I wasn't specific. There was some unethical activity: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/21/israeli-pathologists-harvested-organs
Yeah, I'm against those practices without the patient's consent prior to death. But that was an isolated incident in one part of one facility, and was discontinued thereafter. If it had enjoyed official government sanction or public approval, then you might have been able to make a comment about the integrity of the Israeli government or the Israeli national character, respectively. It's true that revelations like these make an entire society look bad by association, and it's even true sometimes that there are elements in the society's character which fostered the wrongdoing. I wouldn't deny that. Thus, this story is definitely a valid criticism of Israel. Even so, it remains a very thin one for the argument you originally tried to make.
I remain unconvinced that anyone can call Israel one of the better nations of the world without qualifying the statement in lieu of these tit-for-tat abuses.
What are you talking about?
It is no mistake that the article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Israel is so massive.
The reason for the size of the article is Israel obsession here in the West, not because of actual abuses--as you would have seen by actually reading the article, which is decidedly neutral for an anti-Israeli critique and in many instances is even favorable to Israel, placing it firmly in line with other developed nations.
At any rate, you should know better than to use a Wikipedia article's popularity or size to make this kind of judgment about the subject under consideration.
Your argument seems to be that Israel is justified in some deviation from ethical behavior because of the extraordinary adversity it faces.
That is not my argument at all, and for you to make such a construction in response to what I wrote is simply dense--be it unintentionally or otherwise. The closest I came to that whole area of thought was to point out the dilemmas of urban warfare against guerrillas and terrorists, and what I said bears no resemblance to what you say I said. In this kind of strategic situation, it is impossible to both preserve the safety of the Israeli public and avoid taking military action against the enemy. Thus civilian casualties are inevitable. That is not an excuse; that is a reality. In reality--which is where we live--if some destruction is unavoidable then the priority then becomes minimizing the destruction caused in the act of self-defense. The IDF's performance in terms of preserving human life has been nothing short of remarkable. Compare the death tolls among Palestinians to those of comparable conflicts elsewhere, and be amazed. Also: There are no statistics on it, but if you were to divide up the Palestinian civilian deaths caused directly by Israelis, and those caused by the Palestinian resistance, the numbers would be even more amazing.
Additionally, misconduct and corruption among IDF troops, toward Palestinians or anyone else, has always been refreshingly low, exceeding that even of some of the more backward Western nations like Italy. The anti-Israeli media like to strongly imply that IDF troops are thugs and miscreants, straight out of the Russian or Japanese horrors of the 1930s and '40s. These implications are a lie, which is why they are backed with anecdotes rather than statistics. There is misconduct or corruption, of course. That will occur in any military. And individual cases can thereby be presented anecdotally as indicative of wider trends. That is the essential lie: In Israel's military, these anecdotes are the exception to the rule.
Whenever
wider corruption in IDF is exposed--and it has happened on rare occasions--the Israelis themselves, including the government and even the IDF, are the first to react. Their reaction is never one of malicious glee, but always of disgust and condemnation. Your assertion to the contrary, if indeed this is what you were getting at when you said "deviation from ethical behavior," is a door off its hinges.
Haven't we heard that before, in other applications? It's a damnable, slippery path to walk, and when an attitude like that prevails and becomes internalized by Israelis and their allies, it might as well provide carte blanche for evil.
That's some reasoning process! Due to abuses which never happened, the groundwork is laid for even worse abuses to come! Hah! Speaking of slippery paths, Z, not only is your statement here a slippery slope fallacy
at best, but even that bit of acknowledgment would only be possible if your underlying assertion were true, which it isn't!
I should have been more critical of your arguments when we were still on good terms. Curse my love of Ronald Reagan's 11th Commandment. Yoda always told me that ahead I would never get by on Reagan betting.
It also snugly fits into religious apocrypha about the persecution of Jews, the end times, and Christian sentiments.
WTF is this? Do you not remember that I am even more non-religious than you are? Does your enmity toward me somehow make me a religious person all of a sudden? Does my Jewish heritage mandate that any argument I might make about Israel must necessarily become a Jewish one? Lunacy! I am the last person on the Compendium who would invoke the calling of eschatological misadventure. To hell with what the Christians are saying about the Biblical implications of world events. The persecution of Jews is a very real thing, and the illogical antagonism against Israel is a very real thing, and these two realities combine often enough that it warrants attention.
Haven't we heard that before, in other applications? It's a damnable, slippery path to walk, and when an attitude like that prevails and becomes internalized by Israelis and their allies, it might as well provide carte blanche for evil. It also snugly fits into religious apocrypha about the persecution of Jews, the end times, and Christian sentiments.
Bringing both of your comments together now, about the slippery path to evil and your dismissal of the persecution against Jews, I find myself returning to the many conversations we have shared about what to do about enemy peoples, such as fundamentalist conservatives here in America. I've always known that you and I have a starkly different philosophical perspective, even though our ideological positions frequently agree. Among other things, I have recognized that I place more emphasis on human welfare than you. Now, with the perspective of recent regrettable events to guide me, I find myself dismayed.
I am as alarmed about Israeli ultra-nationalism as you would claim to be if you knew enough about Israel to know of its prevalence. I would be the last person to endorse the Israeli state pursuing a Nazi-esque foreign policy, as some of Israel's worst ultra-nationalists have advocated. I didn't like to see the beginnings of totalitarianism here in America under Bush, and I sure as hell don't approve of the tea partiers in our midst today who seek to restrict the freedoms of America to only certain Americans. I am many things, but an apologist for fascism is damn well not one of them, and I reject absolutely, though subtle it was, your insinuation to the contrary.
