I would never take charge of Israel for the same reason I don't want to be in charge of America's withdrawal from Iraq. It is a huge, intractable mess that can never be resolved without hurting a whole lot of people. The only way to cleanly fix things would be to have a magic time machine that would allow you to reverse history so that it never happened in the first place -- but it's impossible now to actually return to that status quo ever, not without a ton of death and destruction.
(Seen from this perspective the common Palestinian opinion -- "We wish Israel didn't exist" -- isn't genocidal, it's a wish for a return to that status quo that unfortunately cannot now happen without something approaching ethnic cleansing/genocide. But I don't think that makes the wish unreasonable.
This is partly because I now look at the basic and foundational argument of Israel's existence -- wishing Israel didn't exist equals wishing that the Holocaust would recur, because Israel is the only possible insurance policy against another Holocaust -- and I think it's crap.
It's crap for numerous reasons, but one of the primary reasons I dislike it is that it's only a tenable position if applied evenhandedly and NO ONE actually proposes applying it evenhandedly. Not even for ACTUAL VICTIMS OF THE HOLOCAUST -- who is out there campaigning for the creation of a Romany homeland?)
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Date: 2010-06-01 03:47 am (UTC)(Seen from this perspective the common Palestinian opinion -- "We wish Israel didn't exist" -- isn't genocidal, it's a wish for a return to that status quo that unfortunately cannot now happen without something approaching ethnic cleansing/genocide. But I don't think that makes the wish unreasonable.
This is partly because I now look at the basic and foundational argument of Israel's existence -- wishing Israel didn't exist equals wishing that the Holocaust would recur, because Israel is the only possible insurance policy against another Holocaust -- and I think it's crap.
It's crap for numerous reasons, but one of the primary reasons I dislike it is that it's only a tenable position if applied evenhandedly and NO ONE actually proposes applying it evenhandedly. Not even for ACTUAL VICTIMS OF THE HOLOCAUST -- who is out there campaigning for the creation of a Romany homeland?)