Letters to the Editor
omooex
Published Letters: 977 Editor's Choice: 5
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Liberalizing Slavery
[Read the article: Rethinking Israel's David-and-Goliath past]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Just one last thing. I think its important to remind progressive people that the two state solution is not a path to peace, nor was it meant to be. Imagine that Israel allows Palestine to become a nation with full sovereignty--that would also require Israel and Palestine to be friendly neighbors and that the state of Palestine have soveriegnty over its foreign relations. One minor consequence of that would be that Israel would have no rationale for banning marriages between Israeli-Palestinians and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and no reason not to recognize such marriages within its own borders. Over night, Israel would be facing a lethal demographic threat--the population of Arab-Israelis could nearly double in a decade. Israel would then have to create a new form of apartheid, by claiming outright that Palestinians cannot be citizens of its nation unless they are born there, while maintaining the right of any Jew--even Jews who converted to Judaism a week before they put in their residency papers--to become a citizen.
Thus the problem is not that Palestinians are oppressed by the occupation, the problem is that Israel requires that oppression in order to maintain its demographic Jewish superiority. Taking away the occupation requires Israel to find other ways of preventing the demographic threat to its Jewish-only apartheid system--it can't be a solution.
As with slavery, you cannot liberalize the occupation or apartheid--you cannot make slavery 'more free'. Think about it.
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Response to David
[Read the article: Rethinking Israel's David-and-Goliath past]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Well its nice to know someone reads my posts, and that there are people here who want to get into discourse for the purposes of edification. Here is my response:
I can't prove that Jews need the Israeli homeland, nor can I prove that they don't. I don't think my argument requires that the latter be true. What I am advocating is discarding a decrepit apartheid system that is hurting Israelis and Palestinians--while serving as a great excuse for repression by all the actors involved in the mess, including the US and Arab govt's. The two state solution is not a permanent solution, it will not work long. What I am advocating is a state of its citizens that includes the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel proper. We're a long way off from the kind of cultural clime that would get us there on both sides, so we better start working toward it now.
One last thing. When Israel became a nation, it could well have established Yiddish as its national language. It was the living language of Jews throughout Europe. Instead, it required all Jews to learn conversant Hebrew--a language so impoverished in the modern world that almost all of its slang is Arabic--while putting up serious road-blocks to the use of Yiddish, or any other language it designated as illegitimate. Yiddish faces language death today. Rabbinical powers within Israel also seek to narrow the definition of Judaism so that not all people who call themselves Jews will be allowed to live in the Jewish homeland unless they ditch their own Jewishness to one that hews closer to the Israeli model. Think about that! Israel may today be Judaism's worst enemy.
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Post-Philosophy
[Read the article: What is the meaning of life?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]This is a really good example of why philosophy is the least valuable subject one could immerse oneself. I applaud Eagleton for explaining that mean can have different contexts. My mother, who has a 7th grade education knows that when she enters the kitchen, her dog thinks its going to get some food. The meaning of her entering the kitchen to the dog is food. However, that is not what it means to her. She understands the implications for herself and humanity and hasn't cracked a book since 1979.
To a great extent, semantics is navel gazing. I once spoke to a philosophy professor who tried to explain to me over and over that the word "is" had no inherent meaning. He could not believe that I already understood this, that it required no review of other people's thinking and I replied "so what, language is all we have. All we have is is." He replied 'you don't get it'.
Yes. I probably don't. However, all of the semantical study of the last century cannot tell us why Bush won an election twice in this country, or why we seem to be about to bomb Iran when seemingly even the most evil beings in the universe think its a bad idea. How about focusing some of that genius outside the navel for awhile?