Brooks Breaks

Over the decades, Israelis have wobbled through error, uncertainty and moral ambiguity. But, collectively, they have adapted to their tragic circumstances with some reasonable degree of success. They didn’t recoil from the drama they were caught in. They are nothing if not critical of one another. The society moves forward on a great wave of fevered argument. There are always new parties, as old messy improvisations — the semi-socialist economy, the Oslo process, the security fence — become obsolete.But there will always be those whose minds recoil from the ambiguity of a tragic situation. Some of these people turn into amoral realists and decide in the brutal situation that anything that advances survival is permitted. Under their leadership, security becomes insecurity because security measures are taken to the extreme. These are the people who want to permanently colonize the West Bank.On the other side, there are people whose minds seem to flee, almost by instinct, from ambiguity to absolutism. These are often good people, with high ideals. But they take a dappled society in a tough situation, like Israel, and they want to judge it according to black and white legal abstractions. They find a crime or an error and call for blanket condemnation (these people tend not to apply this standard to themselves).

That was David Brook in the NYTimes.

And the bold section is not a description of me.  Or my friends.  That 'some' are quite unrepresentative and not at all a 1% if that of the 370,000 Jews resident in Judea and Samaria - and certainly not our elected leaders.

That was immoral writing by Brooks.

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