At 12:36 AM +0000 8/3/02, Lawrence Upton wrote:
>yet there is a priority to be determined almost forensically if one asks How
>did this start? as part of How might this end?
Very tricky, Lawrence - because to go back to Zionism isn't going
back far enough. What were the conditions which made Zionism such a
driving force within the Jewish peoples? Quite apart from the
Holocaust, which it predates, a history of Christian progroms against
Jewish people all over Europe, dating back at least to the 12C. Etc.
Which is merely to offer the commonplace observation, that injustice
is most often answered with injustice. It is always illuminating to
unravel histories, as far as one can (history being such a contested
area anyway) but it carries the dangers of eliding things in a
cause-and-effect narrative which in the end is always incomplete.
We're still stuck in the eye-for-an-eye evolutionary stage
exemplified by the Atreides family; especially if one thinks of the
human race as one big "family". As for Aeshcylus' answer to how
_that_ might "end": I have real big problems with his "solution",
which is very close to the one proposed by the US state: basically,
an application of State force, described as an inevitable
rationality, predicated on irrational and unspoken (and, I think,
deeply anti-female) assumptions. But my arguments with that aren't
easily explicated in an email.
Best
Alison
--
Alison Croggon
Home page
http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
Masthead online
http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/
|