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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dayuhan who wrote (76695)	4/4/2000 11:36:00 PM
From: E	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Americans do not send dollars to Israel because Americans desire the "appreciation" of Ike and other Israelis. Americans send them there because Americans see it as in their distinct interest to do so. As you know. If it is guilt that partly motivates this assistance program to the Jews of Europe and their brothers and sisters, it is real guilt, guilt so great that no color of expiation attaching to the effort would be worth mentioning. Failures of the United States to admit Jews in the period before, during and after WWII will shame us forever as a nation as surely as does our historical treatment of the original inhabitants of this continent. Self congratulation as regards our great beneficence to the Jewish people is overlaid, in my mind, with bitter irony. It is a platitude of some uninterest that abuse suffered does not justify abuse given; its commonest formulation is two wrongs don't make a right. However, if your people had lived the history Ike accurately detailed, you might be somewhat less breezily cavalier about Ike's determination to create a protected space in which to have a haven-nation-- even to have one at the cost of great moral ambiguity, or worse. All national states that I know of are founded on selective injustice. No national states that I know of have had a more urgent and humanly natural imperative motivating their founding. To ask the Jews, with their agonized history, to transcend the common practice of other states, states that have rejected and abused them, doomed them to Death By Policy, strikes me as reflecting an assumption about Jews that constitutes a subtle and probably unintended compliment to humane Jewish traditions. I am not a Jew, and am a critic of much Israeli treatment of the (unangelic) Palestinians. But you appear to be under the callow illusion that the situation is a simple one, and that the history of Ike's people (Ike may have seen his mother gassed, his sisters starved, his father die in a way he won't describe; I know, personally, an old Jewish couple who lived through such experiences) is morally irrelevant to his ardent and perhaps cynical Zionism. It isn't.