How to Inflame the Entire Muslim World Understanding Gaza By GABRIEL KOLKO

How will history describe the Israeli war against the Palestinians in Gaza? Another Holocaust, this time perpetrated by the descendants of the victims? An election ploy by ambitious Israeli politicians to win votes in the February 10 elections? A test range for new American weapons? Or an effort to lock in the new Obama Administration into an anti-Iranian position? An attempt to establish its military “credibility” after its disastrous defeat in the war with Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006? Perhaps all of these…and more.

But one thing is certain. Israel has killed at least 100 Palestinians for each of its own claimed losses, a vast disproportion that has produced horror in much of the world, creating a new cause which has mobilized countless numbers of people—possibly as strong as the Vietnam war movement. It has made itself a pariah nation—save in the United States and a few other countries. Above all, it has enflamed the entire Muslim world.

Uri Avnery, a leading Israeli anti-war activist, has just written that “… hundreds of millions of Arabs around us… will they see the Hamas fighters as the heroes of the Arab nation, but they will also see their own regimes in their nakedness: cringing, ignominious, corrupt and treacherous….In coming years it will become apparent that this war was sheer madness.”