georgeob1 wrote:
I believe the former situation in Northern Ireland provides many useful analogies to the situation in Israel/Palestine today. It too involved a long-standing sectarian dispute involving long-term residents and others who immigrated there (some 300 years ago) and who saw themselves as a somewhat beseiged and "special" people, while utterly dominating the political and economic life of the country. The analogy extends to to neighbors (the Republic of Ireland in this case) who were sympathetic to the disaffected minority, and to the powerful patron (in this case the UK) that protected the dominating "special" community. The analogy extends too to the demography, as the former Protestant/Calvanist majority in Northern Ireland saw itself (in the 1980s) rapidly becoming a minority.
It is interesting to note that peace came only after (1) The Irish Republic renounced the revolutionary IRA; (2) The UK abandoned its former implicit committment to continued Protestant domination, and finally undertook the extremely difficult task of combatting the revolutionaries on both sides while attempting to create the political foundations for peace; (3) The people of Northern Ireland (both Catholic and Protestant) finally realized that peace and accomodation was far better than the continued struggle in pursuit of the illusion of dominance; and lastly (4) that all parties rejected the remaining revolutionaries on both sides of the dispute who bombed and killed out of habit and whose stature was based on continued conflict and not peace.
The lesson of history may well be that the analogous events in the Middle east must also occur if peace is to be found there as well.
Well, in my opinion, I can agree that it is correct to compare Israelis to the Protestant Irish. In fact, American Jews are probably up there with WASP's for socio-economic clout. I'll even be unhumble and add I.Q.
But, you all Gentiles can't really empathize with Israel's concerns, I believe. You need to realize that if Jews just lived in Diaspora countries (Zionist Israel being gone), quite comfortably perhaps, it is only a matter of time that through
assimilation, Hitler's goal will be reached with no gas, and no bullets. That's what American Jews are aware of, and many feel that it is only the Orthodox that might remain Jews for some extended time into the future. But, with a non-Zionist Israel, time will be on the side of eliminating Jews from the world.
So, if Israel ever appears intransigent, I believe the feeling is that Zionist Israel is the end of the line for Jewish survival. They won't survive anywhere else. Assimilation through inter-marriage will not happen overnight, but it will happen (for every Jewish son that avoids a wife like his Jewish mother, there's a Christian/Gentile girl that is avoiding a husband like her Christian/Gentile father - I hope that reality doesn't offend any of you guys).
And, what I suspect no one can relate to is that your willingness to offer your heartfelt solutions to a country, that is really foreign to all of you, really is why some Jews want to live in a country where they can pretend the whole world is Jewish (i.e., Jewish garbagemen, Jewish postman, Jewish construction worker, etc., etc.) In other words, I don't believe any of you can relate to your attitude, that living in your first world existences, you all believe you have every right to pontificate to a region of the world you have so little connection to. Perhaps you all don't, based on some arcane principle of minding one's own business (perhaps the aid from the U.S. gives you taxpaying citizens that right in your minds - but you're really too removed to make truly knowledgeable comments).
Also, CI, isn't there a people that live in northern Japan that are not ethnic Japanese, and are sort of excluded from the main Japanese society? And, how come no one criticizes Japan for not allowing migration of non-Japanese to their country? Japan really maintains an exclusive society of ethnic Japanese. The world accepts this, but criticizes Israel for being ethnically Jewish? Sounds like a double standard. Also, no one criticizes America for giving protection to Japan. Interesting, I think.
I offer the thought of morphing this thread into discussing whether the U.S. was correct to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Doesn't Israel and the Palestinians get sort of boring after awhile?
