alexist

Today's Guardian has an article about Jacqueline Rose, the anti-Zionist author:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1652276,00.html

She says:
"'We went to visit Dima [Habash, daughter of George Habash of the PFLP] in Ramallah where her mother was running a United Nations relief operation for young Arabs. A whole crowd of girls rushed up to us, all in blue overalls, all incredibly excited that we foreigners were there. They were overjoyed to see us. Then they smiled and their teeth were rotten. There was no dentistry in the refugee camps. That was like a political education in a split second and it's never left me. It still gives me shivers when I talk about it. Those were the decisive moments and, if anything, I would say it's taken a while for my intellectual life to catch up with those moments.' "

This is the kind of crappy woolly "liberal" thinking that drives me nuts, and it's far too prevalent here. Palestinian refugee camps don't have dentists, so you're converted to the destruction of Israel? Try thinking for a change, seeing that Israel isn't the source of all evil in the Middle East, that the Arabs conspired to make and keep the Palestinians as refugees. If you really cared about the Palestinians, you'd be asking hard questions of their Arab so-called brethren. The ones who did not create a state in 1937 (Peel Commission), 1947 (UN Partition Plan), or 1949 (post-war of Independence). If they really cared about an independent Palestine, they would have created it rather than occupying the West Bank and Gaza themselves. They had 19 years to make Palestine independent, and they chose not to. Instead, they kept the Palestinians in refugee camps. They still do. Palestinians are the only people in the world where 4th generation descendants are called 'refugees' and held to have a 'right of return' to their homes. (And that's leaving the refugee origin question open.)

But this is what passes for debate on Israel in the UK. This is a country where having Avi Shlaim (an anti-Zionist historian who's so disgusted with Israel that he lives in the UK) and Daphna Baram (anti-Zionist journalist) on a panel with pro-Palestinian activists is considered "balanced" and where a major multicultural conference in London was held on Kol Nidre night. (I remember skimming the full page ad in the Guardian, noticing the lack of Jews, and then spotting the date.)

I've always been fairly centrist on Israel. Extremists on either side hold little attraction for me. But moving to the UK has definitely made me more actively Zionist.

The click wheel on my iPod is totally ineffective when I'm wearing gloves. (or at least my gloves, which are chenille and reasonably thick.) I keep having to take my right glove off to change the song.