Friday, March 8, 2019

FRIENDS, ROMANS, COUNTRYMEN


I should like to say something more about the Ilhan Omar flap, particularly in response to the impassioned anonymous comment to yesterday’s post.

I have virtually no first-hand knowledge of Israel.  Some years ago, my wife and I made a three day detour there on our way to Paris, but though I visited some world historically significant sites, such as the garden at Gethsemane, I met and talked to almost no one.  However, I know a number of Israelis, and my impression of the country is that it is a vibrant, exciting place where political life and the life of the mind are both fully alive.  Indeed, it is my impression that the most knowledgeable and devastating critics of Israel’s policy toward the huge number of Palestinians it imprisons and oppresses are Israelis living in that nation.

The foreign country I know best is South Africa, which I have visited more than forty times.  I first went to South Africa in 1986, four years before Nelson Mandela was released from prison and the liberation process was begun.  I found it a vibrant, exciting place where political life and the life of the mind were both fully alive.  The most knowledgeable and devastating critics of South Africa’s policies toward the huge number of Black, Coloured, and Asian residents whom it oppressed and exploited were South Africans living in that nation.

In those days, Israel and South Africa were allies, and Israel supplied South Africa with sophisticated military assistance.

I grew up and have spent my entire life in the United States, a vibrant, exciting place where political life and the life of the mind are both fully alive.  The most knowledgeable and devastating critics of policies of the United States are Americans living here.  The United States is a settler state, built on land the settlers seized from the indigenous population, whom they then tried to exterminate, and developed with a labor force it imported from Africa and then enslaved.

In these days, the United States and Israel are allies, and the United States supplies Israel with military assistance.

We do what we can, in a world we did not make, in the knowledge that the evil will live after us.  We can only hope that the good will not be interred with our bones.

2 comments:

  1. It's fitting that Israelis are the most knowledgeable and devastating critics of Israeli foreign policy just as U.S. citizens are the most knowledgeable and devastating critics of U.S. foreign policy.

    The first step of any worthwhile ethical system is to get your own house in order or to look in the mirror, as Chomsky says. Ethics that are only used to condemn the behavior and policies of people whom one already dislikes or feels alien to, to other the other even more, are just not ethical, as far as I'm concerned.

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  2. I'm baffled as to why Ilhan Omar hasn't simply responded to the charge that she's reviving the old divided loyalty trope against Jews by pointing out that the politicians who display the most unseemly fealty towards Israel tend to be evangelical Christians.

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