Must Read: Can you really not see?

[malaise]

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/756413.html

<snip>
Could your mind really be so washed with the security excuse, used to forbid Gaza students from studying occupational therapy at Bethlehem and medicine at Abu Dis, and preventing sick people from Rafah from receiving medical treatment in Ramallah? Will also you find it easy to hide behind the explanation "we had no idea": we had no idea that the discrimination practiced in the distribution of water - which is solely controlled by Israel - leaves thousands of Palestinian households without water during the hot summer months; we had no idea that when the IDF blocks the entrance to villages, it also blocks their access to springs or water tanks.

But it cannot be that you don't see the iron gates along route 344 in the West Bank, blocking access to it from the Palestinian villages it passes by. It cannot be that you support preventing the access of thousands of farmers to their land and plantations, that you support the quarantine on Gaza which prevents the entry of medicine for hospitals, the disruption of electricity and water supply to 1.4 million human beings, closing their only outlet to the world for months.

Could it be that you do not know what is happening 15 minutes from your faculties and offices? Is it plausible that you support the system in which Hebrew soldiers, at checkpoints in the heart of the West Bank, are letting tens of thousands of people wait everyday for hours upon hours under the blazing sun, while selecting: residents of Nablus and Tul Karm are not allowed through, 35-year-olds and under - yallah, back to Jenin, residents of the Salem village are not even allowed to be here, a sick woman who skipped the line must learn a lesson and will be purposefully detained for hours. Machsom Watch's site is available for all; in it are countless such testimonies and worse, a day by day routine. But it cannot be that those who are appalled over every swastika painted on a Jewish grave in France and over every anti-Semitic headline in a Spanish local newspaper will not know how to reach this information, and will not be appalled and outraged.

[Name removed]

1. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[breakaleg]

2. I find it appalling that a culture who has been persecuted could do this.

They more than anyone should know what it feels like to be on the other side.

[malaise]

3. Indeed n/t

[Poll_Blind]

4. I see this as a further warning sign to everyone, everywhere.

  The human mind and the human heart, and the societies they create are never perfect but often perceive themselves that way. That hubris, which in this case, is not limited to a particular culture or society is dangerous. There's a book by a Goldhagen "Hitler's Willing Executioners", whose hypothesis ("The Goldhagen Hypothesis") places the burden of anti-Semitism primarily on the German culture which, it is intoned, was filled to the brim with anti-Semitism just waiting for "that spark" to ignite it. I disagree with this theory which certainly has elements of truth to it but which avoids, for whatever reason, the wider implications of a nation driven to commit unspeakably horrible and inhuman acts.

  No one is immune. A culture does not necessarily have to be impregnated with violence, intolerance, etc. to give birth to these atrocities. It is an indication that even a group which recently suffered at the hands of devils could develop blind spots to their own intolerant, destructive behavior. "Eternal vigilance", as Wendell Phillips put it, "is the price of Liberty." Somewhere between that idea and Nietzche's "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you." lies a truth that every human society should understand and be aware of.

  Last night I was at a birthday party for an acquaintance. I found myself in a discussion with a person who, at one point in our conversation, asked "When we evolve into more peaceful, caring organisms?"

  My answer was that we never will. Kindness, like unimaginable cruelty, are not so much evolutionary tokens as artifacts of our unusually-large brains and not, per se likely to be affected by evolution at all. Because of this, it benefits every culture, like a recovering alcoholic, to understand that they may have "kicked" the habit of intolerance and xenophobia, or the predilection to use violence to address complex issues and so, like an alcoholic, must always be aware that they are still addicts to that behavior and who must consciously realize that they are not immune from the behavior even, in this case, by being the tortured subject of it in the past.

PB