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| Israel-Palestine-Jordan |
| Michael Totten Interviews Israeli "Peace Now" Activists |
| 2006-08-23 |
| Hattip Instapundit. A long interview, and even longer comment thread, on Mr. Totten's blog. Very interesting, if you want to explore the thinking of the Israeli public during the hudna before the second phase of the Hizb'allah war. The interviewees were Viet Nam era American anti-war protestors who emigrated to Israel. They make the point that unlike our nutters, they served their 25 years in the IDF as active and reserve, and now their children are serving in turn. They have a strong viewpoint, but are surprisingly realistic about the situation of Israel in the region, and about the views of their countrymen. A taste: “What do you do with this?” Yehuda said. “It’s not reasonable to expect Jewish people to just roll up and go away or disappear. But on the other hand, a true injustice was done to the Palestinians. Between those two poles, you have all sorts of people coming up with all sorts of statements, theories, and whatnot. And it’s all obviously useless. Nothing has led to anything. All we see is military confrontation. When the first Zionists came to Palestine, Palestine was a feudal society. And you have a big clash between concepts that have nothing to do with religion or anything of that nature. The fact that the Arab-Israeli conflict is degrading into a religious conflict is a tragedy beyond description. It never really was.” Israel is often thought of, in the West, as an unhinged fanatically right-wing country, like the U.S. on speed. Israel is far more ‘European,’ though, than it is ‘American.’ If Israel were not constantly under fire and constantly embroiled in conflict with eliminationist enemies, Israel would resemble a Jewish France or even Sweden of the Levant. The country was founded by democratic Labor Party socialists, and only rather recently has become more capitalist and complex. I wanted to know if there are many Berkeley-style leftists in Israel. “I think what’s different from our peace movement,” Amichai said, “from the peace movements in the United States, in other countries, and in Europe is the question of serving in the army. Peace movements are usually pacifists and they don’t encourage their members to serve in the army. The Israeli peace movement believes that Israel would not exist if we didn’t defend it. There is a slogan that’s going around: If the Arabs put down their arms, there will be peace. If the Jews put down their arms there won’t be any Jews left. And I think there’s a basic truth to that.” “Amichai is speaking in the context of Israel,” Yehuda said, “and I can understand that. My feeling goes beyond the spirit of Israeli society only. I see organizations like Hezbollah as a threat to humanity in the same manner, for me, as the settler movement is also a threat. Where you have a nationalism that hooks up with a religious idea, I see only trouble. I’m not willing to discriminate between Jews and Arabs on this score. Not at all.” |
| Posted by:trailing wife |