Israel/Palestine
In reply to the discussion: WATCH: IDF Soldier Screams At Israeli Activists: 'You Are Worse Than The Arabs' [View all]Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)to be "realism". It isn't. It's delusional, because the lesser evil, in the end, usually can't be sustained. The U.S. saw itself as trying to sustain the "lesser evil" what Jeane Kirkpatrick saw as "authoritarian" dictators versus "totalitarian" dictators, as if there was truly a difference)in Vietnam.
And your view on the other situations matters...you seem to sneer at anyone who thought(or still thinks)that good could come of the "Arab Spring". Personally, I suspect this is because an indigenous democratic movement(which may still emerge out of all of this)among Arabs(or, if we could the "Green Movement" in Iran)Muslims in general discredits your narrative about Arabs and Muslims. It seems to be, if I read you right, really important to you to be able to argue that those people are utterly incapable or utterly unwilling to create a non-repressive life for themselves-because, if they do, that means you can't cast them as the mustache-twirling villains in your own personal inner melodrama. That is the problem with depending on a "it's the status quo or nothing" argument...the inflexibility pins you down behind your own lines of logic and leaves your position as nothing but rhetorical collateral damage...destroyed by itself to save itself. You are a good person, from a country that deserves better than its leaders give it...don't do this to yourself.
What you see as hard-eyed practicality is anything but...all you and your fellow soldiers are doing, in staying in the West Bank, is temporarily preserving an untenable situation. Your occupation isn't stopping the "Islamists" assuming "Islamism" is a real thing), it's actually helping them recruit.
Also, you assume that everyone in Palestine who backs Hamas does so because they agree with its entire agenda on every issue. In a situation in which an oppressed people are feeling desperate about ever ending their oppression, they will very often back a group(the Communists in China and Vietnam, for example, the mullahs in Iran, the MB in Egypt)that seems like it has the best practical chance of overthrowing their oppressors(with the thought that, afterwords, they can get end the tactical alliance they made and take control of events on their own terms). That, rather than some atavistic desire to make their lives MORE oppressive, is likely the main reason that Hamas gained support among Palestinians(as well as the fact that Hamas, unlike either the PLO or the hand-picked "better" leaders you think the Occupation was going to produce if only Oslo hadn't happened somehow, ran a strong and effective social service network).
So it's not as simple as saying that they back Hamas because they supposedly WANT more repression. They could live under Sharia right now, voluntarily, if that's what this was about, and, were Hamas to make a peace deal, neither you or your fellow troops would give a damn about how backwards they supposedly were. The way to stop them is to, somehow, make it possible for a secular, progressive Palestinian leadership that STRONGLY defends the Palestinian peoples' right to self-determination and is utterly independent of Israeli influence to emerge. But, frankly, I doubt that's what the politicians who give your army its orders ever want to see happen.
In a path forward, people will sometimes come to the conclusion that they have to take a step back to ultimately go forward. That doesn't mean that those people are inherently evil, just that the situation leads them to choices that don't really reflect their ultimate hopes and desires. Israelis are as guilty of that as Palestinians(clearly, for example, the settlement movement was never about the ideals of Zionism, but rather about teaching the Palestinians "a lesson" and putting them in their place. And it was never about ending the war, but rather intentionally prolonging it, keeping it going by goading the Palestinians and increasing their sense of desperation and rage. Those are the only possible reasons why the younger Ariel Sharon, a man of hatred and death at that age, would have come up with such an insane idea.
Finally, stop referring to progressive, humanistic values as "my" thing. This isn't about me as an individual, about my ego, about my alleged belief in my own moral superiority(trust me, I don't think that way about myself, I'm as much of a moral and personal screwup as any other ordinary schlub). I believe that those ideas are ultimately universal, but not that I as a person have anything to do with creating them. It's truly baffling why you are so fixated with painting me as a moral snob. I'm not trying to paint you as a monster. It's just that you and disagree(and there are Israelis who disagree with you even more than I do, so what do you say about THEM?)
Some ideas are obviously better than other ideas, some beliefs better than other beliefs, but that doesn't mean that that automatically makes it justified to use what you see as a better belief as a rationale to immiserate other people. And an idea imposed from without, on the terms of a conqueror, won't ever really take hold in the minds of the conquered...that's why Japan's postwar "democracy" was corrupted and made meaningless so early on, and why the homegrown democrats in Japan AND Germany were knocked out of the political discussion so early on...because the conqueror in those countries preferred them to not have true, bottom-up democracy, but rather moderate authoritarianism with a democratic veneer.
There is no excuse for you to try to personalize this discussion and to act as an interrogator seeking to extract a confession, or an Inquisitor demanding that the heretic recant. Neither is necessary. OK?
I'm willing to admit it when I'm wrong...It's just that I'm NOT willing to admit that this means I have to agree with things that are ugly and deplorable.