my heart is really in it
being a child of leftist nonreligious galician jews who came to the usa to escape poverty and prejudice, and married to an irish/english man who tells me i'm always ready to run away from a pogrom, i guess being a jewess (i love that word) is in my blood
i also feel very close with the arabs, though the only ones i know are christians; but whatever religion they've chosen, i know we're related (duh);
recently there have been diaries about how the peace process is almost certainly abandoned, that between the so-called leaders in israel and among the palestinians they've managed to make it look like there's no option for anything but continued hostilities into the future
an idea has come to me, i'd like to know if anyone else sees this possibility:
the arab culture has many different modes of expression, and one of them is the warrior life;
despite the many years that the two tribes have been warring, we read that the arabs see the jews as europeans, trying to impose that culture on the middle east; a culture that has given up seeing war as a way of resolving differences;
the arabs have seen that the west will put a certain amount of muscle into a region to get what's wanted out of it, but they've also seen that the west will always leave, at least for intervals
if the jews are just europeans then the expectation is that they'll also leave eventually if life is made hard enough, if loss of life is shocking enough for long enough;
but that is what differentiates the jews from the europeans: they have no place to go back to
i know that for the palestinians who, back in the day, suffered the loss of their homes and villages, their wound is still suppurating, but their grand and great grandchildren can only identify at second-hand, vicariously
these children have grown up seeing the israeli jews take whatever has been thrown at them, and persevere; they're not going anywhere is what has become obvious i think to the young arab mind
i haven't done any research on this idea, but i've read about the struggle from both points of view, and have the humanistic view toward all peoples, so this idea has given me great hope that sometime in the near future, before i have to go, the i/p struggle will evaporate, like the two irish sides, which, by the way, were much more different peoples than are the semites