How would it feel if god really came down from the mountain, if you weren’t doing ecstasy or a 10-day wheatgrass fast but were just sitting at your kitchen table reading the newspaper and god appeared? I think like this. Tom Friedman writes in the Times today that Israel is behaving like a spoiled child. The only problem is, I don’t think god knows how to write, or even how to think.
He’s not a thinker really, god. There isn’t a fresh idea in here, anything that qualifies as an insight. Nothing for instance about American Jewish life, which is the reason Israel can act this way. But then Friedman is the deity of American Jewish life, so he can’t very well write about it. God doesn’t write about himself, that would be unlordly, and it turns out god thinks about just what we thought he thinks about, saving the “Jewish democracy” and about humoring a right wing foreign leader’s concerns about maintaining his all-Jewish governing coalition… Same old god….
here’s another stubborn fact: Israel today really is behaving like a spoiled child.
Please spare me the nonsense that President Obama is anti-Israel. …At the same time, Obama believed — what a majority of Israelis believe — that Israel can’t remain a Jewish democracy in the long run if it continues to control 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank.
… I know this is a crazy, radical idea — when America asks Israel to do something that in no way touches on its vital security but would actually enhance it, there is only one right answer: “Yes.” It is a measure of how spoiled Israel has become that after billions and billions of dollars in U.S. aid and 300,000 settlers already ensconced in the West Bank, Israel feels no compunction about spurning an American request for a longer settlement freeze — the only purpose of which is to help the United States help Israel reach a secure peace with the Palestinians. Just one time you would like Israel to say, “You know, Mr. President, we’re dubious that a continued settlement freeze will have an impact. But you think it will, so, let’s test it. This one’s for you.”
Yes, I know, Netanyahu says that if he did that then the far right-wingers in his cabinet would walk out.
