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questions, I can openly say I disagree with - such as #7. I do not, as a feminist, see a fetus as a baby. And I think that women aren't primarily or even essentially breeding machines and the fundamentalist Christian line on that subject bothers me. And I have NO problem with being a secular person!
HOWEVER, maybe because of the brutal "conversations" on I/P, I'm beginning to wonder about #'s 6 and 8. We're being made to feel ashamed of Israel, even doubting whether it should exist, after all it's Hurting The Palestinians. Others would have us believe we are COLONIZERS, purveyors, oy, of the holocaust. At best, we are USING the holocaust to give ourselves and excuse to hurt the Palestinians.
But yesterday, having been advised on I/P that a paper recording a certain speech by Heykal Pasha to the UN in 1947, openly threatening Jewish populations in Arab lands, was in fact neocon propaganda, I decided to do some research.
It reminded me that Jewry has lived continously throughout the M.E., including in Israel, since Biblical times. Moreover, that population has itself been living a sort of apartheid - allowed to practice our religion but forced to live and dress separately, never really being accepted.
And, the expulsions of hundreds of thousands of ME Jews really puts a different light on the whole refugee question. It can't be seen as a one Arab, one Jew sort of exchange - but it points out the undeniable fact that people who have lived in the neighborhood since day one are not colonizers and they can't, by definition, be committing rascist or apartheid acts.
I'd also forgotten the influence of the Nazis on the ME.
Having said that, one doesn't see how a just solution can be reached without helping the Palestinian people secure a homeland. It is too ironic that they HAD one in their grasp, in 1948.
But I'll tell you what, I fear, I DREAD, the sense that so many forces seem arrayed against the achievement of that peace. No doubt, some are coming from within. But far more are coming from Europe, from the surrounding states - even from people whose ill-wishes take flight in cyberspace.
I'm worried. And I'm worried that "liberal" seems to mean that we can't support Israel, or that we can't support America.
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