01 August, 2014

Zionism and Israel’s War with Hamas in Gaza - NYTimes.com

Zionism and Israel’s War with Hamas in Gaza - NYTimes.com:

This,
as a Zionist, I cannot accept. Jews, above all people, know what
oppression is. Children over millennia were the transmission belt of
Jewish survival, the object of what the Israeli novelist Amos Oz and his
daughter Fania Oz-Salzberger have called “the intergenerational
quizzing that ensures the passing of the torch.” No argument, no
Palestinian outrage or subterfuge, can gloss over what Jewish failure
the killing of children in such numbers represents.

The
Israeli case for the bombardment of Gaza could be foolproof. If
Benjamin Netanyahu had made a good-faith effort to find common cause
with Palestinian moderates for peace and been rebuffed, it would be. He
has not. Hamas is vile. I would happily see it destroyed. But Hamas is
also the product of a situation that Israel has reinforced rather than
sought to resolve.

This
corrosive Israeli exercise in the control of another people, breeding
the contempt of the powerful for the oppressed, is a betrayal of the
Zionism in which I still believe.