A Western country does not belong in the Middle East and the inclination of the other peoples of the region to oppose such a state is instinctive.I find this argument amazing. Not, I should add, in a good way. It's pushing for a clean break with the argument that X is right in favor of a pure identity claim -- and one that allegedly trumps other identity claims, on a basis that is neither asserted nor obvious to me.
Gay rights, women’s rights and Western-style democracy are also not going to do the trick as all three are irrelevant to the core issue at hand, and true indigenous status easily trumps all three in the minds of even the most progressive young activists.... It is also time to throw away the (somewhat arrogant and very much irrelevant to the point of discussion) “we are the good guys because we are more civilized/produce better technology/have more Nobel prizes than you” rhetoric and go back to the authentic definition of Zionism as an indigenous people’s liberation movement...
I understood what Yishai Fleischer meant when he said, 'Hey, here on the Mount of Olives are three thousand years of Jewish graves. We belong here.'
Having established that, however, you still have a duty to do right. At no point did he follow up 'we belong here' with 'and therefore we can do whatever we want to everyone else.' The Nobel prize may be a joke, but the ideal of striving for the good and for a kind of justice is not at all a joke.
3 comments:
Hey, I think Hila is on to something. My great-grandparents on my father's side were minor nobility from the Alsace area. I am sure I should be able to displace the current owner of a nice Chateau with a vineyard.
And Elizabeth Warren is entitled to income from the Cherokee Nation.
/s
One thing I truly admire about the Israelis is that all their rights to their land are founded on contemporary law. They bought the land that makes up their country, or they gained it by military conquest after attack by a belligerent neighbor. These are rights that exist against all others.
One thing that I truly admire about Americans is that, once they are done fighting a war, they want to put an end to the enmity as well as the war. This worked very well for Japan and Germany.
If we applied Hila's logic, we would have done something very different, perhaps something like what the French did to the Germans after WWI. And we would have fought another world war, by now.
Valerie
"It is also time to throw away the (somewhat arrogant and very much irrelevant to the point of discussion) 'we are the good guys because we are more civilized/produce better technology/have more Nobel prizes than you' rhetoric"
Straw man. This is not the argument being made. The argument is that we are the good guys because we don't kill people on the basis that they are gay, teachers of females, non-Islamic (or any other religion), American (or any other country of origin), etc., etc.
These people are savages. They will respond only to force. Anyone who is afraid to name them and refuses to recognize the inferiority of their culture to ours is a fool and a danger to society.
I do wonder if the person would stomach the opposite end of this. Middle Easterners have no place in the West. Admittedly that would be on a more personal level than the more impersonal level of State action. However both look as if the arguement could be cut to fit.
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