I’m on Israel’s side here, so I’m less concerned about the actual facts regarding who attacked who. I trusted the IDF’s version of events more than Hamas from the start. The whole thing was clearly a publicity stunt.

That still being said, the real question and real debate (in my opinion) should be about why Israel appears to be losing the PR battle anyway. The stunt worked. Perception is often more important than reality, and Israel is blowing the perception management badly.

I really think the current Israeli government’s hard-line conservative, isolationist, “whatever it takes to be safe” strategy for international relations is doing long-term harm to Israel’s standing in the world, in exchange for short-term safety. It’s pretty much precisely the problem the US had for the greater part of the last decade. Except while the US seems to have gradually eased out of its public perception nosedive, Israel seems to have just completely given up.

I am also deeply troubled by the polarization of the debate into a “you either support Israel 100% of you’re an anti-semitic terrorist sympathizer.” That’s the same false dichotomy that this very blog has frequently criticized in US politics. If Israel is a secular democracy and not a single-party theocracy, both foreign and domestic sources should be able to criticize the current administration’s implementation of public safety policy without invoking accusations of hating Judaism itself. Unfortunately, such debate is getting more and more difficult.