responses to several who wrote in about my last posting

My last posting in response to Boris Gorbis generated a lot of mail, most of it not very complementary. As experienced as I am in this kind of give and take, and as determined as I am to bring a different perspective to Russian Jews, its painful to receive many of these messages, both on a personal level and because of what it says about how hardened so many people are, how convinced they are that we have nothing to look forward to but endless bloodletting. This attitude makes me very sad, but the attitude is clearly informed by the reality we all confront today and must struggle to transform.
Elena says I am incredibly naïve, and she doesn’t want to say ’stupid’, but clearly thinks so. Elena, I like to think I am neither and I also suspect I have spent more of my life in Israel than you have (correct me if I am wrong, Elena). So let me pose again this question to the collective of Soviet Jews in the U.S.; “Why do you suppose you are greater authorities on Israeli reality than someone like myself?’ I am more than willing to grant that you are greater authorities on Soviet reality than I am, but not Israeli or American reality. Is it just possible that you are distorting reality by seeing the political situations in both Israel and the U.S. through an ideological template formed in reaction to a no longer existent totalitarian construct called the Soviet Union?
An anonymous responder who loves America nevertheless considers this country "zemlya nepugannyx idiotov" because we supposedly lean over backwards to understand the adversary’s point of view and because of that failing Khrushchev had us “beat by decades.” Well, the last time I looked, Khruschev’s system was on the ash heap of history and the writer of these lines was living in America, not the Soviet Union, so it would appear the American system, including our effort to understand the adversary’s point of view, worked a hell of a lot better than the supposedly more realistic and less naïve Soviet system. It ought to be obvious to any moderately sophisticated person that if you are likely to be far more effective in overcoming an adversary by understanding him/her than by reducing him/her to a stick figure of evil. Indeed, the West subverted the Soviet system by understanding that Russians were real people, not devils, who were attracted by consumer culture.
The respondent argues the fact that I only mentioned a few Israeli-initiated homocides shows Israelis are better or more moral than Arabs. Well, Boris was basically telling me there were NO Israeli initiated homocides, that this is stick figure good guys against bad guys. In fact, I could easily have given a longer list if that had been my intent, and certainly could have included Sabra and Shatilla, a horrendous massacre of Palestinian refugees by Lebanese Phalangists which would not have taken place if Ariel Sharon hadn’t sealed off those refugee camps, preventing anyone from escaping and then inserting the Phalangists into the camps with the mission of “cleansing” them. And then, surprise, surprise, three days later it turns out the Phalange had killed 800 people. Yes, the Phalangists did the killing, but Sharon enabled them to do so, and as the Kahan Commission ruled, should clearly have known that was likely to happen.
But I am NOT trying to prove that Jews are worse killers than Arabs. I am trying to show that violence begets violence, killing begets killing, and in such a situation, nobody’s hands are clean. The premise that the other side is the darkest evil and we are goody goodies who are not capable of killing innocent civilians just because we are Jews, is a lot of buba meises and skazkee and I am frankly surprised that observers of the situation as intelligent as Boris Gorbis can take such nonsense seriously. In reality, that way of thinking is nothing more than willful self-delusion.
Having argued what angels we Jews are, the writer then offers the analysis that the Palestinians will see the light only after they, like the Germans in WWII, have been pounded into rubble, adding, “The bag of flower seeds works best if sown on scorched earth. Denazification of Germany is an excellent model for the dehamazification of Gaza.”
What the writer doesn’t get is that unlike the situation in which the Allies far outnumbered the Axis, Israel is not in a position to occupy and transform the Arab/Muslim world, since there are 6 million Israelis and 1.2 billion Muslims. Besides, to dehamasify Gaza and the West Bank, Israel would need to offer the Palestinians something besides endless occupation and the placing of Jewish settlements on their land. The U.S. occupied Germany after WW2, but it did not build permanent American settlements there, with the idea of grabbing a piece of Germany and making it part of America. As long as Israel continues building settlements, it contributes directly to the Hamasification of Palestine, not the other way around.

As for David Tsal, he tells us that he ran up against hatred of Jews and hostility to Israel when he tried to dialogue with Arabs. I’m sure that is true and I’m sure that was painful, but what kind of response would an Arab who encounter if he/she came to dialogue with some of the people on this forum? Hatred and suspicion is a two way street. As for the red heifer, I remember that episode well, and the point was that there are real live Jews, people who live in the Old City known as the Temple Mount Faithful and real live Evangelical Christians supporting them who actually believe that when the red heifer appears, the Dome of the Rock will disappear and the Third Temple will go up. Check out this web site for an example of this. So its not just about Muslim paranoia in this cause (though there is plenty of that) but real Jews with guns, some of whom have plotted in the past to blow up the Dome of the Rock and/or Al-Aqsa (a bunch of them were arrested in 1984, if my memory serves me right, preparing such a plot).
Tsal then goes on to caricature those who fight for peace as being those with blood on our hands, rather than those on both sides, Arab and Jewish, who perpetuate the killing.
From his comfortable exile in LA, he writes the following; “So who made me hate Arabs? Arabs themselves. Only Arabs themselves. Do I like it? I hate it. But then, I must do what I must do. There is no "want" or "like" here. There is no other choice. We are destined to fight and to kill. The only other choice is to be killed. This is not our doing; this situation came from above and ago. I would wish there were another choice, except that I am not interested in pipedreams and empty wishes.”

So David hates and has no choice but to kill or be killed, except that other Jews besides himself will likely have to do the killing. And I am the one with blood on my hands? Get real, David.

Anyway, nidaber, lets talk further.