Tuesday, January 03, 2006
Well if you step back a few years...
I found this witty little cartoon floating around on the internet today:
The Jewish nation is slowly being destroyed by terrorism and diplomacy. Sharon's hands are of course covered in the blood of his hemorrhaging Jewish state. It's a very good cartoon, I'll give them that, nice imagery, nice illustration. It's funny though, because if you stepped back a couple generations, you might see a very different picture:
So lest we keep listening to Tammy Bruce tell us that Israel is our only partner in the world worth defending to the death, we should remember just how Israel got its state... I'm not siding with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on this one (I personally agree with the two-state solution), I think people either easily forget that Britain forcibly created the Israeli state by divvying up Palestinian land, or they have been listening to Bush too long and actually think these guys are terrorists that hate freedom. Turns out they actually really like freedom: their own freedom.
I think politics gets in the way in this issue too much anyways. Personally I couldn't care less about whose spiritual homeland Jerusalem (or al-Quds) actually is...It's really both anyways... but that's beside the point.
This cartoon is so deceiving because you really feel like the body politic is so firmly rooted in the land of Jerusalem that any subsequent negotiations will yield only certain death for the Jews. Of course the Palestinian people shouldn't be blowing themselves up in Israeli shopping malls. That goes without saying for every decent human being on this planet. It's just that in a fight over traditional homeland such as this one, it's good to keep in mind who was displaced to allow for the fight in the first place.
P.S.- I'm hoping to see "Munich" real soon so I'm sure I'll have more to say about this later...
The Jewish nation is slowly being destroyed by terrorism and diplomacy. Sharon's hands are of course covered in the blood of his hemorrhaging Jewish state. It's a very good cartoon, I'll give them that, nice imagery, nice illustration. It's funny though, because if you stepped back a couple generations, you might see a very different picture:
So lest we keep listening to Tammy Bruce tell us that Israel is our only partner in the world worth defending to the death, we should remember just how Israel got its state... I'm not siding with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on this one (I personally agree with the two-state solution), I think people either easily forget that Britain forcibly created the Israeli state by divvying up Palestinian land, or they have been listening to Bush too long and actually think these guys are terrorists that hate freedom. Turns out they actually really like freedom: their own freedom.
I think politics gets in the way in this issue too much anyways. Personally I couldn't care less about whose spiritual homeland Jerusalem (or al-Quds) actually is...It's really both anyways... but that's beside the point.
This cartoon is so deceiving because you really feel like the body politic is so firmly rooted in the land of Jerusalem that any subsequent negotiations will yield only certain death for the Jews. Of course the Palestinian people shouldn't be blowing themselves up in Israeli shopping malls. That goes without saying for every decent human being on this planet. It's just that in a fight over traditional homeland such as this one, it's good to keep in mind who was displaced to allow for the fight in the first place.
P.S.- I'm hoping to see "Munich" real soon so I'm sure I'll have more to say about this later...
