Gideon Levy : To Russia With Love Thank you, Mother Russia, for imposing boundaries on Israel | Opinion
A ray of hope is breaking through: Someone is
setting limits on Israel. For the first time in years another state is
making it clear to Israel that there are restrictions to its power, that
it’s not okay for it to do whatever it wants, that it’s not alone in
the game, that America can’t always cover for it and that there’s a
limit to the harm it can do.
Israel needed someone
to set these limits like it needed oxygen. The recent years’ hubris and
geopolitical reality enabled it to run rampant. It could patrol
Lebanon’s skies as if they were its own; bombard in Syria’s air space as
if it were Gaza’s air space; destroy Gaza periodically, put it under endless siege and continue, of course, to occupy the West Bank. Suddenly someone stood up and said: Stop right there. At least in Syria: That’s the end of it. Thank you, Mother Russia, for setting limits on a child whom no one has restrained for a long time.
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The
Israeli stupefaction at the Russian response and the paralysis that
gripped it only showed how much Israel needed a responsible adult to
rein it in. Does anyone dare prevent Israel’s freedom of movement in
another country? Is anyone hindering it from flying in skies not its
own? Is anyone keeping it from bombing as much as it pleases? For
decades Israel hasn’t encountered such a strange phenomenon. Israel
Hayom reported, of course, that anti-Semitism is growing in Russia.
Israel is getting ready to play the next victim card, but its arrogance
has suddenly gone missing.
In April the
Bloomberg News agency cited threats from retired Military Intelligence
chief Amos Yadlin and other officers that if Russia gives Syria S-300
anti-aircraft missiles, Israel’s air force would bombard them. Now the
voice of bluster from Zion has been muted, at least for the moment.
Every
state is entitled to have weapons for defense against jet bombers,
including Syria, and no state is permitted to prevent that forcibly.
This basic truth already sounds bizarre to Israeli ears. The idea that
other countries’ sovereignty is meaningless, that it can always be
disrupted by force, and that Israeli sovereignty alone is sacred, and
supreme; that Israel can mix in the affairs of the region to its heart’s
content – including by military intervention, whose true extent is yet
to be clarified in the war in Syria – without paying a price, in the
name of its real or imagined security, which sanctifies anything and
everything – all this has suddenly run into a Russian “nyet.” Oh, how we
needed that nyet, to restore Israel to its real dimensions.
It
arrived with excellent timing. Just when there’s a president in the
White House who runs his Middle East policy at the instructions of his
sponsor in Las Vegas and mentor on Balfour Street; when Israel feels
itself in seventh heaven, with an American embassy in Jerusalem and no
UNRWA, soon without the Palestinians – came the flashing red light from
Moscow. Perhaps it will balance out, just a bit, the intoxication with
power that has overtaken Israel in recent years, maybe it will start to
wise up and recover.
Russia, without
meaning to, may yet turn out to be better for Israel than all the
insane, corrupting support it receives from the current American
administration, and from its predecessors, too.
Russia has outlined
for the world the way to treat Israel, using the only language Israel
understands. Let those who truly care for Israel’s welfare, and for
justice, learn how it’s done: Only by force. Only when Israel gets
punished or is forced to pay a price does it do the right thing. The air
force will think twice now and perhaps many times more before its next
bombardment in Syria, whose importance, if indeed it has any, is
unknown.
Had
such a Russian “nyet” hovered above Gaza’s skies, too, so much futile
death and destruction would have been spared. Had an international force
faced the Israeli occupation, it would have ended long ago. Instead, we
have Donald Trump in Washington and the European Union’s pathetic
denunciations of the evictions at Khan al-Ahmar.
Gideon Levy
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