Thursday, March 17, 2011

Bret Gets It

From Bret Stephens' Are Israeli Settlers Human?

A few years ago, British poet and Oxford don Tom Paulin offered a view on what should be done to certain Jewish settlers. "[They] should be shot dead," he told Al-Ahram Weekly. "I think they are Nazis, racists. I feel nothing but hatred for them." As for Israel itself, it was, he said, "an historical obscenity."

...Is Mr. Paulin satisfied now?

...I also wonder whether [it] will ever occur to the Palestinian movement's legion of fellow travelers in the West. To wit, how did they become so infatuated with a cause that they were willing to ignore its crimes—or, if not quite ignore them, treat them as no more than a function of the supposedly infinitely greater crime of Israeli occupation?

...Even worse is that Palestinians have grown accustomed to the waiver the rest of the world has consistently granted them over the years no matter what they do. Palestinians ought to have expectations of themselves if they mean to build a viable state. But their chances of doing so are considerably diminished if the world expects nothing of them and forgives them everything.

It is precisely in this sense that the frenzied international condemnation of Israeli settlements and settlers does the most harm...they have drained whatever capacity there was to hold Palestinian actions to moral account, to say nothing of our ability to understand the nature of a conflict that is more than simply territorial. The demonization of the settlers has made the world not only coarse but blind...For 60 years, no nation has been held to such stringent moral account, or such ceaseless international hectoring, as Israel. And no people has been held to so slight an account as the Palestinians. Redressing that imbalance is the essential first step in finding a solution to the conflict. The grotesque murders of the Fogels and their little children demands nothing less.

Amen.


Write to bstephens@wsj.com

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3 comments:

ziontruth said...

"Israeli settlers are..."

By definition, Jews cannot be settlers in Palestine. That is because the Jews are the indigenous Palestinians, the one and only true Palestinian nation. Falsely-called "Palestinians" are actually Arabs, and it is they who are the settlers in Palestine. Arabs are indigenous to the Arabian Peninsula and settler-colonists everywhere else.

"In this day and age apartheid is simply unacceptable."

Agreed. For the sake of a just and viable peace, all Arab settlers on the indigenous territory of the Palestinian nation, meaning the Jewish nation, will have to leave. Arab settlements on Jewish soil are all illegal and will have to be dismantled for the sake of justice, without which there can be no peace.

Anonymous said...

Your friend Ari Shavit writes

The future is staring at us in the face - a massive project built 40 years ago is threatening the state that built it.
The radiation emanating from it is lethal. Enough with the texts, guys. Enough with floating out there in space. It's time to cool down the settlements, extinguish them and look for alternative energy sources. It's time to go back home

ziontruth said...

"Your friend Ari Shavit writes"

A writer for the treasonous paper Haaretz, our friend?! With friends like these...

The only "radioactive threat" that needs to be cooled down is the one emanating from the toxic reactors of the Left. The Left that's preventing us from fully going back home after 2000 years, and it does so by denying that the Land of Israel (entirely, both pre- and post-1967 territories) is our home, claiming it belongs to another nation (which actually isn't a nation at all).