So Many Fig Leaves, So Few Olive Branches

Larry Derfner in the Jerusalem Post:

Over the last eight years, since the Oslo Accords blew up and the intifada began, there doesn't seem to be any limit to how nationalistic, how gung-ho, how anti-Arab the public can become. Operation Cast Lead marked a great leap rightward; the upcoming election will be one more; the Likud/Israel Beiteinu/Shas government that comes out of it will be yet another. (Labor will probably serve as the government fig leaf, the totem of "national unity" and sop to Obama, with Ehud Barak, the gifted military technocrat, carrying on as defense minister.)

THERE USED to be a peace camp here that represented a substantial part of the public which could at least put some restraints on the country's nationalist bent. But in the past eight years, the peace camp has contracted and become marginalized to the point that it, too, is a fig leaf, a sop to the Americans.

In truth, it has no voice anymore, no influence, no power to slow the march to war even a step. Some 94% of the country's Jews supported the war in Gaza, according to one poll, which struck me as being about right. What's an opposition of 6%? A fig leaf for a "vibrant democracy."