Fork in the Road

Note that you followed the outline I drew up perfectly:

Me: You will reply with: how dare you justify human rights violations committed by the IDF, for which there are no excuses

You: the IDF does target civilians. There is simply no way Israel would have killed more than 2,000 Palestinians civilians since 2000 by mere accident. Anyone who claims that Israel did not "target" one of them has a tough case to prove.

Me: You believe Israel is an occupying Apartheid state.

You: Israel knows that as a belligerent occupying force

Me: We'll do the dance, with onlookers throwing their five cents in about how I am a racist colonialist Zionist

Onlookers: The IDF was created precisely to kill non-Jewish civilians... That you refuse to recognize that is an acknowledgement that the only lives that matter to you are Jewish lives... And with that, nothing you have to write on here should be considered new, thought-provoking or even intelligent.

Do I hear an echo?

You've got to admit, I called it pretty well. I can call the rest of this dialogue equally well, but this is not why I am here. I'm here to put a fork in the road.

The point of me stating all these things in advance is that I understand your position, and that of everyone else here, and I could explain it far better and with more eloquence than the vast majority of Arabs on this blog, or indeed, the activist community itself. I've been around the block.

If I was insecure about my beliefs, I would come to a Zionist blog with witty little posts and commentators echoing my beliefs in an echochamber of irrelevance. Sound familiar?

As I've written about in the past, though I have lived on multiple continents, I am not a "citizen of the world". To me, the opinions of the international community are not simply irrelevant, they are meaningless. The same community that stood by while my family endured horrors and genocide that no one should have to endure; Not 2000 killed in 10 years, under mixed circumstances. 2000 killed in 10 seconds, having just been forced to dig their own graves. The same "international community" that is standing by while millions of others around the world are truly being exterminated, without so much as a UN representative to take pictures. My priority is not someone's notion of peace, nor someone's notion of justice. That is a useful construct when engaged in propaganda, for both of us, but that's not why I'm here.

Let me clear the air to avoid ANY confusion on the part of everyone reading: To me, Palestinian rights are negotiable; Jewish life is not. I value Jewish life more than Palestinian rights. Rights are paired with responsibilities, and those who demand the first, must accept and honor the second.

As I spoke about in a separate comment, every activist comes to a point where they need to make a choice. Do I score that one extra point, or I engage in a real conversation, based not on spouting propaganda, but rising to a shared intellectual honesty.

I've met Palestinian "one staters" before. I'm close friends with some. They have great ideas of how they can use "one state" to score points in an argument about human rights, occupation, etc, but most have not actually considered the results an implementation of this idea will have on Palestinian society. Have you? Do you understand what will happen to the felahin when Chassidic Jews, black hats and all, purchase homes in the villages? We Jews have survived 2000 years of living as aliens amongst those who hate us, pogrom us, expel us and kill us. We can deal with it. Can your people deal with it? Can your culture deal with it? Your society? What becomes of a Palestinian village that is 51% Jewish? What will it do to your people's identity?

As you can tell, I'm a one stater too, perhaps for different reasons. A part of me wants to rip your comments to shreds, and from what you've read of my comments in the past, you already know that would take a good sized essay; I don't shirk from volume. So why should we spend more time ripping one another's comments, when we both know we can do it. There's no challenge in that, and there certainly is no future. Based on what we both believe, [Name], one day, it is possible that your family will live next to mine. You say that you want to make this happen, and so do I.

Here's the fork in the road: You can keep scoring points; little insignificant points that make other Arabs and their western supporters feel good, but do not change a thing in the real world.

Or, you can live up to the ideals you claim you believe in, and start building the one state, for both of us. How you do this while maintaining credibility in the eyes of the many voices here who would much rather log on twice a day to score a point is your problem. If you can't solve that, then we can't solve anything.

You expect 5 million Jews and 5 million Palestinians who don't know each other to make a pact for national unity, in our lifetime, with minimal life lost on all sides. Prove it. Start right now.

Shabbat is coming and I need to get ready. Perhaps one day, you'll see me taking my kids to shul on a Friday night. It all depends on what kind of world you want to build.

Have a good weekend.