Time to wake up and smell the cardamon

As Jonathan Freedland puts it so eloquently here in this very newspaper, it's time to stop deluding ourselves that rah-rah events such as the very well organiser We Believe in Israel conference are in any way a substitute for proper thinking and looking Israel in the eye and telling it some home truths.

But it can also look a lot like self-delusion. For, by a quirk of timing, it just so happened that there was, in fact, a storm brewing outside.
While the delegates sat in sessions named, "Do they really hate us?", the IDF was opening fire on stone-throwing Palestinian protestors marking "Naqba Day" on Israel's frontiers with Syria and Lebanon. Instantly, Israeli politicians were warning of a third intifada, one that might include Palestinians to the north, south and east of the country as well as inside it.
And this storm is unlikely to blow over after a single day. For what is now clear is that the Arab Spring will not leave the Palestinians untouched. Despite feeble efforts to pretend that the Syrian authorities were behind Sunday's events, seeking to create a diversion, there is good evidence that the action had been planned by online activists for several months.
Worse, when Israel says that demonstrations are the work of shadowy foreign agitators, its spokesmen sound just like the dinosaur Arab regimes in the region, the Libyas and Yemens, who say the exact same thing about the protests in their countries.
This is the larger danger here: that Israel is placing itself on the wrong side of a popular movement spreading across the region, standing opposed to those marching for long-demanded rights. It is said that the Assad regime has one loud advocate in Washington, arguing that the west should go easy on the brutal Syrian dictatorship for fear of the alternative - and that advocate is Israel.
So, yes, we should laugh at the hypocrisy of Damascus condemning Israel ("How dare you open fire on unarmed Syrian citizens: that's our job!"). But we also need to consider what it means if the next target of a movement, seen across the world as essentially non-violent and thirsting for democratic rights, is not this or that Arab government but Israel. (It won't wash to say that, for example, the protesters from Syria were crossing Israel's sovereign borders: they crossed into the Golan Heights, recognised by no one as Israeli territory.)
...
Whooping and cheering in the name of solidarity might make British Jews feel good, but Israel needs something so much more serious.