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Katzav - and Israel as a decent society

Death at Bilin: A timely death is too good to waste in order to demonize the IDF...

@The Propagandist: One Angry Arab, lies and other posturings

January First 2011: terror and religion in Egypt

@Enagage: Same old

Some of my comments do not make it through the moderators (who, I daresay, share my interlocutor's diagnosis of my defence of Israel as "Israeli chauvinism") and I lose them. * So I'm going to keep a log of the comments I submit at Engage.

1. Noga Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
January 3, 2011 at 2:43 pm

Obviously, Sacha, you are incapable of speaking in anything but Rococo Left cliches: Israeli chauvinist, internationalist. I’m left pretty cold by these tired sentimental outbursts with their anachronistic tabulations.

There can be no comparability between the place hatred for Israel as the core of Palestinian nationhood and Israelis’ hatred of Palestinians which is the more “normal” type of hatred towards an enemy that openly and daily declares his aim is to destroy and annihilate you.

Israel underwent its paradigm shift when Ben Gurion accepted 1947 UN Partition resolution. Re-affirmed in 1967, with 242. Again, with Oslo Accords. Again, in Camp David II. again, with Olmert’s proposals.

From the Palestinians we get reverberating “NO”s, campaigns of terror, low-intensity terror, and threats of terror. There are other possibilities. Palestinians can be taught, told for a change, that “compromise” is not a dirty word and often is the only ethical solution to be had from a pretty meagre selection of solutions.

2. Noga Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
January 4, 2011 at 12:52 am

“…but that doesn’t excuse an attack on the terminology and the person.”

Terminology provides the backbone of any account or argument. Once you cede to Sacha’s penchant for applying colonialist vocabulary to Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians, you accept his premises about the denouement of Israel’s history, that is, you accept Palestinian narrative. My problem with Sacha is that he holds a hammer in his hand and thinks he can knock any nail into the frame of his own ideology. So from Israel the colonialist state flow immediately such pearls as “Israeli chauvinist” and “internationalist” and a mean-spirited tone, all for disagreeing with his rigid and unworkable solution.

Language matters awfully. If one decides to refer to women as tramps and to men as rapists, there is no way you can discuss gender relationships but through the prisms offered by these terms.

Sacha knows it. That’s why he keeps piling it on.

* Update: Surprise! The comment shows.