Ami is a very strange dude. He'll tell you he's a progressive and then rant against Peace Now. It's not that Ami is an outright fraud. He's just someone like Ralph whose views have somehow become twisted & distorted.

Ami has no consistent political viewpt. that I can discern though he's somewhere in the vague center-left with rightist tendencies (if that's not too much of a contradiction in terms). He loves to rant as you can see from this passage. He even accused me of libeling him & threatened a lawsuit. Never heard anything further about that.

IT's really a shame because Ami pioneered dealing w. the I-P conflict on the web. His site was one of the first. He 'coulda been somebody' if you remember your Marlon Brando lines.

Do you understand how he might have rationally come to that perspective, and still disagree?

If so, then the specific conclusions, would be identifiable.

I personally don't believe in any political approach that is sledgehammer (imprecise), or oriented to conformity of thinking.

A sledgehammer approach is by definition meant to coerce people to adopt a conclusion without decision.

We all form conclusions that have an element of either faith (as in religious belief in God it/him/her self, or scripture, or orthodoxy), or of social conformity.

It is honest to identify what those foundation stones are, explicitly, to discern what is clearly consistent, what is a guess, what is vanity (wanting to look good).

The best arguments are about what assumes, not the heat of drama. How do you know that? How do you add that up?

Phil has stated recently that he considers such intellectual discussion not his, that he as a journalist is more interested in horse races, in dramatic story, novel (ala Shakespeare – of which the moral dilemmas are part of the dramatic, rather than say Ibsen – of which the drama is part of the moral thesis).

Who is We? What is the basis of this statement?

I think the answer lies in the adoption of moderation that can short circuit the culture of extremism. For example, forcing Israel to adopt a Constitution and set its borders. Could the Constitution stipulate preferential treatment for Jews seeking immigration? I don’t see why not, so long as it stipulates equal treatment for citizens of all races once they have citizenship status.

I fear Left-wing anti-Zionist Jews are allowing the perfect to make an enemy of the good. I believe a few moderate steps such as those above would, so long as they had the girth of the Jewish community behind them, go a long way towards short-circuiting the downward spiral. Of course, Right-leaning Zionists would have to moderate their extreme ambitions for an expansionist Israel, and the ball is really in their court. Their own extremism is forcing anti-Zionist extremism.