allabootmatt
Senior Member
But the trick is to be critical of them in a way that doesn't feed into the (very, very, very understandable) Jewish instinct to assume that the world is irretrievably biased against Israel and hence against Jews. That contributes to a bunker mentality in Israel, and a my-(second) country-right-or-wrong sentiment among Jews everywhere. And of course that benefits the right wing, the hardliners, the Likudniks, whose policies come out of that feeling in many ways.
The way to do that is, frankly, to tone down the rhetoric about a dozen notches. Throwing around words like "apartheid," questioning Israel's status as a democracy, and focussing on it as though it were the only country in the world--let alone the developed world--which has ever done anything wrong or killed people unnecessarily, and so on, is absolutely the wrong approach. So is criticizing it as some kind of American protectorate, a notion that should make Canadians blush pretty red.
Israelis--and it is Israelis, as in Israeli voters, Jewish and Muslim and Christian and atheist--need to feel like a) their country is being judged by a fair standard, and b) like the world understands the unique circumstances of their existence before things will really change. I think it's pretty fair for people who send their kids to the army, who have seen multiple invasions in living memory, who for a long time were worried that getting on a bus or going to a bar would mean getting blown up, and whose country was born out of the greatest genocide in human history, to feel like a lot of European and North American critics of the way they do things are way out of their depth.
Once progressives in the west dial things down to the point where that's no longer true then they will be able to find allies within the Israeli political system and actually change things for the Palestinians for the better.
The way to do that is, frankly, to tone down the rhetoric about a dozen notches. Throwing around words like "apartheid," questioning Israel's status as a democracy, and focussing on it as though it were the only country in the world--let alone the developed world--which has ever done anything wrong or killed people unnecessarily, and so on, is absolutely the wrong approach. So is criticizing it as some kind of American protectorate, a notion that should make Canadians blush pretty red.
Israelis--and it is Israelis, as in Israeli voters, Jewish and Muslim and Christian and atheist--need to feel like a) their country is being judged by a fair standard, and b) like the world understands the unique circumstances of their existence before things will really change. I think it's pretty fair for people who send their kids to the army, who have seen multiple invasions in living memory, who for a long time were worried that getting on a bus or going to a bar would mean getting blown up, and whose country was born out of the greatest genocide in human history, to feel like a lot of European and North American critics of the way they do things are way out of their depth.
Once progressives in the west dial things down to the point where that's no longer true then they will be able to find allies within the Israeli political system and actually change things for the Palestinians for the better.
