0 for 3. Not major league material.

Peace is constructed of mutual engagement, between communities that are invested in their communities.

I think you are lying to yourself when you say "not in my name", because I think that all you feel and engage in is guilt, not genuine participation and relationship. I know you feel appreciation for many ideas and rituals in Judaism, and a sense of comraderie associated with familiarity. But your frequency of hopelessness expressed in your editorial choice and presentation of materials, is telling. (It should be telling to you, not only to Sword of Gideon or Ralph).

I think that the same political assertions of consideration by those that are actually engaged, rather than apologetic, carry more weight and more merit, and have greater chance of success.

Hence, Rabin appealing to a peace of the brave, a peace of the engaged, of the fully loyal (dual or treble or hundredfold), remains MUCH more profound than the "peace" of habitual dissent.

I think it is an enormous failure on your part when you describe yourself as having studied and experienced less history than a 23 year activist. How is that possible?

How could you write about an issue for eight years, and not study the history in any depth, or from multiple perspectives?

How could you possibly be confident that you are portraying anything accurately without that study, from multiple perspectives most importantly.

About me, I was a student and critic of the occupation since 1973, the time of my first argument with my father and aunt about it. Jonathon sided with me. (You know Jonathon.)

Me taking that side was wrenching to my family, as yours is wrenching to yours. I didn't have 5 brothers and sisters to bounce it off of. I stood alone.

You piss me off when you pigeon-hole me as anti-Palestinian or "old and in the way" when I comment in this den of habitual "dissenters" and the few genuine anti-semites.

You don't bother to read my posts arguing with settlers in different settings, or presentations that I bring to my own Jewish community assertively conveying the common humanity of Palestinian neighbors of Israelis.

So you form this trivial political view (evil/good same as George Bush's but with different language) rather than hold multiple respected story and history in your being.

I learned second hand (better than first hand, better than abstraction or history), the experience of the holocaust, by marrying the child of a holocaust survivor that I met in India at the community of the radical yoga group, that we later distanced from. (For reference, the "guru's" third cousin was Subhash Chandra Bose.)

I heard her mothers' and aunts first-hand experiences as hated in Hungary and informed to the occupying Germans, then harrangued by their own patients when herded on the train to slave labor camps, then there experience underground with false identity papers after escaping from slave labor camps (with experiencing both help with great personal risk to the helpers, and betrayal), then liberation to return to their former home towns again to taunts and threats, then as homeless refugees in Budapest, then their migration to Israel, poverty, and two wars in 8 years, and the low-level imprisonment of Jews within Israel (not permitted to leave), and their post traumatic existential homelessness in England and US.

Somehow, REAL experience gets imprinted. Remembered. NOT abstracted, not politicized into polemic.

And, what did they and I derive from that experience. NOT permanent victimhood in the slightest, but liberal compassion, permanent, committed.

Not forgetting my own and my new family's experience, and not dismissing others.

Not all diaspora Jews or survivors responded to their experiences with sympathy for others. Some only politicized their experience (a form of abstraction, of denial of themselves and other). Others adopted fascist likud commitments to Greater Israel and screw the Arabs.

Most of the people that you criticize among AIPAC are very interesting studies for their motivation. Very different from the liberal, in that they use the valid concept of self-defense as a rationale not for confident defense, but as a rationalization for offense.

When you infer in any way that people like Ralph, or Dan Fleshler are racist for validating the compelling experience that Jews are a people, you sicken me. (Literally that strongly.)

"Stuck".

The way that I stay UNSTUCK, is to read the works of people that disagree with me, with the intention to learn, NOT to repeat to myself (as comforting as that is, to add up to the same right conclusion after each study).

So, I read Pappe, I read biography of Begin, I read Kimmerling, Chomsky. I read Darwish respectfully. I read Amichai respectfully. (Darwish wrote of his affinity for Amichai in an introduction to a collection of poems that I bought.) If they bring relevant perspective, I take it in. If they bring bias, I acknowledge it. If they bring distortion, I object and specifically.

I do not call Saif an imbecile. And, I don't call Ralph Seliger a racist.

If you can't respect that dual awareness, that dual loyalty, then screw you.

We'll argue vicously rather than laugh next time we meet in Brooklyn at a wedding or bar mitzvah.

Or, you can approach our liberal Zionist courage with respect, rather than dismissal and contempt.

There it is again. The ubiquitous perniciousness of "dual loyalty."

I'm not sure Witty is here to discuss. He is here on a mission to slow things down.

You're right. Witty is guilt-tripping Weiss and too often Weiss buys into it.

Well said, and spot on. There is an ugly intolerance, it's more than defensiveness or even never-againism, in Richard's attitude. It's a limiting exercise, and I don't like others to try to enforce limits on my thinking. Phil shouldn't either, though I tend to admire his capacity to put up with the assorted characters he has drawn here. Where Richard and co are madly painting the bubbles they are trapped in, so to keep the sunshine out, Phil is always trying to burst the bubbles his circumstances trap him in. As Ali G might say – respect.

'our liberal Zionist courage'

It's this pride in a form of ideology that has victims who are invisible. In fact, Richard often paints the perpetrators of the injustice as the victims. The quality, not to mention the acceptability of an ideologue's thought is terminally affected by the twists of logic and reason they have to make to accommodate the cherished idea.

Courage Richard consists in being able to question and even break away from your preferences, not in succumbing to them.

look at the way Jimmy Carter has been blacklisted by the power zionist.

its oppression pure and simple…