| Dear Professor Victor Davis Hanson thinks aloud again. |
In our version of the Soviet, we know that Israel is supposed to be culpable and that we are asked to praise the "aspirations" of the Palestinians, but if we were to go to the Middle East we most certainly would not stay in Gaza or the West Bank or visit unescorted a Christian shrine. We would wish to dine with people like the Fogels, but not their killers or the people who ordered them to kill. We are also to understand that the Arab and Turkish worlds abhor Israeli violence, and so we nod our assent; but privately we know that the issue is really Jews, not savagery per se, and that an Arab dictator can murder 1.000 Arabs with less worry about Western condemnation than an Israeli soldier can shoot one Arab on the West Bank in self-defense. Publicly we accept that tiny Israel, a country of 7 million, is an overdog, the foreign-policy equivalent of the demonized "them" here in America, the people who make over $200,000 a year -- too successful, too Western, too unquestioning of their culture. Privately, we sort of admire Israel's courage and understand that anti-Semitism, oil, fear of terrorism, and demographic calculus construct Arabs as sympathetic victims and Israelis as neo-colonialists. |