Israel

Israel’s Slowly Rising Platform

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Imagine yourself on a slowly rising platform, already high enough above the ground that jumping off will hurt a good bit. Imagine the platform is slowly getting warmer as well. Staying on the platform allows you to avoid short-term pain, but it involves increasing discomfort from the heat, and ultimately will make the jump more painful.

That, essentially, is Israel’s predicament. The platform of course is the policy decision to subjugate and oppress the Palestinian people. The hope is that somehow these people will one day come to accept their subjugation. Will they? Hardly.

It’s been almost 70 years since the 1948 war. Palestinian resistance efforts over time have grown more intense, as the tactics of Israel to maintain the subjugation grow more extreme.

Nope. The Palestinians are not going away and they’re not going to throw in the towel.

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Palestine: Why Hope Springs Eternal (At Least for Me)

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This is one Tammy urged me to write. And she was right to do so.

As awful as things get in Israel – Palestine, I cling to hope. The reason? If my views could change as dramatically as they have, the views of others can as well. And maybe, just maybe, we’re starting to see that happen.

I traveled to Israel in 1995. I was on the plane from Phoenix to New York the moment Yitzhak Rabin was shot. Too late to turn back, I spent six days in Israel with other guests of a pro-Israel charity. Israel was in mourning, as this country was after JFK’s assassination. Yet the people we met welcomed us. And we of course saw only the best Israel had to offer. No West Bank. No Gaza.

I boarded the El Al flight back to New York very much the Zionist. Then, ironically, on the America West trip to Phoenix from New York. I shared a row with West Bank settlers on their way to Los Angeles, who didn’t do much to conceal their radical views, their hatred of Palestinians, and, yes, their near elation over Rabin’s death.

Nothing changed in me immediately, but perhaps seeds of doubt had been sown.

Fast forward twelve years or so. 

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Is Israel the First Morally Justified Oppressor?

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To ask that question is of course to answer it.

We know by looking back historically on periods of oppression by one people on another that there has not been one example of morally justified oppression.

But in the moment, the argument is routinely made, and accepted. In The players may change, but the game remains the same: The use of racism to justify the massacre of innocent civilians in Gaza, Jenin Younes draws the parallels between Israel and all other oppressive regimes. Younes:

In the digital age where a wealth of information is available at the tap of a keyboard documenting background facts that are disputed by no serious historian—the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people from their land, and the continued occupation and oppression of the Palestinians–it is difficult to understand how otherwise reasonable, fair-minded people can continue to support and justify Israel’s aggression against this helpless group of human beings. While the reasons underlying this anomaly are many and complex, ultimately Israel uses the same tool that has been used for centuries to justify various forms of oppression of an ethnic group, from enslavement of blacks and ethnic cleansing of Native Americans in the United States to apartheid in South Africa: the dehumanization of the oppressed by portraying them as inherently inferior in some aspect, and the insistence that, regardless of its acts, the oppressor is morally superior and therefore justified. [emphasis mine].

Can there be any argument that is not what is happening in Israel today?

Here’s Netanyahu, distinguishing Israelis from Palestinians:

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Is Israel’s “Jewish State” Demand a Source of Oppression?

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My posts on Israel – Palestine tend to focus either on what I believe is a ludicrous demand on the part of Israel that it be recognized as a “Jewish State” or on the oppression of Palestinians.

But I never considered the possible connection between the Jewish State demand and the oppression.

In a piece last weekend in Ha’aretz, One wretched Jewish state, Gideon Levy makes the case for such a connection:

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