In my previous post I asked a question: does Hamas’ war crimes justify Israel’s? Apparently the answer is yes, for most Israelis. This article recently appeared in the New York Times. In it you find a remarkable insight into the Israeli mind:
The Israeli theory of what it tried to do here is summed up in [...]
When I was a high school student, the poem by Robert Southey, After Blenheim, was a standard part of the English curriculum. Now that a cease fire has come into effect in Gaza, little Wilhemene’s comment and little Peterkin’s question seem quite relevant:
They say it was a shocking sight
After the field was won;
For many thousand bodies here
Lay rotting in [...]
To start off, here is another excellent article by Glenn Greenwald.
In the following article from Ha’aretz, Ze’ev Maoz, a professor of political science at Tel Aviv university, provides a more detailed look at the issue of “moral equivalence” in this war. This was written on July 25th and the death toll and destruction is already far worse.
Uri Avnery starts his article about the lynching of a young Palestinian boy by Gaza settlers with these words: “All the world saw the horror on TV…” But the fact is that despite the pro-settler claims that the world media is “biased” against Israel, the only place I could find this story (even after a [...]
Today in my inbox I got one of those emails that make the rounds to shore up the faithful. It was typical self-righteous crap, whose basic argument boils down to; “Arabs bad, Jews good.” One of the main self-righteous themes that runs through these types of screeds, is that Palestinian insurgents deliberately kill civilians while [...]
As a follow-up to the article on the reaction to the pilot’s letter, Ha’aretz had an interview with playwrite Joshua Sobol. Disturbing and provocative:
“War crimes have a definition. The Geneva Convention and the annex to the Rome Convention stipulate that a systematic and prolonged policy of killing civilians is a war crime. So in the [...]
I suppose on weekends I have more time to write. So here is something I’ve been thinking about all week, which I finally had time to “put down on paper.”
Speaking of equivalence, anyone who has a good twenty-first century equivalent to that expression, let me know.
[For a more general discussion of this issue, see this feature article].
Israelis and many diaspora Jews, often justify the most brutal actions of the Israeli government and army by pointing to the suicide bombings perpetrated by Palestinian terrorists. The latter are used to justify the most heinous acts on the part of Israel. There is [...]