‘Israel’s Neighborhood Is Filled With Fanatics’

Ok Steve, here’s my answer. Then you get touch-back:

I’ve been to four Arab countries. They have free speech issues and women’s rights issues. No doubt. Zionists chose to settle there. They descended on their beautiful balloon. They’re 500 miles east of Istanbul and style Israel a western country. It’s not. It’s in Asia like South Africa is in Africa. It partakes of the climate. Bad neighborhood? You moved there, dude. When in Rome.

The article you cite says that Arabs across the spectrum are condemning the cleric. So the Arab world is actually engaged in a struggle of reform. I know the good guys aren’t getting a lot of victories. But they’re trying. We have to be on those folks’ side. Hearts and minds. Don’t invade Arab countries and impose democracy. I believe you were for the Iraq invasion. At least you’re contrite. Israel is alienating the Arab world by responding militantly to everything, out of a Holocaust mentality it also imported from Europe.

There are a lot of bad neighborhoods in the world. Africa, no picnic. Oceana, where I’ve been a lot, democracy is larval. Fiji was shot up again and again while I was there. South America. “Emerging.” Russia, I don’t even know what you call it. The point is, trying to save Israel by reforming the neighborhood is arrogant. Outside of the liberal west, this is the human political condition. There has to be a degree of tolerance. China. Indonesia. India. The biggest countries in the world, and there are real freedom issues.

If Israel lived next to India, we would hear night and day about the savage caste system. And it is savage. There are endless dowry killings in India too. But no, Israel is allied with India. So we hear the Muslim world demonized. It’s times like these that I think of Trita Parsi’s statement in Treacherous Alliance that radical Islam was the “glue” dreamed up by Israel in the ’90s to replace the last rationale for the U.S.  being joined at the hip with Israel, the Soviet Union. Now the Soviet is gone, we need a new glue. Radical Islam. Parsi is a distinguished scholar. It sounds like a conspiracy theory and I think there’s truth in it; that the tail has wagged the dog on our relationship with the Muslim world. The Arab world wants to be friends with the U.S. I say cast your g-damn “upsetting” occupation to the wolves right now–actually a criminal horrifying occupation that destroys the hopes of young Palestinians– get the Israelis to get back to the ’67 line or we withhold our aid and our movie festivals and our visas and all the rest, and we thereby fix our relationship, and by Our, I mean the U.S., with the Arab world. So we can suck their oil with a straw and not have them fly into our tall buildings anymore.

Another thing. If Islam is so bad, then why are the idolatry clauses in their Sharia so close to Jewish fundamental belief? There are crazy Jews too, religious. They may not dominate to the extent that the mullahs do, but they’re powerful. I think it’s possible to demonize anyone. And here’s the thing. Jews and Arabs in their funny outfits and objections to women showing their hair and their ban on representational art lived alongside one another for centuries till Israel came along, till the settlements began in a serious way in the ’20s. A cycle of violence since. We can restore that understanding between the sons of Abraham. We can get back to balance. One way to do that is to end the nonstop landgrab of Palestinian land, start to respect Palestinian human rights, and stop demonizing the Arab world. I live in a neighborhood with a lot of people whose values I disagree with, pretty profoundly. But I try and be neighborly. I think the occupation is not at all neighborly, and you might actually be able to keep your Jewish state if you worked hard now to end it.