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

To: E who wrote (76852)	4/6/2000 2:37:00 AM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

I suspect that you read more into my post than I put there, no doubt through my own clumsiness. My point was solely that comments like this one, from "Ike"... In any event, dear world, if you are bothered by us, here is one Jew in Israel who could not care less. And this one, from Nancy... I hope this will help show the feelings of the Jews in Israel are a bit unrealistic. Israelis do care what the rest of the world thinks, and most particular what the people of the United States think. They have to. We pay the bills, and that gives us influence, whether they like to recognize it or not. 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. Americans expect appreciation, and they expect it to be expressed in very concrete terms: in granting the US significant influence over Israeli policies. If Israel does not express such appreciation, the calculation of self interest will inevitably change, and the dollars will go elsewhere. 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. I do hope it isn't guilt, because if we are trying to expiate guilt with dollars, we'll be in deep financial trouble. We've already discussed the native Americans, but there are many others. At the same time we were refusing entry to the persecuted Jews, we were selling metal and oil to the Japanese, who were massacring our allies in China. How much would we owe the Chinese over that one? How much would we owe African Americans for kidnapping and enslaving their ancestors, how much would we owe the descendants of the million-odd Filipinos we killed because they objected to being our property? No, guilt won't do at all. It has to be self-interest, which means very simply that if the Israelis want us to keep sending the money, they have to make sure that sending the money remains in our self-interest. It may not be a nice calculation, but it is a necessary and inevitable one. 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. Of course it isn't, any more that the atrocities suffered by the Palestinians are irrelevant to their beliefs. But if both sides are unwilling to set a certain amount of the past behind them and try to negotiate a peace that recognizes the imperatives on both sides, they will inflict a life of violence, fear, and atrocity upon their own children. I don't think that serves anybody's interest.