I HAVE thought about it, long and hard. The carving up of Arab states began in organized and deliberate fashionjust after WWI. TE Lawrence tried to set Faisal up in Arabia, but that fell to the House of Saud. He then helped to set Faisal up in Syria but Faisal did not live long enough to see what would happen. True one wrong does not justify another. But the 3000 years you speak of is not ancient history. It is on-going history, witness please the Russian pogroms going on for centuries, the traditions of Jews for example who go into the diamond business because it is easier to get up and run. We are the inheritors of our own histories and our forebears, to a very great extent the victims as often as not of the hands we are dealt. I put myself in the place of a Jew having survived Hitler. Would I join and support the Haganah? You bet your life. If I were a Palestinian of the same time would I be pissed off at being told to move to some other place in that God-forsaken desert that seems to stretch of thousands of miles? You bet. But the Palestinians did not have a 3000 year history of being persecuted. They had not had 80% of their number burned in ovens. Do I look back and long for more wisdom by our forebears to have made the Jews go somewhere else. Yeah, I do. I do not know where. But they went to Palestine, their ancestral home. And there or elswhere I believe they deserved and deserve a homeland as victims of history. Same argument could be argued for what we did to the Native Americans, but as Jay says, it just was, it just is, and we have to live with it. You do pose valid, tough, agonizing questions. But on September 11, 2001, I. a past rather vocal critic of Israeli policies toward Palestinians in their homeland, well, I rather morphed into an Israeli Jew on that day, wishing that we ( the Israelis, rhetorically speaking now) had listened to General Moshe Dayan and dealt with the Palestinian "problem" back after the Yom Kippur War. But we did not and we are paying the price. But I am not willing to yield to this terrorism. And I have a big rifle and invite everyone to sit down and talk. But if they (anyone) comes after my Kneset Bldg, our Capitol, I am going to kill him. It is so close we are to the darker angels of our nature, as Darth Vader would say, the dark side of the Force is very strong. So God or the Force be with us all.
Jim Black
FWIW, as an American, I actually have entertained the fanciful notion of evacuating Jerusalem, Muslims, Christians and Jews, and carpet bombing it to dust, covering it with stable heavy nuclear metals, big chunks of scrap nuke material, fatal on approach for thousands of years, eg thorium, really long half life! and saying to everybody, what are you fighting over now. It's gone, poof, no more. It is ridiculous to dignify that with the name of a solution, but it would in part undo and make moot all the strife that comes fm fighting over that plague of a city. Relax, I am not in charge so you do not have to live with my decisions. All of us here still have a couple of things in common, those being sadness and rage at what happened to us on the 11th, and the yen to survive financially as well as otherwise. |
