Wednesday, March 18, 2015

a test for American Jews?

There are a guesstimated (2012) 5.4 million Jews in the United States, a country of about 318 million people (2014) and if I had to guess, I think I would say that Benjamin Netanyahu's fourth-term re-election as prime minister of Israel yesterday is likely to increase the religio-political work load for each one of them.

In a tightly-contested race I can't pretend to understand, Netanyahu pulled out all the stops shortly before the election and said flat-out that he did not favor and would not promote as "two-state" solution to the Israel-Palestinian frictions. The statement was widely seen as a bid to inspire nationalist/conservative voters to pull the lever for "Bibi," a tactic that appears to have worked.

But now that Netanyahu has made his bed, it will be up to the rest of us to sleep in it. By dismissing the Palestinians and asserting Israel's exceptionalism, Americans inclined to be sympathetic to Israel find themselves skating on increasingly thin ice. The slaughter of Palestinians (who are hardly without flaws) is becoming hard to overlook ... even in America. The same ruthlessness that once guided Adolf Hitler to slaughter Jews now appears -- in every news story that goes unwritten --  to inform Israel's own policies ... with a little help from allies like the United States, whose air waves are lop-sidedly attuned to the poor-little-Israel (armed to the teeth) agenda.

If indeed Netanyahu tells the 'peace process' to go fuck itself, the willingness to support Israel ... well, I guess I am just tired of what is admittedly ordinary bullshit ... the kind that kills people for sport ... sport that is lovingly referred to as "freedom" or "protected rights" or some other well-dressed excuse.

Oh well ... our Islamic State is better than your Islamic State.

1 comment:

  1. My doctor, who is jewish, believes that all people are assholes, just varying by degrees. He further asserts that the people of the middle east, on either side of any question, deserve one another. I don't know that deserve has anything to do with it. But it strikes me as a principle that might change our views of how we deal with each other. We all feel we deserve more than the other guy, but if it was a law of physics that we couldn't have more than the other guy, we'd be clamoring to increase the other guys value just to bump up our own. But i doubt we could sell anyone on the idea that they weren't the center of the universe.

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