Ah, Zion

Thoughts on a recent post on Sam Scott’s blog:

Oppo­si­tion to the occu­pa­tion and the way Israel con­ducts its mil­i­tary defense is not in and of itself anti-Zionism, and anti-Zionism is cer­tainly not anti-Semitism.

Pales­tini­ans’ infight­ing is an indi­ca­tion of just how ille­git­i­mate and ephemeral the “Pales­tin­ian Author­ity” is. This is a polit­i­cal entity that was borne not of the Pales­tin­ian peo­ple as a whole, but of a small cabal of rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies (or ter­ror­ists), the PLO, in cahoots with the then-liberal Israeli gov­ern­ment. Glick is wrong, dan­ger­ously so, about the exis­tence of a Pales­tin­ian “State.” She shows a gross mis­un­der­stand­ing of what a “state” is (and belies her ultra-right ten­den­cies in the use of terms like “Samaria”). Not only is there no Pales­tin­ian State, there is no real Pales­tin­ian Author­ity, except on paper.

Freund’s arti­cle fails to rec­og­nize the rea­son under­pin­ning his sta­tis­tics: that a “war on ter­ror” only can result in greater sup­port for “ter­ror­ists.” If we are truly to win a “war on ter­ror,” we must:

• real­ize that vio­lence begets violence
• stop lump­ing jihadists, gueril­las, ter­ror­ists, tribes, coun­tries, and other groups into a broad def­i­n­i­tion of “ter­ror­ist organizations”
• under­stand the roots of jihadism and the moti­va­tions of indi­vid­ual groups

In other words, let’s return to a nuanced for­eign pol­icy: W’s broad-brush approach does not become us.