Hey, Tom. Glad you're feeling better.

...Frankly, the Palestinians look very much like the Jews of the 1940s, in the Polish ghettos, and the Jews seem like the Germans of the same era in occupied territories.



This is like the fourth time I've heard this comparison just today, from various media sources. I figure in another week or two, painting swastikas on synagogues will become something to be admired instead of a hate crime.



Tom, I've been avoiding reading or listening about this, much less commenting on it. I did, however, read the article you posted at the top of this thread (the "never mind" post), and with absolutely no prompting from media of any kind, I thought of the Warsaw Ghetto right away. I read Leon Uris's Mila 18 when I was in high school, and it made such an impression on me -- I cried, which I seldom do over novels -- that I started to read about the Battle of Warsaw. The parallel in the spirit of the people in the article to that of the Jews and others in the ghetto army is striking.

I submit to you that if I, without any suggestions from the outside, drew that comparison, it's not a media construct but my shocked recognition of a historical pattern being repeated by the children of the victims of the pattern.

Quite some time ago, maybe 10 years, I listened to the radio broadcast of a speech by an Indian (as in Bombay) gentleman talking about patterns of peace and aggression. He pointed out that victims of violence and their children are likely to internalize the violent behavior of their oppressors and act it out in other venues, or mimic the behavior in internal power struggles among themselves. I knew the truth of his statement because I could see what generations of violent oppression by a foreign nation had done to the ability of the Irish to put aside hate. In their zeal not to become victims again, it's entirely plausible that the Israeli leadership has taken on the emotional attitudes, if not the ideology, of oppressors themselves. And the soldiers are, as soldiers will, following the orders of their commanders. We will see whether there is any reaction or backlash from the rank and file, or from the Israeli people themselves. It's likely that they are so terrified, and so angry, that the level of hate will rise and rise, unexamined.

Do they really have to confine Palestinian civilians to overcrowded camps, and then bulldoze off the front of their homes? This kind of behavior will only make more radicals. I'm certain, in my heart, that I would have no interest in learning to get along with, let alone trust, anyone who did that to my neighborhood. If more radicals find their motives watching the tread of an Israeli tank crush what's left of their front doors, then the Israeli government will have another reason to go into the settlements and kill more Palestinians. Even those, like that poor woman killed by a stray bullet in her home in Dahariyah, whose only mistake is being born an Arab in the Promised Land.

Regards--
Mary Anne