Israel/Palestine
In reply to the discussion: The Crazy Lie of "Pinkwashing" and the Liberal Case for Israel [View all]Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)just to prove I'm not talking down to them.
And it's Orwellian of you to say that it's colonialist for people to oppose what amounts to a de facto colonial power structure. Do you also believe that war is peace, slavery is freedom, and ignorance is strength?
What I actually believe is that you can't expect people under military occupation to be able to do the same things people NOT under military occupation can do. For an occupying army to demand democratization of the people it occupies isn't anticolonial, it isn't showing respect to "brown people" your words not mine and not my thoughts). It's just arrogant. And the fact is, no matter how democratic the Palestinians were to become, the government that sent you and your fellow soldiers into the West Bank will just keep saying "not enough...not enough...not enough" and will just keep building more and more settlements, taking over more and more land, and going on creating enough "facts on the ground" to make a Palestinian state impossible.
And before you bring up postwar Germany and Japan again(situations that have nothing in common with the West Bank Occupation and were never valid comparisons to it), the U.S. occupiers after World War II weren't destroying German and Japanese homes and plowing under German and Japanese crops. They weren't forbidding the Germans and the Japanese to rebuild their countries by tying up all building applications in paperwork and bureaucratic delays. They were, in the main, leaving ordinary Germans and Japanese alone(they never collectively punished postwar German civilians for what the "werewolves" postwar German anti-Allied terrorists)were doing. They weren't preventing German and Japanese people from getting to hospitals when they were having chest pains. And they weren't doing a Marshall Plan for the West Bank. There was nothing in either situation comparable to the way the IDF is treating Palestinians. The postwar German and Japanese occupations were nonviolent. YOUR occupation is just war by other means.
Finally, I don't insist that everybody agree with me. If I did I'd be insane to post in this forum(or on DU at all, or anywhere on the web) What I do insist on is that nobody accuse me of believing in things that they KNOW I don't believe in. That's disrespect, and it's unworthy of you. You are the one who brooks no disageement...because YOU are the one who distorts the views of those who disagree with you into despicable caricatures of their actual views.
You have lied, and knowingly lied, every time you said that I support a religious dictatorship in Palestine. You know I don't support that, I've proved it over and over again. and yet you repeat it over and over again. I support no such thing and you know it. It's just that I don't accept your argument that the only choices are continuing the Occupation or accepting Hamas dominance. The Arab Spring PROVES that Arabs can democratize without a foreign army forcing them to so.
What this really comes down to is that you believe that the fact that you've been a soldier means that no one can question YOUR conclusions and remain an honorable person, that you and you alone know the only possible ways the West Bank situation can play out. You're a soldier, not the Pope...and even the Pope only claims infallibilty once in a very rare while.
You should just accept that a person can disagree with YOU without wanting something evil And if someone says they don't want a religious dictatorship in Palestine, you have an obligation to accept that and not to insist on saying that they believe what you KNOW they don't believe.
OK?
Just don't accuse of holding beliefs I don't hold. That is all I ask. You are perfectly free to disagree with me, but you don't have to distort my views to do that. Agreed?