The interview Sculptor posted is actually quite good and the argument the man presents is quite sound. What he says is that if you want Hamas to condemn itself, and do this as a public confession, that you must be consistent, and he asks the BBC interviewer to recall if he has ever, once, asked the Israelis who he has had on his show to "condemn themselves" for war crimes that Israel has committed. The answer of course is no.
We have to return again to the root of the problem: the root is that in 1948 there were events that robbed a people of their land, their sovereignty, and turned them into refugees and prisoners in their own land. This is a fact. (The root of this issue extends back farther of course to the early part of the 20th century).
So the man is in fact holding to
a principled argument and, for this reason, he can be admired.
I might
still decide not to care about the Palestinian plight (speaking theoretically), and I might choose to take the side of, for example, Walker in a thoroughly wishy-washy pseudo-moral position which cannot sustain itself when interrogated, and align with Power and the Israeli side of the issue.
But I would like to point out what I view as a substantial core in what we see unfolding: today there are articles in the Times which describe how retaliatory measures are being taken against the NYU students who signed a document condemning Israel as the original instigator. Alan Dershowitz named Ryna Workman (a Black NYU student) and made it clear that he could focus attention on her for her
wrongthink.
You are going to witness an aggressive campaign that seeks to condemn anyone who does not see these issues as they *should* be seen by *truly moral people*. [Examine in this context Veggie's arguments which are simply condemnatory for refusal to agree to see things as she does -- though she is completely ignorant of the issues and the history].
And I submit that this really is an Orwellian issue. Power is defining what is the right way, the sole moral way, to view the issues. It is not a question of your choice, or of your discrimination, or your skill in analysis, but rather your statements, what you must think and say, are determined by powerful interests who demonstrate that they can control and mold the discourse.
If you do not
think right you will suffer. That is the personal aspect. The other side of this is that huge powers are gearing up their war-machine and structuring a war-aim argument for the war they intend to foment. Iran? Russia? China?
They are all guilty.
We witness *ideological war* and we have to ask: Who has the power to enforce this level of control over what people think and say?
From where I sit what I see is the following: Israel and those who explain and defend it wield a narrative. It is based at the most essential point on a rehearsal of the biblical narrative of God-empowered and righteous people *taking what is theirs* when they took over Palestine. The core narrative has to do with its *rightness* and with its *justice*. I would say that this belief, then, operates on a
metaphysical plane. If you subscribe to the metaphysics, and in this sense to the Story, it doesn't really mater much that the physical or historical facts do not coincide with the action your belief allows you to take.
This is, again
in essence, what the Israeli and the Christian Zionist position is really based in. So it seems to me that it is, in truth, a repeat of the biblical story of the conquest of the Canaan lands. The core justification is
metaphysical. And because the biblical story is mentioned, one must also mention a corollary that is part-and-parcel of it:
“In the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them — the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites — as the Lord your God has commanded you.”
It might seem like a stretch to draw this corollary but I do not think it is.
At a base level what this means is that you don't have to be concerned for the *injustice* or the *crime* committed since what you are doing is ordained on a metaphysical level.
