Reply #9: The Simple Word 'Neutrality', Mr. Carpenter [View All]

[The Magistrate]

Does not convey much useful meaning in this context, nor can it be taken as providing much hope for those urging a political line of flat opposition to Israel.

By the standards employed by the latter group, most expressions of neutrality that might commonly be encountered are interchangeable with simple support for Israel. Neutrality, after all, does not embrace one-sided cries of war-crimes, the farcical exaggerations that underly cries of genocide, or the view that Israel is, at bottom, the gravest crime of the last half of the last century, nor does it reach to the view that support for Israel is contrary to the interests of the United States, or that such support is the product of various nefarious machinations of our political life, or base urges among those who support it. A person with a neutral view will reject all these assertions, even recoil in some distaste from their expression.

A person with a neutral view of the matter will simply acknowledge what is undeniably true of the situation, namely that both sides contribute to the impasse, that both sides behave poorly on occassion, and that any peace is bound to contain elements that are not wholly satisfactory to either side of it. A view like this is not some sort of "halfway house" inhabited on the way while moving from support for Israel to opposition to it. Nor are people who hold it adverse to the sort of expressions of support for Israel engaged in routinely by Democratic Party political figures.