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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (101887)	6/21/2003 9:10:36 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

France decided her bread was buttered on the other side and dropped Israel like a hot potato And why should they not? Holocaust guilt gave the Israelis a 25-year free pass from criticism, even from people who had nothing to do with the Holocaust. Are you saying that the free pass should have been eternal? If one nation has been giving another unconditional support, and eventually comes to believe that the support has been abused and is no longer in their interest, why should they keep giving it? You show me one post where I have classed criticism of the Israeli government as anti-Semitic. Don’t have to look very far to answer that one. From the same post: Anti-Semitism still generally adopts the cover of the much more respectable anti-Zionism, but it's there. That seems a pretty clear attempt to blur the distinction between anti-Semitism and discmofort with Zionism. There are hundreds of peoples on this earth who have suffered much worse than the Palestinians…why is it that the Europeans are only passionate about the Palestinians? A difficult question for a non-European neutral to answer. Some may feel that their former support for Israel imposes some obligations. Possibly residual guilt over the Holocaust – which for most was somebody else’s crime – was outweighed by residual guilt over colonialism. Hard to say. One thing that isn’t hard to say: if a similar situation arose today – a population relocating to land they hadn’t lived in for thousands of years, and expecting to be granted sovereignty over the current inhabitants – it would be instantly rejected by every nation on the face of the earth. That’s one problem the Israelis face: the ideological foundation of their state was completely acceptable when the idea was developed, but is completely unacceptable today. People tend to judge by the standards prevailing today, not those that prevailed when an idea was conceived. Ironies are, of course, abundant. If Israel had been founded 50 years earlier, nobody would have raised an eyebrow: the right of a European population to go where they chose and declare sovereignty over “lesser peoples” was taken for granted then. If the issue had waited 50 years, it would have been abandoned as irrelevant. The driving assumption behind Zionism -–the belief that Jews can only be secure in a Jewish State – has of course proven to be completely wrong. For the last 50 years, Jews in Western Europe and America have been far more secure than those in Israel. Of course it didn’t work out that way. The Zionists declared sovereignty at a time when the lesser peoples of the world were getting completely fed up with the European habit of arriving uninvited and declaring sovereignty. Initially because they looked small enough to fight, later because they stayed when the other colonists left, they ended up receiving the pent-up anger that colonialism collectively had inspired. That’s why the anger seems so irrational. Much of it is anger that was earned by other Europeans in other places. Justly or not, much of the developing world sees Israel as a relic of the colonial age, and it’s not an age they care to see endure. It also needs to be said, at this point, that while the supporters of the Palestinians may be loud, they deliver very little material aid. Support for Israel may be muted, but if you count support in dollars, they get a whole lot more of it than the Palestinians ever did.