What are 20 tons of explosives?

[Englander]

By Amira Hass

Hamas has smuggled 20 tons of explosives into the Gaza Strip, and that is aside from the anti-aircraft and antitank missiles. That is what the Israel Defense Forces has calculated, and it made sure to pump this frightening information into the Israeli media over the course of several days, raising the specter of Hezbollah-type attacks.

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Israelis are convinced that we are facing an existential danger. But what has been erased from the Israeli consciousness is that Israel is a weapons superpower, and that the weapons this state has, as is the nature of all weapons, are lethal and frightening.

The Israeli media, of course, cooperates with this distortion of reality. It devoutly reports every shot fired by the Palestinians and every rocket they launch - even when they cause no harm. But Israeli bullets and shells, which are fired routinely, do not exist in the media unless there are fatalities, and even those are quickly forgotten.

The purpose of instilling such fear in Israelis is to win ongoing support for the IDF's policy of constant escalation. The security establishment is not neutral. Its members, no less than bureaucrats in any other system, want to perpetuate the rationale for their existence and their salaries. They need public silence about the free use the IDF makes of the weapons and ammunition that it puts into its soldiers' hands. This serial intimidation is meant to give the IDF a free hand while it expands its operational infrastructure, perhaps to the point of using thousands of cluster bombs on Gaza, too.

The military establishment in Israel is joined at the hip with the political decision-making establishment, and hyping the security threat facing Israelis, while completely disengaging from the reality of the Israeli occupation, assures continued Israeli support for the myth that there is a military "solution" but not a political one. This in turn provides support for the ongoing regime of occupation and dispossession, and for the privileges that this bestows on Israelis.

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Haaretz