rationalskepticism.org

Stein wrote:

arugula2 wrote:<snip>

At first, I was furious with Israel when they dragged their heels with not only Arafat but even with Abbas, who actually took a bullet from his own people for being a peace advocate.

[Reveal] Spoiler:

So at first, when Rabin and Arafat got together and the Oslo accords came through, I was over the moon at the thought that the Palestinians would finally have the separate state to which they'd been long entitled and for which the U.N. had explicitly called from the beginning. Arafat and Rabin had clearly earned the Nobel Peace Prize, and I viewed the Oslo accords in the same golden light in which I saw the collapse of the Berlin wall and the accession of Nelson Mandela. It was all part of a new world where peace and hope was emerging, and benchmarks were being laid down for decency and a functional world.

Then came Bosnia and the helplessness of the U.N. there, and in Israel a lowlife settler's bullet for Rabin. Oslo later threatened to unravel, and I later wondered if Peres and Shamir were really dedicated enough to peace compared with heroes like Abbas. Little did I guess that compared to what was coming and the abuses of Netanyahu, Peres and Shamir would seem like angels, looking back.

Netanyahu has descended to depths of depravity that I never thought I'd see in a post-Berlin-wall world. His refusal to properly confront the criminal settlers once and for all has made him a criminal too. He enabled them instead. His continued check points around the West Bank, his harrowing and persecution of Gaza, have hammered nail after nail into the Oslo coffin.....

Today, what do we see? We see that Netanyahu has gained virtual allies in his clearly criminal attempt to wreck the dream of two separate states. Who are those virtual allies? They are the pioneers in the B.D.S. movement. By implicitly pretending that Netanyahu has somehow rendered the dream of two states obsolete -- an absurd, obscene and immoral assumption on a par with the sick complacent assumption back in the 1850s that the South had somehow rendered Abolition impossible! -- they left-handedly work for a single state, which is a de facto recipe for genocide of either demographic by the other. Fellow travelers compound this obscenity by total ignorance on the essence of what is meant by apartheid. Yes, the policy of bantus for the subordinate demographic is reminiscent of apartheid. But what is unfolding elsewhere, inside the internationally recognized borders of Israel proper, bloody well isn't. Inside, it may still be deplorable for other reasons, yes, but it is not apartheid. Hyperbole, never mind abject historic ignorance, helps no one.

At this point, the cretins who throw around words like "apartheid", and such sick notions as the unstoppable death of two states, have even ended up with blood on their hands. The statistics for the concluding year or so of the last decade show that the greatest hate-crime spike has been against Jews. Abuses against Jewish students in campuses across the country have also ratcheted up in a direct parallel with the increased demonization of Israel. Whether by intent or not, advocacy for the Palestinians today has been coopted as a de facto antisemitic enterprise. Its DNA grows filthier by the day. I don't know if its integrity can ever be restored. I only know I no longer want any part of it. It has ended up as a de facto movement aimed at the total destruction of Israel, a step that Abbas or the U.N. would never have taken, on their angriest days.

None of this extenuates the horrors of what Israel has unleashed in Gaza one bit, nor the sheer desecration in what Netanyahu has done to Oslo. But modern-day advocates for Palestinians now fill me with as much distrust as ever I have felt and still feel for Netanyahu.

I first threw in my lot for a good part of my life with friends who shared my outrage over the treatment of the Palestinians. For me, siding with the Palestinians was obviously the only moral choice.

But when the tenor of the Palestinian cause here in the U.S. morphed this past decade into a widespread belief that Israel should never have been launched at all, that two states was somehow impossible (!!!!!!!!!), that the only good Jewish state was a dead one, I felt I'd been had for half my life. There is no hatred so intense as self-hatred and self-contempt. When, finally, one of my friends actually remarked that I shouldn't be so put out by and exercised over Israel's extremist settlers because "what else could one expect from greedy Jews", I not only severed all connections with him but grew to profoundly distrust almost anyone with an animus against Israel and to profoundly despise my own idiocy as well in having not seen the DNA of many a Palestinian advocate long before that "friend"'s "greedy Jew" remark.

Irrational? Maybe. But finally, when the BDS movement tacitly dispensed with the notion of two states altogether (!!!!), that was the final nail in the coffin. I am now so disgusted with my own stupidity and blindness at the associations I've cultivated that my consequent profound distrust of the DNA in any advocate for the Palestinians leads me to be suspicious first and ask questions second.

Thoughts?