It's possible that I owe you an apology. You wrote, and I was rubbed the wrong way by,
There is, of course, no solution. Perhaps we should give Palestine back to
the Palestinians and let the Jewish State be established in New York City,
where the Jewish people are already more numerous, prosperous, and
secure than their counterparts in Israel. Perhaps they could make the
Bronx bloom, which would be an accomplishment.
I assume that you can recognize a tongue in a cheek.
I re-read that this morning. And this time, "There is, of course, no solution" registered. It seems to make the remarks more wry and less mysteriously gratuitous than I perceived them as.
I think my awareness of the increase in anti-Semititism, sometimes only slightly veiled, being displayed on talk radio made me trigger-happy at those remarks.
So I shouldn't have reacted to them, and am sorry I did.
About "no solution, of course." I do think that taking the position that the Jews are thieves who stole their homeland from the Palestinians isn't helpful. (Is anybody on earth on land that somebody else didn't have first? Legal residents winning a war they didn't start with people who rejected a partition plan is one of the more respectable ways of claiming territory.) I think forgetting the Palestinian pogroms against the Jews and the war that they started and lost and their pro-Nazi history and "buying" the PR tale that the children's deaths aren't stage-managed by the adults isn't helpful. I also think that any solution must be an extremely suspicious and self-protective one on the part of the Israelis, and will be, unless they are idiots. I think this because of the history of Palestinian attitudes toward the Jews.
Seriously: what would you propose the Israelis do, aside from relocating the settlers? |
