POSTED COMMENT TO A COLUMN BY SHIRA HERZOG IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
"Absent innovation, industry, investment and democracy the balance of palestine will look like Mogadishu within a year. The world will have lost all interest and life for the palestinians will become a nightmare."
There, encapsulated in a brief statement by a reader, is everything wrong with Israel.
The arrogance and ignorance on display towards Arabs are breathtaking.
Lebanon has been a very prosperous place, thank you, and would be more so were it not for decades of savageries from Israel.
Iraq was the most advanced Arab state in the world, advanced both in technology and in matters like women's rights. For all his faults, Saddam was a secular, forward-thinking man in a number of respects. And what happened to Iraq? Flattened by Israeli interests.
Democracy? Israel, a state which insists on calling itself exclusively Jewish and practices ethnic-cleansing daily, hardly qualifies under any meaningful definition of democracy.
And even if we do grant the adjective democratic to Israel, does the writer not understand that democracies are just as capable as any other form of state of atrocities and abuse. The United States in Vietnam? Apartheid South Africa? The Confederate States of America? And just so, Israel.
Democracy is not a state of grace from stupid policy, prejudice, or cruelty. Power is power, however conferred, and, as we know, power corrupts.
