There's a heated argument taking place on my high school reunion mailing list, of all places. I'll leave the other emails to your imagination (I don't think it would be OK to reproduce them here, though they are fascinating.) There was only so much I could take before I wrote this:
As a Jewish woman working at a Jewish organization in the Bay Area, I feel like I can't stay out of this one. These are my opinions only and don't reflect those of my employer.Israel exists, people live there, they have a right to live there in peace. However, yes, Jews have had a presence there for longer than 59 years... but so have the Palestinians. Currently, they live in a miserable situation.
Arguments about who has more right to live there are, in my opinion, pointless, because taken to extremes, the options are "wipe out Israel" or send the Palestinians packing off to... where, exactly? The clock is never going to be turned back to a time when there was no Jewish state, and the "land without a people" never existed either. Mainstream opinion, even among the most Israel-supportive Jewish organizations (and the one I work at is one of them), says that the status quo is not OK and there needs to be a two-state solution.
There are extremists on both sides; peace would give them a smaller audience.
Last summer, during the war with Hamas, my office received first-person accounts of the terror that families living in northern Israel experienced during the rocket attacks. People were living in underground shelters for over a month! Real people got injured and killed. I can't even begin to imagine how terrifying that must have been. I saw photos of the damage -- at least one town had to be practically rebuilt.
But that doesn't erase the fact that I think about 10 times as many people perished in Lebanon at the same time, and Israel apparently used some weaponry that they really, really shouldn't have used. And the war didn't even accomplish Israel's objectives; Hamas is still alive and kicking. (Incidentally, my understanding is Hamas is popular in part because they did a lot of charitable work in the occupied territories that nobody else was doing. Nothing's ever simple, eh?)
The hardest thing to keep in mind is that one side's truth does not invalidate the other's.
