If one is seeking truth about the tragedy of Israel and Palestine and Gaza and the Settlers, and the dispossessed and the death and the destruction Lord Finkelstein , in The Times, tells it here. He eschews the binary. He avoids the “I’m a Jew, therefore…” almost entirely. He tells it as it is. And who can not share in his despair?
It had long been an ambition of mine to visit Israel and before that became impossible I managed it. I walked on the Mount of Olives. Climbed the Via Dolorosa. Saw the Jordan at Galilee. Bethlehem. Nazareth…
The thing abut the New Testament stories for me is that they represent a positive historical break. Above all by replacing “An Eye for an Eye” with “Turn the other cheek”.
But now the Holy Land is besmirched with revenge, other cheeks are not being turned. Israel needed to respond to the vile assault it suffered. But nobody, including Daniel F, can truly say that that response was proportionate. It just has not been.
I make no charge of genocide but understand why some do. I do, however, make a charge of opportunism.
Netanyahu did not, we must assume, directly incite the Hamas attack. But he sure has taken the opportunity to make part of his response to it to promulgate the goal of Greater Israel. And some of his compatriots go back two thousand years to justify their ambition, a denial of two millennia of history – including the emergence of a third Abrahamic religion!
A charge of Israel seeking Lebensraum, for that is what it is, is the most chilling irony.
Paddy’s Blogs in a crazy world 