The most annoying thing I think about the whole matter is that a lot of liberals view it as a white vs. non-white thing, like the Israelis are racist towards the "brown-skinned" Palestinians. There was an opinion piece along these lines in my university's newspaper this week. I wish people would realize a) Judaism is an ethnicity, not a race. Actually my boyfriend says he considers it a "civilization", but I don't know about that one. Basically, there are black Ethiopian Jews, middle-eastern Israeli Jews (and yes there were Jews already LIVING there when they created the state of Israel), and white American ashkenazi Jews. The idea that all the Jews in Israel are exactly the same as Jews in New York is fallacious and ludicrous. b) The Palestinians weren't there for time immemorial. Arabs actually immigrated to that part of the middle east. It's not like they were always there. There have been Jews, Bedouins, Kurds and other ethnic groups living there pretty much since the time of Jesus, and guess what? They all got along well enough to continue living there for all those years.

What it all boils down to is this: most Arabs hate Jews. Some of the more fundamentalist Orthodox Jews in Israel hate the Arabs. Basically, I think that Clinton came the closest that anyone ever has of negotiating peace between the two sides, but Arafat had to go and fuck everything up. Now that he's died, all these American news outlets are doting on him like he isn't a huge terrorist supporter like the Saudi royal family and all those other jerks. And they wonder why Bush made his cryptic statement and didn't want to attend the service in Cairo. I am in no way a Bush supporter, but at least the man is being consistent in his "war on terror" by not attending the funeral of a man who was, in many accounts, a terrorist himself.

Thanks for the post. I'm going to save this one.