Every time I have grappled with the reality of an intractable enemy, such as the quintessential Christian zealot here in the States who wants to undo the quilt-work of our liberty and spread the icy blanket of darkness in its lieu, I have reminded myself of that lesson which was ingrained to me from a young age: the Shoah. The Holocaust! I don't agree with those who say that experience is necessary to understand a thing. I don't make the claim that, as one without a Jewish heritage, you are incapable of appreciating this particular historical lesson as well as I am. But cultural experience helps expose a person to the facts, and I've seen more facts about fascism's fruits than you have, because I come from a line of people who were severely affected by it. And, maybe in part because of that--because of the perspective I gained from learning that somebody once tried mass extermination as a solution for potholes--I care about human welfare in a way that you don't seem to. I don't think you realize what all goes through my mind when I contemplate, as a writer and a philosopher, taking children to be raised by the state instead of in the broken homes where they are corrupted by maleficent parents, or curtailing the freedoms of religious zealots so that they may lose some of their power to repress those within their ambit under the existing law, or even "bombing the South" in response to the generational abuses which linger there interminably at the expense of Southerners' own quality of lives, the virtue of the policies of our nation, and by extension the wellbeing of the whole world.
I don't know where I stand on all of those questions, yet. They are hard. In our culture we have a deep-seated aversion to that kind of political philosophy, and most people refuse to even consider the questions of humanity, or approach them only with the cowardice of blind ideological dogmatism. It's so easy to say that some questions are outside the purview of human judgment. Yet what are we to do when evil persists despite our willingness that it would depart of its own accord? More than anyone here, I have considered what to do about evil in the world, because to me its eradication is an imperative of the conscience. I have considered no subject off limits. Within the space of my mind, I am willing to ponder anything conceivable. An idea cannot be judged until it is known. Yet
always I carry with me the lesson of how wrong it is to fight evil with evil. It's not just my knowledge of the Holocaust, which is but a part of my life's library; it's the result of my whole awareness that power and ambition have often been the hallmarks of villains--and not classical villains, but villains by my own definition. My desire to use power for good has been so wrapped around my wariness of being misled into using power for evil that it has seeped into my very personality. And so I have wondered about these damnable perfidies in the world--the evils of our time, and those of every age--without malice and with the desire to harm or displace or inconvenience
no one beyond what is absolutely necessary to create justice from injustice. Not to replace evil with evil, but to erase evil. To erase sexism, to erase xenophobia, to erase trafficking, to erase the repression of the human spirit. As a kid I learned to hold some terrific grudges, but as an adult I learned that I no longer know how. It just isn't in me anymore. Even the worst people, the rapists and the mind muddlers, are enemies to me only in principle, to be defeated without bias against their individual nature, and only held responsible for the extent of their crimes. That's why I support the death penalty, but not torture. That's why I support imperialism, but not slavery. Whatever visceral reaction I might have when I read about, say, what happened to Sajainta, I have within me the discipline of years and the fear of corruption to know not to ever seek the fate of other people in an emotional pique, or with cold emotion.
But you...
You seem to know nothing except emotion. Your arguments--which have become better-informed and more persuasive with each passing month, and will continue to do so for a good while I have no doubt--exist to justify the emotions you already have in response to positions you already hold. And you hold those positions, for who knows why? Because you are wiser than I realize? Because I was the Compendium's best arguer back in your formative days? Because conservatism is self-evidently bogus and you have lived in a conservative society? I don't know. But I do know that you didn't get to these positions the same way I did. You have been too fast to agree with me in the past, without considering what I have considered in the journey to reach a conclusion, and I have failed you by failing to explain myself more thoroughly. As a result I find myself in the very dismaying position of wondering about you, wondering, for all your criticism of convenience of "evil," what you would do if you had the power that we both consider. If I may take a risk at saying something which I suspect but cannot prove: You have very little regard for most people. For your enemies, you have next to none. That is not a healthy trait in a power-seeking person. I have not been able to reconcile your ideological desire to spread civil liberty with your emotional contempt for the "inferiors" who would benefit from it.
Perhaps what you should do, instead of going to work in the halls of a huge corporation, is spend a couple of years at the village level--perhaps in the Peace Corps! There, in the podunks of podunk realms, you could carry out the utterly menial tasks which would nevertheless improve the lives of the unprivileged and simultaneously introduce you to all sorts of interesting people--people who might perhaps provide you with some of the perspective which could lead to the philanthropic awareness that I suggest you need.
Israel will be what it is: a country under stress. It is surrounded and outnumbered, and hated by the world. Against these adversities, I hope the Israeli people will choose to preserve not only their country but their country's dignity. I will be harsher than you, and ahead of you in line, to criticize the Israelis when they do go wrong. But I will also speak passionately about this fine country of which I am quite fond, for it has been misrepresented and maligned. I'm not wrong about Israel, Z. And there is nothing fascist--or racist, or colonialist, or war-mongering, or classist--about that. I was having these debates about Israel nine years ago, and my knowledge has grown ninefold since then. Doctrinaire liberalism is simply wrong about this one. I can suspect why. Regardless, I never take strong positions if I'm not well-informed, and, among those positions I do have, Israel is one of my stronger subjects. But! If you can put aside your desire to foster this ridiculous enmity between us, and explore for yourself the question of Israel's character, with an open-mind, then you won't have to take my word for it. Until then, enjoy life on the receiving end of my arguments. Israel has too few defenders for me to afford myself the luxury of ignoring you on this.
