By John Chuckman
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Calling people names because you dislike their views is not logic and is not any form of argument. It is not even decent. I can’t see how this lawyer’s words differ from American Senator McCarthy using the dangerously-loaded slur, Communist, applied to anyone he didn’t want working in the State Department or in Hollywood.
If I indulge this lawyer’s name-calling, saying it resembles logic, what comes to mind is another lawyer’s argument at the trial many years ago of a man who had slashed a woman’s throat and then tried to strangle her with a lamp cord. That lawyer claimed his client had only been applying a tourniquet to a wound he accidentally inflicted.
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Does he include decent, honorable people like Uri Avnery, former member of the Knesset, a citizen of Israel who writes regularly of the injustices committed by the country he loves? Does he include the great pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim who grew up partly in Israel and has many times criticized its policies? Does he include the chief rabbi of the United Kingdom who expressed his rejection of Sharon’s brutality? Does he include Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela who both have described what they see in Israel as the apartheid with which they are intimately familiar?
All people supporting any cause must be selective. You can’t focus on the facts if your attention is distributed among fifty causes, and advocacy or criticism without facts is vacuous. Ghandi had a focus as did Martin Luther King as did Tutu as did all the early Zionist leaders as did Arafat. Taking on every injustice in the world plainly makes it impossible to say much to the point about any of them.
So why does anyone focus on Israel? In part, for the simple reason that we are overwhelmed with awareness of Israel in our press. A day almost cannot pass that we do not have a news story about Israel. The slightest statement of Ariel Sharon is reported with about the same weight as the words of major world statesmen. We hear of every change in his cabinet. We hear of every change in his plans. We hear of every meeting he has with other leaders. When was the last time you read or heard a story about Tibet?
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Why would it surprise any thoughtful person that Israel is far more on people’s minds than Tibet? But the question of focus on Israel involves far more than constant repetition, important as that fact is.
A good deal of the mess that we find ourselves in today, the so-called War on Terror and the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people, largely pivots on Israel’s policy and behavior towards the Palestinians and on America’s policy towards Israel. The problem of Israel versus the Palestinians has become a kind of geopolitical black hole which threatens to consume much of the energy and substance of Western society. Surely, we all have a right, and even a moral obligation, to address such a threatening situation without being called names.
Why doesn’t Israel just make peace? Israel holds virtually all the cards. The weapons. The intelligence information. The economic advantages. The immensely powerful ally. At least certainly compared to the pathetic group of people, the Palestinians, it calls its enemy.
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Is Israel the only country somehow magically immune to Lord Acton’s dictum about power? I think not, but in saying that I risk being classified an anti-Semite.
John Chuckman lives in Ontario.
