Leon – try this for starters.

Links?

I am glad you are hopeful. To tell you the truth, I was feeling quite the opposite as I wrote my post last night.

One hears people like David Irving say that, and it makes one sick.

I am actually feeling quite hopeful at the moment, goodness alone knows why, but I feel that there’s some sort of covert movement afoot, that people are starting to tire of perpetual conflict. I read a lot of ME bloggers, and although, of course, all countries have their fight-to-the-deathers, there appears to be a groundswell of opinion where people are reaching out to each other and actively listening. In particular these are young people, the people who the older ones send out to do the dirty work. They want to stop. They want to visit each others countries. They want to become friends.

They should be listened to.

I always think it is unlikely it would make any difference – that’s from “the world will come to its senses” school of philosophy (founded by my wife).

What I do know is that given the situation jews found at the time – I too would have been on the first boat out.

And yes if the situation got hairy I too would expect to look for a haven. Problem is Israel isn’t proving to be a haven for anyone.

There is a view that it is a massive militarised base with every citizen at the beck and call of the military. That is a very sad state of affairs. From what I have read of Israeli history one of the primary motives for having military service (calling it national service would hide reality) was to pull together a disparate people into a state that the citizens would not only have loyalty to but be able to physically defend. And being in a permanent state of ‘preparedness’ has left it a highly nationalistic militant state.

Getting out of that is the big question for Israel. Lasting peace isn’t possible without it. Regime change is what it will take.

For me I would wish for the WHOLE of the middle east to be a haven for jews as it once was. And I think we have already agreed what the way forward is beyond that.

Carry on posting. Although I am on the side of interfaith stuff from the woolly trustafarian perspective you made some good points. Sure it’s
also true that there is a hard political reality to all the issues that are discussed here and we need differing perspectives.

Blimey that was difficult. For my next trick I shall admire a van that ain’t white. *cringe*

Sunny, you are looking at it more tactically, I think, that the interfaith school apparently working so well undermines the ideological messages that people have to drop their religions to get on, or that there is an inevitable clash of civilisations. And I appreciate that side of it too.

Maybe I’m not so bothered, because I don’t think schools are a good thing in the first place. They are variations on a kind of abuse, which most people seem to accept, but depresses me. That’s even before we get to the issue of expecting patriotic displays with all the petty sanctions against anyone with the humanistic sensitivity to want to opt out of it.

That’s school. Some people enjoy the experience of institutionalisation and even get hooked on it. Some people get involved in setting them up and filling them with their own well-meaning ideas. And other people object to those ideas. The kids just have to go through it whether it is patriotic, religious, secular, competitive, liberal, militaristic or whatever.

On the bright side. I managed to get through schooling without taking on any of the values expressed in assembly, and yet I think I’m one of the most conformist people you could meet – so maybe not….

I hope most people manage to get through school disrespecting the values the governors are trying to foist on them. But I also hope we can get through life at least respecting people who respect us. Even at school. Even if I’m not patriotic or secular or fond of chemistry.

I think that you are incorrect in two things. The decision to partition Palestine was made a long time before the second world war (Balfour declaration), and it wasn’t so much ‘Zionists’ taking ‘advantage’ of the Holocaust (taking advantage of having 6 million killed is, I hope, not what you meant to imply), as there being a total fear and hopelessness amongst the Jews of Europe. A little of the research that everyone here loves to do would show you what happened to Jews who went what they had previously called home after their liberation from concentration camps.

Even here, there was a climate of despair. I remember my grandparents had a record sung in Yiddish on one side and English on the other called ‘Where shall I go’, of which the first lines were, ‘Tell me where shall I go, Is there no place left for me’. I appreciate that this probably sounds like sentimental claptrap to you, but it sums up how the whole remnant of a people felt.

To a degree I still feel like that. I have no real desire to live in Israel for two reasons, the climate does not agree with my condition (I am supposed to avoid places where I might be bitten by insects) and I feel that as I am mainly housebound these days, it would be difficult, at my age, to get to know people and have any kind of a life. However, I would go like a shot if things got hairy for Jews here.