Door slams hard on any who would criticize Israel
Seattle Post Intelligencer By ROBERT L. JAMIESON Jr. P-I COLUMNIST
When it comes to Israel, there seems to be precious little room for free discussion.
To suggest anything critical of the country puts one at risk of being labeled the worst kinds of things.
Seen through another prism, it is like a white person being called racist for wondering why black kids can memorize rap lyrics but won’t put the same effort into English 101.
Or like folks being deemed hostile to immigrants because they question why undocumented workers line up downtown for day-labor jobs.
Or being called a homophobe for suggesting that gays and lesbians are off base when they equate the push for legalized gay marriage to the civil rights movement.
Such issues, molecularly charged, are ripe for debate.
Yet none of these topics, from where I sit, comes close to setting off the kind of reflexive and negative reaction touched off by questioning Israel.
Doing so invites being called anti-Israel or anti-Semitic, damning labels that are hard to remove. Then the door slams on honest discourse.
After Rachel Corrie of Olympia was fatally run over by an Israeli military bulldozer, numerous Jewish and pro-Israel thinkers told me she had it coming. They said she was abetting terrorists — a disputed claim.
Corrie wanted to bear witness to Palestinian suffering.
Such suffering doesn’t negate the horror of Palestinian suicide bombers who spill the blood of Israeli civilians.
But even raising the plight of Palestinians invites vilification.
Are we to pretend Palestinian suffering isn’t so bad?
Corrie’s critics didn’t want to hear about how the global community has criticized Israel’s use of bulldozers for military force. Israel, they said, has to do what it must to protect itself.
Israel has a right to protect itself from groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah that have vowed to destroy it.
Israel has a right to exist. But that right appears to come with an implied moral authority that seemingly supersedes everything — and everyone — else.
Other parties in the Middle East conflict have rights, too.
Palestinians have a right to a viable state, and a lot of Jews agree with that. Innocent people in Lebanon, site of recent Israeli missile strikes, have a right to live and not be bombarded with disproportionate force that can be seen as military-supported terror.
If people on all sides of the crisis could look beyond the vitriol and polemic, they would find plenty of blame to go around. They would also come across a lot of people wanting to see an end to the bloodshed. [more]