= new reply since forum marked as read
Nothing in Landsmann's column was bigoted.
And she's right to object to Netanyahu's cynical and arrogant insistence that Israel is synonymous with everything and everyone
that happens to be Jewish. Israel does not equal "the Jews"
or "the jooz", as you like to pretend that everyone who offers even the mildest criques of Israeli government policy says the word...in accordance with your pointless and offensive obsession with labeling any critic of the Israeli government, other than those who want it to be MORE brutal and oppressive towards Palestinians, as "antisemites"
.
You're going to have to accept, at some point, that its possible to oppose the Occupation and the settler movement without being a Nazi. Most of us who do offer such critiques, whether in the Israeli left-peace and justice community, the nonviolent wing of the Palestinian resistance that most Western media refuses to cover, or in the progressive communities in Europe, the UK and North America, do so because, whatever national arrangements we might favor for the area, we want the killing and the oppression and the misery suffered by all concerned to end. We aren't monsters and we don't want anybody to suffer.
Why do you waste so much time and energy starting demonization and anti-dissent threads on this issue? What goood would come of everybody doing what you want and supporting everything Netanyahu does? How would silencing discussion and debate on this issue, as you seem to be relentlessly fixated on doing, make anything better at all?
Why do you, in short, participate in a discussion group on this topic if you don't think anyone should actually discuss it at all?
Israelis freely discuss all of these issues all the time...why shouldn't people in the country that arms the IDF be able to do the same without being accused of a prejudice you know perfectly well we don't hold?
What Palestinians feel is hostility towards an oppressor nation. If this one survey that you keep dredging up shows Palestinians expressing hostility towards "Jews", rather than "Israelis", that's most likely the result of the demagogic habit of Israeli prime ministers of all parties have had of referring to Israel, as a country, as "the Jews" something they have no right to do, since Israel is simply a country that calls itself "a Jewish state and is not interchangeable with Jewish people as a collective entity, or with Judaism as a religion or a collection of cultures). The anger is towards the state and its actions...period.
And is also partly rooted in resentment, most likely, for that nation's leaders' insistence that Palestinians should accept the idea that, even since 1967, they should accept the idea that Israelis are the true victims in that conflict...something even you, in your heart of hearts, know is simply not true.
Besides, if what you said were true, if it was bigotry, how would keeping Palestine under military occupation ever possibly make that bigotry go away? It's not possible to oppress bigots into tolerance.
