re: #39 Obdicut

Wait, your ideal world still has Israel and Palestine fighting?

Point well taken. Clearly, the ideal has no fighting. I should have defined my first “world” as “ideal” and the second as “sane”.

Comparing this to a police action is very dumb. Military actions cause plenty of civilian casualties. This is basically a non-response otherwise— it’s saying there isn’t a metric for success, it’ll just happen and every once in awhile Israel will bomb them back.

Unfortunately, history suggests there is no metric for the type of success that any sane person would use, which is zero rockets and zero need for response. The reality has been and is likely to be in the future merely reducing the violence to a level that the society can live with. Hence the analogy to how a police force views the murder rate. The ideal is for zero, but the reality is that the number is likely to be above zero and the best you can do is apply your resources to combat it as best you can.

And does this particular military action place the final goal of reducing antisemitism farther away or closer?

It is not part of the calculus. Israel’s government has a duty to its population, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, to protect them from those in the Gaza Strip and elsewhere who would kill them.

As for its effect on antisemitism, antisemitism existed long before the State of Israel won its independence. It existed and, if we are being honest rather than merely hopeful, will likely continue to exist regardless of whether Israel defends itself. Nobody becomes an antisemite merely because Israel defends itself. A person becomes an antisemite because he or she has been educated to antisemitism and has internalized the lies about Jews, generally, and about Israel, in its capacity as a proxy for Jews in the antisemitic discourse (hence my occasional use in this forum of the term “Jew Among Nations” to refer to Israel).

We aren’t any closer. That isn’t Israel’s fault, since the Arab world uses the Palestinians as their proxy, inflame the situation, and Hamas tends to kill those who would be conciliatory with Israel,

Not just Hamas.

but Israel still needs to believe in a future of peaceful coexistence. I really feel that a lot of those on the Israeli right have truly given up on that— and it is not an option, to give up.

There are certainly many on the Israeli right who have given up on the hope of it happening in the present. But that is true across the broad spectrum of Israeli politics, largely as a result of the thousands of missiles that the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

That said, with the exception of the far right, even most on the Israeli right would like nothing more than truly peaceful co-existence. They just do not see it happening under the current “leadership” of the Palestinians.