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because of the Holocaust?
Israel has been supported by the West, principally the US, because it was seen as a kind of outpost of the West, a democratic state in the midst of dictatorships, and a beacon for what other ME countries should aspire to. It was also created out of collective guilt for the Holocaust, because the rest of the world did know, and stood by and let it happen.
But too often now it is Israel riding roughshod over the rights of others, all too often Israel who is guilty of racism and bullying smaller and weaker peoples, and crying anti-semitism and Holocaust denial if anyone dares criticize. Attacks by Hezbollah and Hamas have only ever been in response to Israeli actions against the Palestinians, however Israel chooses to spin it. And they are very good at spin.
Yesterday they targeted an ambulance carrying wounded to hospital; today a UN outpost, and in both instances there is absolutely no way they didn't know what they were doing. They boast about their ability to mount precision attacks, and both the ambulance and the UN post were very clearly marked. It is very difficult to see their behaviour in any light other than reverse racism; a determination to push their borders further and further, and to keep out any other than their own.
Nobody outside the Jewish community could have been more idealistic than I was about the creation of Israel, the wonders they achieved in the desert, the brilliance of the kibbutz system on which the state was built. I loved the country, and my heart was completely open to it. But I've been disillusioned, and as I learned the history from the perspective of the Palestinians while seeing outrage piled upon outrage against them, I feel only great anger.
Israel could only have succeeded with tolerance and compassion for the Palestinians, and they could have built a state together with them. They began with the goodwill of the west, some of it certainly born out of contrition for the evils allowed to happen under the Nazis, but it is being squandered by their aggressiveness and bullying, their refusal to understand any view but their own, and their now very obvious determination to push the Palestinians right out of the Territories. For those people who were once incarcerated behind walls and pushed into ghettoes to do the same to others who are guilty of nothing more than having been the inhabitants of a land now wanted by the Jews is a shame and a disgrace, and it is time that western leaders called it for what it is: ethnic cleansing; racism of the worst kind.
It is bad enough that we have to worry about Islamic fundamentalists and where they're going to strike next, without a supposedly democratic western state going berserk for no other reason than because they can.
There are serious problems facing us all right now, not the least of which is climate change and the ever-growing Third World poverty and malnutrition. There are dictatorships aplenty causing great suffering to their people, and we don't need so-called responsible states adding to the instability and suffering. It's time for the rest of the world to say "enough".
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