Rosa Brooks of the Los Angeles Times puts succinctly what I've been trying to say for ages:
In a climate in which good-faith criticism of Israel is automatically denounced as anti-Semitic, everyone loses. Israeli policies are a major source of discord in the Islamic world, and anger at Israel usually spills over into anger at the U.S., Israel's biggest backer.
With resentment of Israeli policies fueling terrorism and instability both in the Middle East and around the globe, it's past time for Americans to have a serious national debate about how to bring a just peace to the Middle East. But if criticism of Israel is out of bounds, that debate can't occur — and we'll all pay the price.
And that's just for criticism of the attack on Lebanon. The basic premise of Zionism - that there needs to be a separate, special country for Jewish people and that it needs to be located in at least some portion of Palestine - is simply assumed as a given in the US, but to most of the rest of the world it's still a debatable question.
And it's a premise I reject. I just don't believe that any religion needs its own special country. And I have nothing against the Jewish faith. (It's telling that I feel the need to include this disclaimer, isn't it?) It's the policies of a foreign country I find objectionable.
I'm not quite where Ahmadinejad of Iran is, saying that Israel should have been created out of a piece of Germany and not a piece of Palestine, and I certainly reject his Holocaust denial. His rhetorical excess nevertheless makes the point: Holocaust guilt is what drove the creation of modern Israel. But there have been many, too many, holocausts - including the one my ancestors committed on the native Americans. (Not hypothetical ancestors, one of my ACTUAL ancestors.) So perhaps I dare not cast stones until I move back to Sweden. But the Nazi Holocaust is a wrong that can never be righted, certainly not by other wrongs.
My honest, perhaps too simplistic belief is that any person should be able to live where they want and practice the faith of their choice. That applies to the Rio Grande Valley as much as it does to the River Jordan valley. The Islamic-dominated countries of the Middle East that have expelled and repressed Judaism in the era of modern Israel (Morocco and Ethiopia come to mind, and certainly Saudi Arabia) are wrong, just as Israel is wrong for dominating and suppressing the Palestinians.
When apartheid was under attack in the 1980s the world rejected the demands of some white South Africans for a separate, white state. We insisted on a unitary, one person one vote South Africa. It's an uneasy coexistence, but it's nevertheless a coexistence.
It might seem like a unitary state in the neighborhood of Jerusalem is impossible, that Israel and Hamas will never sit down and talk. But we never thought deKlerk and Mandela would talk. We never thought Reagan and Gorbachev would talk. Why are we asking anything different in Israel-Palestine?
Both nations claim the Holy Land, both nations claim the God of Abraham gave it to their people. Both nations love the Holy Land. The wise King Solomon of that land was once faced with two mothers who claimed the same baby. When he offered to divide the baby and give each mother half, the real mother offered to give up the baby. Dividing this land is destroying it just as certainly as it would have destroyed that child.
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