SLICE

[napoleonherself]

ETA: I explain myself very slightly better in a comment to a comment to this post, so if you do find yourself wanting to draw a tiny mustache on me, you might want to read it before making your final decision. I guess what it boils down to is, are there really exactly two points of view on the subject? Do I really either have to be in full support of this particular country or else I hate it and desire its end? Can I really not be against its current governmental and political actions and climate without also hating the people who live there, even though you'd never accuse a guy who hated Parliament and the Queen with bitter bitter loathing as hating all British or Anglican people? Why? Just because you feel that way? Who wrote that particular rule, was there a vote, and are we just not allowed to ever again discuss it?

Now back to the actual post.

Ouch. Why did no one tell me that TxtLJ chops your posts into tiny pieces? Fixed now.

Explanation for previous post: I wanted to record this commercial on the Mike, so I decided to suffer through the Ed Schultz show instead of switching back to my mp3s right after Stephanie Miller finished up. This guy Norman Goldman was subbing. At one point a twelve-year-old girl called in, making a fairly confused point about I think the government wasting money on things like illegal wars? Goldman was with her until she said we should stop giving aid to Israel, and then when she said that Israel shouldn't even exist he called her an anti-Semite, declared that she needed to get a lot more education before trying to talk about these things, and hung up on her.

Israel shouldn't be there, though, not really.

Look. You probably have a home. Chances are you like this home, at least a little. Now see this guy here? This is Bob. Bob has been oppressed all his life. He's had a horrible time of it, through no fault of his own. Some asshole even threw him in a concentration camp, can you believe that? He barely escaped with his life.

From now on, the southeast corner of your living room belongs to Bob.

What, you say you were there first? You say that was YOUR living room, goddammit? Well, sure, but Bob has a right to exist too. Bob's suffered more than you ever will. Are you some kind of anti-Bobbist?

Yeah, the Jews have been putting up with assholes for centuries, and they absolutely did not deserve it. But kicking other people off their land to make up for it? That's your answer? You've decided that two wrongs make a right? Really?

The Jews should exist, absolutely. They're people, and once we've determined that much, any further modifiers probably aren't needed. But a COUNTRY is not PEOPLE, and being against Israel DOES NOT MEAN YOU ARE AGAINST THE PEOPLE WHO LIVE THERE. And I just can't get behind a government that sends armored bulldozers into the residential neighborhoods of their slightly browner neighbors, folks. I just can't.

Just like for eight years, so very many Americans kept pointing at Washington, D.C. and saying "I swear I'm not with them."


So there you go. Norman Goldman is an idiot, and the nation of Israel can bite my shiny metal ass.

Swastikas, anyone?

Comments

[karmenghia.livejournal.com]

If we're going to oversimplify, we can also point out that Bob's ancestors not only settled the land, they build the building, the community and the culture, for which they were despised by a series of invaders and from which they were repeatedly expelled. Because one takes back what is theirs, it doesn't mean they aren't entitled to it.

I detest many of the things the state of Israel does -- the settlements, bombing/invading Lebanon, evictions -- but please remember they do it with the complete backing of the United States government and under the glaring, often murderous hatred of their nearest neighbors. You might be right, Israel shouldn't be there, perhaps it should have been destroyed long ago. The only reason it exists is because the people who live there know the world does not run on love and continue to fight very hard for it to be there. So in effect, if you are against the state of Israel's existence, I think you are, in fact, against its people. Put the shoe on the other foot, how do you feel when haters want to see the United States removed in some way from the world? Is that not not aimed at the people of the United States? Irregardless of our politics or ethics?

As far as peace in the Middle East including Israel goes, now that the United States has gone sane again, perhaps our government can pick up where Bill Clinton left off. It wasn't a great start and Rabin's assassination was a huge setback, but at least the effort was in the right direction. The last eight years have done a terrific amount of damage in the Middle East. It will take a while to undo, but now that our President isn't fighting Gog and Magog in Iraq any longer, perhaps sense and sanity can return to the U.S.'s Middle East policies. You want to do something for the Palestinians, start writing to your Congresspeople and Senators about what your tax dollars are paying for. Doctor Without Borders are also working with the Palestinian Territories. Wishing Israel away does less good for the Palestinians than sending a letter to D.C. or a check to DWB.

And, lastly, about the Jews existing: the state of Israel was founded because modern Jews realized that without a nation state, another Holocaust was and is inevitable. I believe this is true.

I'm pulling you off my friends list, Jenny, because I can't bear to see things like this. I'm sure you understand.

