| Speaking as a quarter Jew, and as proud of this as I am of my Celtic and Anglo-Saxon heritages, I want to know which Israel do the pro-Israelis support?
We outsiders often make the mistake of seeing Israel as a homogenous society. The people who live in Israel are as varied as any other country, and more so than most.
There are European and North African Jews. Some of the latter hate the former as much as they hate Arabs, considering them to be interlopers and immigrants. Some of the former despise the later as savages and primitives. I used to work with a an ex IDF tanker many of whose relatives didn't speak to him or his parents, one European Jew and one North African Jew, due to his polluted mixed blood.
There are Liberal, Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox of many flavours. The first two are no different from Jews anywhere in the world. However, many of the latter wish an Old Testament society whose laws make Sharia seem liberal. There are tiny groups who endlessly campaign for a military ethnic cleansing of Greater Israel while prohibitting their own sons from risking their lives in the military, to avoid "contamination" by mainstream Israeli society. Due to the make up of Israeli democracy, such fanatics have a powerful voice.
We do the same with the Arabs. Palestinians are not the only Arabs in the country, by the way are anti-Muslims aware that a significant number of Arabs are Christian. The Israeli army, itself, contains moslem Arabs, the Bedouin have many men loyally serving in the IDF.
Think, who is closer to you a biblical modern day patriarch who wants to kill women for speaking to unrelated men or a Christian Arab journalist fighting against injustices (not necessarily in Israel).
Its not as simple as we let ourselves believe.
The situation is astonishingly complex and not amenable to the "stomping all the r*g-h*ds will bring peace" attitude prevalent nowadays.
We have a greater confusion in the wider world. All the anti-Arab and anti-muslim rhetoric has so little to do with real people its hard to see how it the hate burgeoned. Mainstream Muslim cultures are little different from their western conservative counterparts. I've spent two decades of my working life surrounded by colleagues from both groups, once they started to trust each other they found more in common than either have with liberal Europeans.
How quickly we westerners came to become kneejerk haters of Islam is worrying, who will we hate next? Maybe, now we're allowed to be racists again, we will go back to being anti-negro. Or, irony of ironies, return to last centuries antisemitism.
An even greater worry. We created the organisations of muslim fanatics for our own purposes in the 1980's and by some astonishing blunders we turned them against us. Its too late to correct this now, we are at war with implacable foes and we must hunt them down root and branch.
But let's stop confusing Islam and terrorism before we give Bin Laden his real victory. If, as many textbooks state, the goal of terrorism is to provoke your opponent into over reaction, our confusion of Islam and Terrorism is giving our enemy an easy victory.
Remember neither Bin Laden nor Al Quaeda need to survive the war. If he has set Christianity and Islam at each others throats he has triumphed.
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