My general position on most Israel/Palestine conflict

[desh]

If anyone's interested:

* I like peace. A lot. I dislike death, injury, and any situation in which innocent people cannot live safely and healthily.

* There are lots of innocent people in both Israel and Palestine.

* As far as I can tell, Israel and Palestine as national entities are both being idiots, each spending time during "cease fires" doing things in bad faith with the immediate or eventual goal of harming the other.

* Lots of friends of mine disagree with half of the above statement. They're all more intelligent and much more informed about this situation than I am. And they're all right, whichever side they're on.

* I'm an easily persuaded person in general; especially so with issues I'm much less informed about than the person trying to persuade me is. When I get into discussions about this issue, I almost always come out agreeing with whoever spoke last.

* Israel is much less important to my life than it is to most of the people I'm in Jewish communities with. I don't think Israel, as a land or a modern state (rather than as a concept or a history or a people), is particularly important to my life as an American Jew. And most of the individuals I know personally in Israel are both there temporarily and out of harm's way. (I worry about the rest, but I have fewer such people I know than most of my friends do.) I have even less invested personally in Palestine; I don't know anyone there at all.

* Therefore, I choose to stay relatively poorly informed about the issues going on in the region. Short term, I plan to continue to be persuadable about the issues, but long term, I plan to continue to stake out this moderate and apathetic stance. Frankly, there are other issues I care about more. How about the awesome poverty situation here in the country I live in?

* The one thing I'm sure about is that any opinion on the Middle East issues that disregards nuance and subtlety is automatically wrong.

Clear? Cool. Any questions?

Comments

[below-the-belt.livejournal.com]

Desh - thanks for posting this, I'm so interested to know what your stance is. I love that you recognize how easily persuaded you are.

I also am excited to know the extent to which you're uninterested in making this a big issue for you to get roiled up about. US Jews don't have an inherent ownership of, deserving of or relationship with Israel, and the only reasons I do are fucked-up reason from fucked-up choices my parents made 25 years ago. Just to politicize your unwillingness to be politicized about it...

The thing is, though, that you're healthily concerned about the poverty situation here in the US - which is directly related to our tax dollars going in such giant numbers to Israel's military and their fabulous stratagems, rather than to education, public assistance, healthcare and other things that help people survive and thrive and maybe boost their class status. So, dealing with that interconnectedness, Israel [and Iraq and Afghanistan] are implicated too.

Also thanks for being such an excellent interloper/informant. You're one of the best Swedens ever.

[desh]

It looks like our annual aid to Israel is about $2.5 billion. That's a lot of money, and for those of you who feel invested in the Middle East situation, it's a great point of discussion. But by the standards of the total federal budget, that's really not much money. From the angle of the interconnected US policy stuff and how we spend our "limited" resources, I'd much rather spend my limited time resources advocating for getting out of Iraq and saving the $144 billion we spent in 2008.