At the end of the day, it was clear that a mountain had been made out of a molehill. Of the 1,200 activists who were supposed to land in Israel, only several dozen arrived. A few were arrested and a couple released, and the event came to a close. A sigh of relief by government officials — including those within the police and the Interior Ministry, which dealt with the affair — silently brought an end to what had seemed to be a major attack on Israel’s air space and entry point. But to what end? The government used a ton of bricks against the equivalent of a few mosquitos that threatened — but failed — to sting. It’s been a while since we’ve seen such a disproportionate gap between a threat and the response it draws.
While Palestinians have developed a new, less violent strategy, Israel is stuck in old patterns. MK Shay (Kadima, Opposition) writes that the Israeli response to the "Flightila" overshot the Palenstinians, who aim to compromise Israel's international status and legitimacy. Israel should have simply led the activists to Bethlehem.
The varying ministries dealt with the matter clumsily, with the state comptroller breathing down their necks. The ink has barely dried from the Marmara flotilla report, which has yet to be submitted, and now a new report can be expected. Everyone involved in the flotilla affair had cause for concern, and they invested that energy into shooting down what they called the “pro-Palestinian fly-in.”
Israel refuses to understand that the rules of the game have changed. Even worse, it doesn’t make those rules — the Palestinians do. Since the terrorism of the second intifada, the Palestinians have chosen a strategy of non-violent resistance. The goal hasn’t changed — they have their sights set on a Palestinian state on 1967 borders — but the means have changed, and they are out to harm Israel’s international image, legitimacy, economy and civilian affairs as a whole. We thus recently witnessed a march, a flotilla, a fly-in and the propaganda performances of “Israel Apartheid Week.”
The Palestinians are avoiding a physical confrontation on the battlefield, and are choosing other arenas without blood or fire or smoke. But this does not mean a lowered potential for damage for Israel.This is a war of consciousness — the consciousness of the Palestinians themselves, the Israeli public and global opinion. But while the Palestinians are fighting the new war, Israel is still stuck in the old war, and therefore deploys hundreds of uniformed and ununiformed security officials at the airport, painting its gates in militaristic colors, all to deal with the “threat” of a few Palestinian activists coming through Israel en route to Bethlehem.
The truth is that Israel does have tools, and it is certainly able to fight in this arena, but it chooses old tools instead, tools which don’t require new and creative thinking. The letter that Israel handed out to the activists, and before that to the Israeli media, suggested they fly to Syria, Iran or Gaza. That was a typical mistake: we are geographically in the Middle East, but culturally we belong in the democratic and liberal west. By comparing ourselves to Syria, Iran or Hamas, we erase the difference between us and our region’s dark countries.
Israel should have transferred all of the participants of the fly-in, upon arrival, to the hands of the Palestinian Authority in Bethlehem. From that moment onward, we’d have had nothing to do with them. No damage would have been done to our international standing or our security. Instead, all of the excitement at the airport and the concerns of the security forces over the fly-in caused Israel to lose another battle in the consciousness war. And it’s a shame.
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