>>But the general judgement has swung from mindless approval of imperialism to mindless disapproval of it. Neither makes sense in my view.<<
Oh, ugh. Too early in the morning for this. Wow. Nadine. I am probably as far from mindless as it is possible to be. I'd match my credentials for mindfulness against yours any day. So please save the nasty remarks. It is morally wrong to take other people's land by force. That's my position, and I judge everyone by it.
It's so disingenuous to extrapolate from our struggle against terrorism to the Israelis struggle against the Palestinians. As former Senator Mitchell says, we've been trying to negotiate peace there for decades, and the hard line taken by Sharon lately is as much of a stumbling block as the suicide bombers.
The Palestinian civilians are just as dead whether they are beaten to death by Jewish civilians in an unlit field or on an unlit road, or shot to death by Jewish security forces.
A dead baby is a dead baby, whether it's Israeli or Palestinian - that is the moral equivalence.
I weep just as much for a dead Palestinian beaten to death by Jews for no reason other than he is Palestinian as I do for a dead Jew blown up by a Palestinian just because he is a Jew. But I don't see many others weeping for the Palestinians, and I sure don't see you doing it.
No, I don't think the Israelis first showed up in 1948. But I do think that Zionism is a relatively recent phenomenon. Israel was not the "homeland" of Jews for centuries. They left, for many reasons. It became the homeland of the Palestinians. As an ethnic group, they've got at least an equal, and in my mind, superior right to the place, because they were there more recently.
I know you like to lump them all into Arabs, and I am sure that all Arabs look alike to you, but the ones that were living there had names, and faces, and even houses, wells, and olive trees. |
