Didn’t read the Beinart article (that’s a paywall I’ll never climb over) but you nicely dissect a tendency to delusion in polite liberals, that the palestinians don’t want the Jews gone or, so it seems, dead. “Give peace a chance”: it will struggle session you, then push you to the ground, then kick you until you are dead. Peace at last, and everyone still alive can live in harmony.
I won’t read a word from Beinart. But I do wonder how he feels in his tiny heart of hearts surrounding himself with Jew haters. Because that’s what they are.
Given that the peaceniks getting their way on Vietnam led directly to the Khmer Rouge coming to power, it's fair to say they were always on the side of evil.
While woke ideology is the most popular and progressive way to reduce a historically dense, morally complex conflict to a simple binary of black and white, good vs evil, it is not the only way. I accept that it is entirely possible, as you’ve illustrated, to frame the conflict in equally dualistic, reductionist terms without relying on an identity-politics framework.
War in general exacts a horrible cost on the innocent, and urban warfare against an enemy embedded within a civilian population it regards as expendable even more so. But to claim, without evidence, that Israel is strategically targeting civilians as part of a mass displacement campaign crosses the line from moral concern into irrational demonization and conspiracy mongering.
Didn’t read the Beinart article (that’s a paywall I’ll never climb over) but you nicely dissect a tendency to delusion in polite liberals, that the palestinians don’t want the Jews gone or, so it seems, dead. “Give peace a chance”: it will struggle session you, then push you to the ground, then kick you until you are dead. Peace at last, and everyone still alive can live in harmony.
I won’t read a word from Beinart. But I do wonder how he feels in his tiny heart of hearts surrounding himself with Jew haters. Because that’s what they are.
Given that the peaceniks getting their way on Vietnam led directly to the Khmer Rouge coming to power, it's fair to say they were always on the side of evil.
Very well said.
While woke ideology is the most popular and progressive way to reduce a historically dense, morally complex conflict to a simple binary of black and white, good vs evil, it is not the only way. I accept that it is entirely possible, as you’ve illustrated, to frame the conflict in equally dualistic, reductionist terms without relying on an identity-politics framework.
War in general exacts a horrible cost on the innocent, and urban warfare against an enemy embedded within a civilian population it regards as expendable even more so. But to claim, without evidence, that Israel is strategically targeting civilians as part of a mass displacement campaign crosses the line from moral concern into irrational demonization and conspiracy mongering.
Israel has no commitment to mass murder.