We are being tested, as Dan Levy said last night. Many great voices are speaking out. J Street and Brit Tzedek have covered themselves with honor. Andrew Sullivan, Dan Fleshler, David Bromwich and Glenn Greenwald have distinguished themselves on the web, and the San Francisco Chronicle has the guts to bring up Sabra and Shatila:
Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps killed hundreds of Palestinians; the
camps had been under Israeli control. In 1996, there were 118 people
killed at a U.N. compound by Israeli artillery in the town of Qana, and
in 2006, an Israeli air strike killed 56 in an apartment complex in the
same town. All three events spelled the beginning of the end of Israeli
campaigns into Lebanon.
I'm not going into the much longer list of people who have supported this horror and, worse, compelled our political leaders to do the same– Condi Rice's gutless statement at the U.N. I said at the start I think things are going to change, and I think they are, even now. I believe Obama is going to get a narrow political platform to stand on. This isn't Lebanon because we're two years on in Israel's endless prevarication about Palestinian self-determination.
My headline is the refrain you always hear from teenagers who visit the Holocaust Memorial. They come out crying and say to their parents, Why was the world silent in the face of obvious human rights abuses in the 1930s? and We would never do that! The answer is that injustice generally has economic/social component and so it always finds its advocates. During the Leo Frank trial/lynching in Atlanta in the early part of the last century, the NY Times valiantly opposed the trial and the ADL was born, but the Methodist bishop affiliated with Emory University was for it (a fact I reported when at the NY Observer). The destruction of Palestinian human rights over decades, supported by a powerful well-connected faction in the U.S., has titrated the U.S. Establishment with moral indifference to the point that they can rationalize anything and say nothing. They've been tested. Kids will be taught about this some day.
