I keep meaning to get to this note, on my desk. A week or so back I was watching CSpan, and young adult book author Marc Aronson talking about his book on race, and how we all have racism in us, and have to root it out, and grow with the country, all good sentiments, when Israel/Palestine came up, which was the subject of a subsequent book, and Aronson said that while he "deeply deeply loves Israel," and has family living there, he is conflicted about Israel's human rights record. He is concerned about Palestinian suffering, "however much partially self-inflicted."
This is an ordinary statement in American media, but also a biased one. In any other colonial or settler situation, no one in progressive circles would get away with blaming the victim for what Princeton scholar Mark Cohen and Brown scholar Omer Bartov, two Zionist Jews, have lately described as "oppression." Some day this collective moral collapse will be taught in young-adult books.
