Though I suppose it is, it just seems odd given how long ago it was. It actually touches on the issue that I think is too often ignored in European discussions of Israel and Palestine: I still think the whole reason modern Israel exists has less to do with Zionist conspiracies and more to do with an attempt to export "the Jewish Question" and be rid of it once and for all. Of course, when European nations and nationals decide to weigh in on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict they aren't really rid of it at all, are they? 
There seems to be some trouble recognizing the root problem: An attempt to expiate guilt over anti-semitism by simply exporting all the Jews to a recreated Israel created new guilt for having displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians already living there. But having "done right" by the Jews it seems like many people are willing to completely ignore their own nations role in recreating Israel as they criticize what Israel subsequently did. Meanwhile the same parochial patronizing attitudes that caused intervention (and hence a lot of current problems) continues apace.
There seems to be some trouble recognizing the root problem: An attempt to expiate guilt over anti-semitism by simply exporting all the Jews to a recreated Israel created new guilt for having displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians already living there. But having "done right" by the Jews it seems like many people are willing to completely ignore their own nations role in recreating Israel as they criticize what Israel subsequently did. Meanwhile the same parochial patronizing attitudes that caused intervention (and hence a lot of current problems) continues apace.Many Europeans do indeed gloss over the role their own countries played in the past, either in the creation of Israel and the modern Middle east directly, or in shaping the circumstances in which the Zionist mindset originated. The Brits and the French divided the Middle East between the two of them and stayed there for a good thirty years, in a number of cases (mostly in North-Africa) much more still. It's a bit too easy to then sit back and criticize Israel when some of the difficulties facing Israel are of their own ancestors' making.
Of course, as I have argued before, part of what makes Europeans so uneasy about Israel is precisely that - that some aspects of the situation remind them of pages in their own history that they'd like to turn. And then I'm not talking about the Holocaust, but about colonialism.
All of which leads me back to my own old view: Neither Europe nor the US is responsible for the millennia of conflict between Jews and Arabs, or Israelis and Palestinians, it's not our responsibility to resolve it and we keep getting a mountain of grief for trying, so why not just get the hell out and let them go back to happily killing each other like they've been doing since before any of our native countries existed?
This is the part where I strongly disagree - your ahistorical view and projecting current problems back across a whopping three thousand years, or close. Jews and Arabs have not been "happily killing each other" for centuries, let alone millennia. Certainly there have been moments in time in which that happened, before the creation of the modern Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but it's completely wrong and misleading to depict it as some kind of eternal struggle. Wrong, misleading, and also dangerous - if it's an eternal struggle, how could there ever be a solution or a peace?
Jacqueline Rose on the Dreyfus affair and related problems, in the LRB
- 06/06/2010 11:28:14 AM
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*remains amused at the suggestion of the Dreyfus Affairs "pertinence" to "current" events* 
- 06/06/2010 05:14:23 PM
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- 06/06/2010 05:14:23 PM
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I agree in part and (strongly) disagree in part.
- 06/06/2010 05:40:26 PM
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"If it's an eternal struggle, how could there ever be a solution or a peace?"
- 06/06/2010 06:20:39 PM
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Purim may or may not refer to a historic event. Even if it does, Haman was not likely an Arab.
- 07/06/2010 12:00:05 AM
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I second your main point.
- 07/06/2010 12:09:42 AM
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I don't discount that there is Arab blood in many or even most "Arabs".
- 07/06/2010 12:18:32 AM
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The holiday is centuries old and real, regardless.
- 07/06/2010 12:28:59 AM
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You're still missing the major point here.
- 07/06/2010 12:44:08 AM
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That seems a rather limited view of history.
- 07/06/2010 01:10:11 AM
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I (coincidentally) stumbled across those infamous hadith passages about Jews the other day.
- 07/06/2010 09:41:39 AM
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So?
- 07/06/2010 10:50:49 PM
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are you claiming that people would pull some things out of holy text and ignore the rest?
- 08/06/2010 12:16:41 PM
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well, for me this just proves why we are not supposed to live among non-Jews
- 06/06/2010 11:39:45 PM
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couldn't get past the part where anyone who opposes Obama is a racist *NM*
- 08/06/2010 01:40:07 AM
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You hallucinated? *NM*
- 08/06/2010 08:39:37 AM
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No, that would've been one of the places where she should've shut up. *NM*
- 08/06/2010 08:58:11 AM
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No
- 08/06/2010 09:08:04 AM
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I think he's not talking about that bit, but about the very first paragraph.
- 08/06/2010 09:30:21 AM
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If there was more I didn't get far enough to hear it
- 08/06/2010 12:09:47 PM
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That's the problem with the speech - the large majority of what she had to say was worthwhile.
- 08/06/2010 01:15:39 PM
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