The Biden administration's special envoy to Lebanon, Amos Hochstein, came to Israel again to advance a cease-fire agreement in Lebanon. During his visit, he met the man leading the talks on the Israeli side, minister Ron Dermer. What is clear to all, and yet repressed as an insignificant detail, is that Hochstein, who represents the United States, was born in Israel, while Dermer, who represents Israel, was born in the United States.
Nobody in Israel would make a big deal of the American mediator being Israeli and the Israeli envoy being American. The reason is that the Jews' two hats are transparent to everyone. We also choose not to see that the Israeli and the American Jew being seemingly on the same spectrum serves Israel, or at least that's what our subconscious believes and makes us not notice, and certainly not make a big deal of it. What's the problem? Hochstein was born in Israel but he's American, and Dermer was born in the United States but he's Israeli.
Anyone who wants to begin to understand what the problem is should ask themselves if they'd remain as indifferent if the U.S. had sent Muslim Palestinian mediators to represent it in its efforts to reach an arrangement with Lebanon, not to mention in negotiations with the Palestinians. Try to imagine what a diplomatic volcano would erupt if, say, Democratic Sen. Rashida Tlaib was appointed United States' ambassador in Israel, and represented it in efforts for a peace negotiation with the Palestinians.
Anyone who tries to evade the issue and say the problem with Tlaib is not that she's a daughter of Palestinians but her biased views had better refresh their memory regarding the oh-so-not-biased views of the American ambassador under President Donald Trump, David Friedman, a known contributor to the settlements who owns a house in Jerusalem's Talbiya neighborhood. If you google him, you'll most certainly see a photo of him beside a rendition of Jerusalem's Old City with the Third Temple instead of Al-Aqsa Mosque. What's the bit deal? Nu, he didn't notice, why are you making a big deal of it? Petty me.
We're moving between Auschwitz's striped pajamas and being the elite commando unit of Western civilization. Bottom line, it seems we're constantly surprised, whether it's about the power of the enemy we had thought weak or deterred, or regarding the weakness of the enemy we had thought almost omnipotent.
Israelis have totally lost all concept of their enemies' power. Hamas, an organization that Netanyahu thought was deterred, became an existential threat to Israel in the course of one day. Add to this the total loss of the ability to assess our power: No matter how much we strike the enemy, as far as we're concerned, it only grows while we are disappearing. And all this – miracle of miracles – without tainting our sense of omnipotence one iota.
Without a clear sense of our real power, without knowing whether Israel is a (main) branch of the Jewish people or a defined sovereign state, without agreed borders of the territory we're protecting, and with a total distortion of the magnitude of the threats against us, how can we even begin to climb out of the pit we've fallen into?