When people just won’t give you a straight answer.

A student on the Palestinian side (PS) was being interviewed by a TV talking head (TH).

TH: What do you think would happen to Israel if the US withdrew all of their support?

PS: Israel is guilty of terrorism from 1948 to the present. Israel doesn’t deserve support from the US.

TH: What do you think would happen to Israel if the US withdrew all of their support?

PS: Concentrating a population into a compacted space and then bombing and starving them is genocide.

TH: What do you think would happen to Israel if the US withdrew all of their support?

… and so on. PS never did give a straight answer.

The Palestinians have a powerful case. That’s been my position for decades. But PS was desperately avoiding an answer because it would have justified US support. Without it, there is every reason to believe that Israel really would be pushed “from the river to the sea”. If PS had actually answered the question, it might have turned into something like an honest dialog. Maybe.

There certainly has been the same kind of dishonest posturing by the Zionist side of the argument too. Jews, in general, do not support what Netanyahu and his right-wing, ultra-nationalist allies are doing. President Biden doesn’t support it either. But (so far) he’s not willing to sacrifice Israel just to punish Netanyahu and his Zionists.

I made my first declaration in a previous blog: Crossing the Line. The first thing I wrote in that blog was that I was a Vietnam War protestor and took part in massive demonstrations. But we were non-violent. At least, I always was. I believe that’s why we didn’t really change anything. The Vietnamese beat us and it was only then that we got out of the war.

It’s different now. When  I was a young man, Republicans and Democrats both realized that Nixon was a corrupt liar and joined forces to spit him out like rotten meat. Trump never would have been elected in the first place if we were still able to have that resolve. The Palestine/Israel divide, serious though it is, is still just a symptom.

If we don’t figure out how to be Americans again, we’re toast.