----- Original Message -----
From: "Nick Temple" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 06 March 2002 15:46
Subject: Re: Palestine continued
Understandable pessimism, Nick
Butit's more than pursuing solutions. There is no reason why the illegal
occupation should not be ended. There is a moral imperative that it should
be ended. That in itself would be a solution - I fear my own govt more than
I fear the real IRA
The only justification acceptable to all which Israel has for its own
existence is UN acceptance. I know because I have asked apologists for
Israel to tell me any other and they have all declined. Yet Israel it
ignores UN resolutions on occupation. I would have thought that makes
Israel's claim to exist somewhat shaky - if something is an authority then
it is an authority; and that is, perhaps, why we are told that even to
question the right to existence of Israel is anti-Semitic - it avoids
explanations which do not apparently exist.
Another, rather sophisticated but to me totally bogus argument, runs that
Israel has special rights because it is a democracy; but I do not see that a
country where the bulk of the inhabitants are exiled without a vote and a
bunch of foreigners, many of whom have stolen the land, have the vote can be
regarded as a democracy as that term is now used
I agree with you about the innocents. I see all the Palestinians as innocent
in this context... I cannot support violence, but I need only rejig Israeli
logic for their retaliatory attacks to produce a "justification" for
Palestinian retaliation... Unless one argues for Israeli racial superiority,
I do not see that can be avoided
There are now several generations who have been born in Israel and cannot
therefore beheld responsible for the terrorism and theft involved in their
state's establishment. Whatever happens, they must accommodated, though
their apparent widespread support for state homicide of Palestinians might
be held to undermine that.
Said has just written: "When Thomas Friedman tiresomely sermonises to Arabs
that they have to be more self-critical, missing in anything he says is the
slightest tone of self- criticism. Somehow, he thinks, the atrocities of 11
September entitle him to preach at others, as if only the US had suffered
such terrible losses, and as if lives lost elsewhere in the world were not
worth lamenting quite as much or drawing as large moral conclusions from.
One notices the same discrepancies and blindness when Israeli intellectuals
concentrate on their own tragedies and leave out of the equation the much
greater suffering of a dispossessed people without a state, or an army, or
an air force, or a proper leadership, that is, Palestinians whose suffering
at the hands of Israel continues minute by minute, hour by hour. This sort
of moral blindness, this inability to evaluate and weigh the comparative
evidence of sinner and sinned against (to use a moralistic language that I
normally avoid and detest) is very much the order of the day," (Al-Ahram
Weekly Online, 28 Feb. - 6 March 2002, Issue No.575)
To be optimistic would to be to be foolish
Ah well, back to the poetry, perhaps sometimes a catalyst
L
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