[napoleonherself.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I have a habit of coming up with really bad metaphors for things; it'd be a bit more accurate to say that Bob, Fred and Steve all used to live in the same place, and built bits and pieces of the house and the areas around it, and now Bob has decided he doesn't like Fred and Steve so much anymore, so they're not allowed to use the XBox and Fred's stuff has started being thrown out on the lawn by Bob with help from Bob's buddy Sam. But even that's a huge oversimplification.

I'm also extremely uncomfortable with the idea that the way to prevent another Holocaust is NOT just to get it through everyone's heads that you don't kill people for stupid crap like religion or ethnicity. You base that belief on anything else, and sooner or later it comes back to a guy pointing and going "That's Them, this is Us, and I think you know what We need to do with Them." Impossible task? Maybe. But giving people more ways to divvy up into Us and Them doesn't feel like an answer to me. (Then again, I am in no way an expert in, well, basically anything, and if anyone starts making policy decisions based on one loon on the Internet then they're even worse off than I am.)

Israel's there now, and trying to kick people out again would be even worse than the last time. It exists, it is a country, and I support the concept of a country that is a home for a historically disenfranchised people. But if the current example of that concept is a place where various atrocities are committed in the name of preserving said historically disenfranchised people, then I cannot consider myself a fan of said current example. I'm also not a fan of the United States as a political entity right now. We're pretending like everything is okay again, but we're still holding kids in semisecret prisons without trial, so really we haven't much cleaned up our act at all.

I've known for some time that it's almost a rule that if you're a liberal, you have to love Israel, but I just can't. It skeezes me out. It makes me feel bad that humanity just can't seem to learn the Stop Beating Up On That Guy Who's Littler Than You Are lesson. I'm aware that that's a lesson we may not ever learn, but that doesn't mean I have to support someone who's flouting it extra-crispy style. They can flout it over there without me. I'll be over here watching Star Trek or something.

Bah, I type too much. Short version: opinions differ, politics are sticky things, and if you get another reply to this comment from my robot friend, you should probably ignore most or all of what he says. He is a politics wonk with opinions similar to my own, and can be very vociferous about those opinions.

[wing-zero-ew.livejournal.com]

I will try hard not to be *too* vociferous here, but:

1) Bob's ancestors had been gone from the site of Bob's house for anywhere from centuries to millenia by the time Bob came back to build his house. A variety of other tenants had lived on the land over those centuries. None of them matter now that Bob's decided to come back?

1a) Those other tenants all built homes and had communities and cultures of their own. They are not inherently inferior just because they're not like Bob's.

2)Not all of Israel's neighbors are their enemies. Egypt is both a de facto and de jure ally, even against the Palestinians. The idea that the entire Arab world is a bloc that responds with some sort of gutteral, unreasoning hatred to the existence of the state of Israel is a counterproductive myth.

3)She answered the question of whether she is against the state of Israel's current existence below, so I'll skip it. I will say that the state of Israel is currently occupied by a totalitarian, racist theocracy and being opposed to its current form is supportive of its people and their liberty.

4)Writing to our Congresspeople would do very little good. Not to give you a long lesson in the working state of the American political system, but a: Israel decides what it spends the aid money we give it upon, not us (we dictate broad categories only, along with saying they have to spend most of it buying US products) and b: since the aid to Israel is also a bailout of various vested US interests, our Congresspeople are already bought and sold. See the wikipedia article on the Iron Triangle for more details on how that process works.

4a)Reflexive cries of anti-semitism whenever someone critiques Israel have ruined all productive dialogue in the United States on this subject. If you write your Congressperson suggesting changes in Israel-US policy that don't fall under 'give them more money to buy more bullets', your letter will get tossed in the crank pile and be politely ignored. Guaranteed. It is considered beyond the pale to even say such things in public. See the Overton Window for more details.

5) It's odd that without the state of Israel, a holocaust is inevitable. For one thing, it's clearly an untested theory. For another, approximately as many Jews live in the United States as Israel, and I don't recall seeing brownshirts in the streets smashing their shopwindows of late. Actually, since your own post puts forth the assertion that Israel does what it does with our full support (largely true)... but the United States would perpetrate another Holocaust if it could.. we hate them?... we love them?... my head hurts.

Yeah.

One final point: stop conflating 'Jew' with 'Israeli', please. For that matter, stop conflating 'Israeli' with being a member of Likud (or Kadima for that matter, or Eris forbid, Yisrael Beiteinu).

Thanks for (not) reading