This silence very likely will continue in the lead-up to election day on November 2. However, there are new and extremely important questions on this subject that could be asked, and that now excite intense controversy inside Israel itself.
The Gaza affair is another act – and possibly a culminating one – in a great moral crisis for Israelis, and for Israel's friends elsewhere. Most Israelis sense this.
The source of the crisis is the one identified by Israel's first prime minister, David ben Gurion, in 1967, when he expressed his fear of the consequences of Israel's annexation of new areas with large Arab populations.
Should Israel annex those populations, enclose them, expel them? Or, as in Gaza, has it a right – intentionally or otherwise – to destroy civil society itself in retaliation for these people's resistance to Israel's settlement and effective annexation of what legally and historically are Palestinian lands?
The psychological as well as political conditions created in Gaza's wretched refugee camps by the Israeli army's new intrusions, the most violent in two years and announced as of indefinite duration, are those of anarchy and what may be described as existential struggle: the conviction that struggle affirms existence and survival.
The rhetorical accompaniment to the attacks suggests Israel intends this time to finish with the resistance in Gaza. But, as an important part of Israeli opinion itself understands, this is what Ariel Sharon's Government cannot do. The ostensible aim of the intrusions is to force Hamas and other Palestinian militants to stop their rocket attacks on Israeli towns adjoining the Gaza Strip (and settlements inside Gaza), or to make the Palestinian Authority or Palestinian civil society stop the attacks. The effort is self-defeating.
An analysis by the Strategic Affairs Unit of the Israel-Palestine Centre for Research and Information points out that the Israeli aim obviously requires the existence of some kind of Palestinian authority capable of taking and enforcing decisions.
Yet the Israeli attack itself is a continuation of the campaign by the Sharon Government to make sure that no Palestinian centre of decision survives.
Many in Israel think the attacks are really meant as a penultimate display of Israeli military power before the announced evacuation of Israel's Gaza colonies next year. Sharon cannot tolerate any interpretation that the evacuations are a victory for the Palestinians, and particularly for Hamas.
Such is what happened in 2000, when Israel finally evacuated its security zone in Lebanon under Hamas military pressure. The zone was the sad and useless remnant of Sharon's disastrous invasion of Lebanon in 1982.
A new and crucial interpretation and elaboration of the significance of what is going on has now been provided by Sharon's political adviser Dov Weisglass, who has been the Israeli Prime Minister's main contact with the Bush administration and with the congressional leadership in Washington.
Last week he told Israeli newspaper Haaretz that the Gaza withdrawal was meant to put an end to the US-backed road map that was supposed to provide an overall peace settlement, including an independent Palestine – and that the Bush administration had secretly acquiesced.
The road map for negotiations leading to peace and a free Palestine was drafted by the US, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia, all of whom promised to support it.
Weisglass said a deal had now been made with the US Government that, in exchange for the Gaza withdrawal, the US would abandon its promise of a Palestinian state, "with all that entails".
He added: "All this with a presidential blessing (from Bush) and ratification by both houses of Congress."
He subsequently and unconvincingly denied saying this. But it has been apparent from the start of the road map plan that, for the Sharon and Bush governments, it was merely a gesture to appease international opinion. (It was originally devised to provide domestic political cover for Tony Blair's decision to join the invasion of Iraq.)
Sharon and his colleagues are acting out something the radical and brilliant American Jewish journalist I.F. Stone wrote many years ago.
He said Zionism had from the start involved the physical displacement of the Palestinians from what became Israel, but achieving that would require a psychological act of denial of the existence of the Palestinians. "Jewish life", he said, "went on as if the Arabs weren't there". "In a profound sense, the yishuv, the Jewish community, had to pretend the Arabs weren't there, or confront ethical problems too painful to be faced."
Sharon's entire life has been devoted to Israel's expansion, and to the physical realisation of the forbidden and denied Zionist wish, that the Arabs are not there.
Tribune Media Services
