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To: M. Dodge Thomas

If the goal of Israeli policy was to eliminate the guilt of younger voters elsewhere for their grandparents having produced a world that produced the Holocaust, that policy would look a lot like this one.


Not quite sure what you are saying here. But I think part of the Israeli (Jewish) miscalculation is to try to instill guilt for the Holocaust much too long. Instilling guilt (to me) is not a viable or wise long term strategy for success. Even now, you see the Holocaust being used against Israel as some people claim the Palestinians are victims of an Israeli Holocaust. This is a laughable assertion to any rational person, but that element is not playing to rational people—who are a minority anyway. To survive, Israel has to have pragmatic, illusion-free leaders and be the strongest, toughest (but not meanest) kid on the block.


17 posted on 04/02/2009 4:43:34 AM PDT by rbg81 (DRAIN THE SWAMP!!)
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To: rbg81

Israel’s international legitimacy - and I’d say thus its long-term viability - rests on the assumption that the establishment of Israel was a justified exception to the post-World War II European withdrawal from the Middle East, Asia and Africa, and that the justification for this exception was that the Holocaust demonstrated that the Jews would require their own state in order to guarantee their survival.

In this sense Israel dilemma is an example of historically unfortunate timing: Israel was established early enough so that Britain and France still believed that the colonial enterprise with sustainable, but late enough so that within a few years of its establishment Israel’s legitimacy was increasingly judged by the standards of the post-colonial era - by which of course the establishment of such a state was illegitimate.

(Please note that I’m not speaking here from a theological standpoint (arguments over who did God gave the land to), or from the historical antecedents (arguments about who occupied this part of the Middle East when, and what that means about who has title to it today), or about the relative moral standing of the various parties to the dispute (one side or the other as a right to exist as an independent state on its own territory because it represents a more desirable political and social arrangement) but from a strictly practical standpoint: a state established largely by a massive post WWII European immigration into an area which is largely Muslim will perhaps never “be at peace with its neighbors”).

In response, Israel has undertaken a long course of attempting to establish legitimacy by creating irrefutable “facts on the ground”, but this only increases the difficulty of establishing legitimacy.

Israel’s trump card to date has been the Holocaust: what has happened us is so terrible that it must never be allowed to happen again, and we have absolute moral right to set the conditions under which we will avoid it; this is the lever which is been used to move public opinion - especially in Europe and the United States - contrary to the general direction of history post-World War II.

However the political usefulness of the Holocaust is being eroded by the passage of time and the increasing difficulty of maintaining territorial integrity in the midst of a hostile population: “The Holocaust” is increasingly seen not as uniquely terrible event, but one of several such events during the 20th century, and its centrality to defining the history of that era and the responsibility imposed on our own becomes less certain, inevitably the cost of maintaining “security” is the use of what the rest of the world increasingly sees as disproportionate military force, and the paradoxes of the situation - for example that you can “preserve your own territorial integrity” only at the cost of violating that of your neighbors (as for example in the case of the West Bank settlement program) inevitably invites unflattering comparisons of current Israeli behavior with that of European anti-Semitism.

So, as memory of the Holocaust fades and is placed in historical perspective, and as it becomes increasingly clear that peace with Israel’s neighbors is likely impossible, Israel will inevitably (in my opinion) increasingly come to be seen as an archaic remnant of European colonialism rather than a noble and just response to an enormous tragedy.

And one of the most potent ways to accelerate that process, IMO, is to have your foreign policy conducted by someone like the new foreign minister.


18 posted on 04/02/2009 6:52:06 AM PDT by M. Dodge Thomas
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