Re: META: Re: POLITICS: Re: grim prospects

From: David Lubkin (lubkin@unreasonable.com)
Date: Thu Apr 18 2002 - 13:39:48 MDT


At 12:39 PM 4/17/2002 -0400, CurtAdams@aol.com wrote:

>What's this groupism business? Some Israelis want to ethnically
>cleanse the Palestinians. Some want to live in two separate states,
>and some want to live mingled. Some Palestinians want to
>ethnically cleanse the Isrealis. Some want to live in two separate
>states, and some want to live mingled. Right now it looks like the
>cleanser Israelis are succeeding in getting the cleanser Palestinians
>to play into their hands, but that hardly makes them the good guys,
>nor does it make the many peacefully oriented Palestinians disappear.

You say "some Israelis". I don't dispute this. Out of 6,000,000 Israelis,
I'm sure there's at least one who wants to exterminate them. But then you
refer to "cleanser Israelis" in a way that suggests that there are enough
of them to be politically influential in Israel.

I believe there is substantial evidence that there are "cleanser
Palestinians". There are hundreds of statements from prominent Arab
political and religious leaders (and a new one every day) calling for the
annihilation of Israel or praising the killing of Jews.

But "cleanser Israelis"? This is more of the moral equivalency
nonsense. Who are these people? Substantiate your allegation.

The most extreme view that I've seen in 35 years of following Israeli
politics is from those who looked at population trends is that of the
followers of Meir Kahane, who saw that in a few decades Israel could not
remain both Jewish and democratic, and advocated solutions such as forcibly
evicting the Arabs from the West Bank or Israel proper. And even that
view, which is far from advocating mass murder, never attracted more than a
few percent.

-- David.



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