Friday, June 11, 2010
ISRAEL EXPLAINED
The (s)State of Israel vexes me sorely.
They just piss me off.
Why is that?
It starts, for me, at the end of WWII with my own memories of the struggles in that area of the world.
I can remember the assassination of Count Bernadotte, the UN mission head. It was shocking at the time. One of the assassins became President of Israel. They were hailed as heroes.
Of course, today, it is nothing. Another death.
Since then I have moved from a supporter of the Israeli state (after all, none of us were immune from the portrayal of Zionist heroes and Paul Newman in Leon Uris' Exodus, a piece of effective propaganda as there ever was. You would want to play Arrafat?
So, I remained fixed on the paradox of a situation which, after 60 years of my own life, is still in flux.
The issues are almost always misrepresented.
Here is a great op-ed that helps demystify the situation.
Read it. Perhaps you, like me, can get through the morass.
We cannot write the problem of Israel off. It is the reason we have so much trouble in the Middle East. Everything rests on it.
I don't suppose that any of my anti-Israel feelings were changed by this. Rather, I now have the same opinions bolstered by some facts I don't normally run into my calculations.
Labels: Israel
