Hello you!
This is about the 6th update I’ve written in the last few weeks, and I haven’t published any of them. I’m determined to post this one.
I’ve been very busy over the last few months. That’s always a terrible excuse for a blogger. Almost as bad as admitting that he’s been busy on Twitter.
Among the many topics that I’ve written bad and unpublished posts about include Catalan corruption, PP corruption, Catalan racism (yeah, the veil in Lleida), the Spanish economy… and the Gaza siege. This last item is something I’ve not written about on this blog, though I’ve talked about some of the language connected with it. So, forgive the non-Spain-related post, but:
Israel has no right, either legal or moral to blockade the Palestinian territory in the Gaza Strip. Israel was in breach of UN resolutions referring to the status of Gaza long before it acted against the ‘Freedom Flotilla’ earlier this week. This seems to be a country dangerously close to believing not just its own propaganda but the extremist, fatalist, racist and blind ideology of its far right wing. Israel is sometimes held up as a model democracy in the middle east (and it’s obviously not Saudi Arabia), but the influence held by a radical minority over the entire Palestine issue (borders, settlements, constant IDF incursions) seems to prove that it is drifting towards a even more terrible form of state ethnic-religious absolutism maintained by apparent parliamentary democracy.
This is not a breed of fascism as experienced in Europe in the first half of the 20th century. But it is of the same genus.
Therefore, I believe that we ought to boycott anti-Palestine Israel and its economy in any way possible, until Israel withdraws the blockade against Palestine.
Not to come to the party 4 months late or anything, but I just have to say I agree here. What’s more frustrating — and this might be a uniquely American thing, granted — is what I consider Jewish “blind faith” in anything and everything Israel does. At my undergraduate university, I was a member of Hillel and one other Jewish student group. I took Hebrew for 3 years, as well. I was pretty much completely entranced by anything Israeli at the time.
That said, it still surprised me how many people within those groups defended anything Israel did, even if they had no valid reasons for doing so whatsoever, apart from it being a Jewish state.
This confounds me. American Jews tend to be liberal, progressive people, with an eye for justice and an insistence that wrongs be righted perhaps matched by no other ethnic/religious minority that I’ve come across in this country. Yet most defend Israel for doing the most inhumane of things, and it’s maddening. Human rights violations are human rights violations, regardless of whether a Jewish government happens to be behind it. For me, that’s really the end of the matter. Doesn’t mean I don’t still want to visit sometime, practice my Hebrew and be the hugest geek of a Jewish Studies major tourist of all time. But I’m decidedly less inclined to want to help boost their economy one iota when the country panders to a group of far right religious zealots (the Orthodox) who insist on building settlements on territory that isn’t theirs and don’t even acknowledge Israel’s existence as an actual country (because that makes total sense, right?).
Stepping down off my soapbox and back into September 2010 where I belong now…
Thanks for your comment, Amber. People all over the world and throughout history sometimes find it easy to turn a blind eye to things they shouldn’t. The English, key progenitors of liberalism in the 18th and 19th centuries presided over atrocious conditions for workers at home and repressive colonialism everywhere else. You might be surprised to learn that Empire (the largest the world has ever seen, and still extant in living memory) is never mentioned in English high school history classes!
Although that does surprise me, it really probably shouldn’t. I spent three years of schooling in Georgia (the US state, not the country). If you can believe it, never once in any of my history classes did a teacher actually admit that the South had lost the Civil War. They also tend not to mention it during guided tours of Civil War battle sights. It’d be funny if it weren’t so ridiculous.
I wonder if the same can be said for French, Dutch, Spanish and other forms of colonialism with respect to their educational systems…