I have been reading the comments on the Meteor Blades diary and I have to say that I am sick to my stomach. I find the comments so lacking in compassion and insight, so full of hate and vitriol that I am left to wonder at my place in this community. Let me start by saying I do not agree at all with what Israel is doing in Lebanon - and yet I am at a loss to know what they should have done instead. I am sad that friends and relatives, people I know to be good and caring, felt that they had no other recourse. But I try and understand. There is a sneering cruelty in the comments and an attitude by those making comments that there is some sense of moral superiority. I think I would feel maybe a little better if I had seen these type of vitriolic threads about the genocide in the Sudan, the hanging of a rape victim in Iran to name just a few of the horrors that occur in the world. I wonder why this focus on Israel, why this horrific response to this particular nation. I am not comfortable with the response I come up with.
Let me ask so many of you who comment with such anger towards Israel - if the people of Israel are cut do they not bleed? Do they not suffer and cry the same as others when rockets and bombs kill their children? Do they not feel fear when others scream for their death in the night? Israel is not interested in hegemony. They do not want to increase their power and their land. They do not look to enslave others, to steal the resources of others, to abuse others. They are simply a people caught in a very difficult position. They want to have a democracy in their small plot of land. Their neighbors don't want them to survive on their small plot of land. Groups like Hezbollah despise them and would do anything to destroy them. They do not fight Hezbollah out of choice, but because they feel they have to. They believe if they let Hezbollah become too strong that they will destroy them. Why do the people of Israel think this way? Because that is what Hezbollah said they would do. Hezbollah shoots rockets in the their marketplace and kidnaps their children. If somebody were doing that to you how would you feel? If somebody wanted to kill you, how would you feel? Would you turn the other cheek? Would you allow them to grow more powerful? No, I am asking, with all your brilliant analysis, what would you do?
Oh, I know, you would be beneficent. You would try and make your enemies friends. I agree with this. Except the times I have done this on a small scale in my life many times my enemies have used the moment to gain an advantage. It is a big chance you are asking Israel to take. Would you take this chance? Really. I'm asking you to look in to your soul. But then again you have not lived with daily horror for so many years, so many generations.
Let me finish by saying something that I have seen mentioned on this list before. The attachment to Israel by Jews is in no way ideological. You make a horrible mistake by making these ideological arguments. It is an attachment that burns deep in our gut. It is the understanding that if the lights in Israel go out I am a little less safe in the world.