Times change, sometimes very oddly. I was surprised to see Op-Ed Contributor: MUAMMAR QADDAFI on the front page of The New York Times, arguing for a one-state solution. And I agree with him!
There are more than one million Muslim Arabs in Israel; they possess Israeli nationality and take part in political life with the Jews, forming political parties. On the other side, there are Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Israeli factories depend on Palestinian labor, and goods and services are exchanged. This successful assimilation can be a model for Isratine.
via Op-Ed Contributor – The One-State Solution – NYTimes.com.
It’s unfortunate that people are no longer well enough educated about the Jewish Holocaust to understand that it truly was different in some significant ways from every other “genocide.”
A Norwegian diplomat based in Saudi Arabia has sent out e-mails from her Foreign Ministry e-mail account equating Israel’s offensive against Hamas in Gaza with the systematic mass murder of six million Jews by the Nazis.
One of the picture sets that Norwegian diplomat Trine Lilleng attached to her anti-Israeli e-mail.
The e-mail, sent out by Trine Lilleng, a first secretary at the Norwegian Embassy in Riyadh, includes a juxtaposition of black-and-white pictures from the Holocaust with color images of Operation Cast Lead.
via Norwegian envoy equates Israel with Nazis | International | Jerusalem Post .
Let let me set out a few of the differences between Gaza and the Holocaust as corrections to the “Holocaust is just another genocide” meme.
- For starters, “genocide” means genocide: the attempted or successful murder (“cide”) of an entire people. Genocide is not the same thing as war or brutal oppression.
- The German genocide of the Jews was carried out by a European country against the Jewish population of European countries. Many of the occupied European countries were tacitly supportive of the genocide. This is something that Europeans seem to forget with amazing frequency. Germany, France, Italy … many members of the current European Union share a special responsibility for atonement, and for preserving the state of Israel. I will not respect the European Union’s Israel policy until it begins to share this responsibility as a collectivity.
- While the US , the UK, and Russia, could have done more to mitigate the results of the Holocaust, it was American, UK, and Russian soldiers who rolled into the concentration camps and set the prisoners free. It was the US and the UK that set up Israel and it has been the US that has preserved it. We have done our share, and Europe has not.
- The German genocide was more successful than most other genocides: in many countries in Europe, the Jewish population was reduced to almost nil. That is simply not the case in Gaza, where the population is three million.
- There was a technocratic and bureaucratic character to the German genocide that still remains uniquely chilling. While the oppression of Gaza is horrific, the people there are not being herded into cattle cars and sent to death chambers by functionaries with checklists.
- The situation in Palestine is not a genocide. It is not the written policy of the state of Israel to kill every Palestinian. Lest we forget, that was indeed the written policy of the German government during WWII. The unwritten goal of the Israeli policy is brutal oppression. That is bad, but it is not genocide.
My response to the Arbor Update Gaza thread
As the comments after mine suggest, the solution has to lead to the desired outcome — thriving, mutualistic civil society — despite unending violence and finger-pointing. Moreover, the solution has to work despite conscious efforts to stop it by numerous opponents on both sides.
the only social system that humans have ever devised that, in the long run, produces consistent improvements in median quality of living, despite regular outbreaks of violence in, around, and throughout the system, is the scientific method, accompanied, usually, but not always, by Enlightenment values of tolerance, skepticism, and inquiry.
Patient, long-term investments in education and tolerance are the only sensible solution–and those investments must, tragically, be undertaken in the full consciousness that ongoing violence from factions on both sides is consciously intended to tear down the foundations of civil society in both Gaza and Israel. Yet there is room for optimism. The historical record is that societies can survive great trauma to their infrastructure (the Thirty Years War, 1789, Japan 1945) once the commitment is made to the path of science, tolerance, and inquiry.
Israeli government stands accused of … good acting. Of course they’re trying to give the impression that they might bomb Iran … if they did anything else, they would be cutting their own throat.
Political Punch
Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, met with House Democrats yesterday, talking about his trip abroad and his observations.
Obama told the caucus, according to an attendee, “Nobody said this to me directly but I get the feeling from my talks that if the sanctions don’t work Israel is going to strike Iran.” Others in the room recall this as well.
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