As it was written...

 I thought it was worth reposting this. I wrote it initially as a comment over at Nancy Nall's joint.

"What frustrates me most about this Gaza mess is the obvious fact that it IS an Israel problem, or at least it was. If the new country was going to be a “Jewish state” (and my memory of the first sabras was that there were many pretty secular Israelis in the early days, but the goal was still “Jewish”) then anyone who was not-Jewish was gonna be by definition not-100%-Israeli. So the danger of what the Occupation made a fact – Israel as an anti-Arab apartheid state – was always kinda baked in.

If the Arab states had been less shirty about the issue, if Israel had been less threatened, if the Great Powers had been more concerned…well, they weren’t. So here we are.

And here we’re gonna be. All the killing, all the hate, all the vengeance…there’s no undoing any of that. There’s no getting around it. Too many people now see hating on the “others” as giving their own lives meaning…and Israel is caught inside their own history. They fear giving up the Territories (I had a friend tell me flat-out “Israel cannot survive without the Golan” and that’s a widespread belief about the West Bank, too – they’re strategic depth) but to keep at least the West Bank means continuing apartheid at best, and flat-out ethnic cleansing at worst.

And for the Arab subjects? How galling it must be to look at how the world reacted to South Africa, how Mandela is revered and the armed wing of the ANC is overlooked no matter how many white farmer families they murdered (“one Afrikaaner, one bullet”), compared to how their own Bantustans are viewed.

Nope. It’s just grimdark no matter where you look…"

That's the saddest part.

There might have been another path...if people were different than they are. Kind, gentle, thoughtful...to those others not their own.

But we're not, most of us. We're the same fang-baring monkeys we've always been.

So, no. The moment you set yourself up as a "......" nation; white, black, Christian, Mormon, sun-worshiping...is the moment you make the other the Other, a danger and a threat, the Outsider.

So it was written.

So it is being done. Selah.

Update 10/13: Jim Wright has a thoughtful rumination on the same subject.