I am home today, enjoying a surprise day off due to the snow. I know, I know, it’s not really that bad out there — but two of my on-campus commitments were canceled anyway, and at 8:30 this morning I was worried that the 45-minute return drive on back roads might not be safe. And so, here I am.
This semester is going well so far, although somehow I think it might be my most work-intensive one yet. The fact that it’s my last semester just makes it all the harder to deal with.
I’m taking History of Modern Philosophy, a Spanish class which I originally thought was going to be way over my head but may actually turn out to be okay, Rhetorical Approaches to Non-Fiction Literature, and a couple of PE classes. I was taking a class on Jane Austen, but I didn’t need it, it was a non-trivial amount of work, and I was feeling overwhelmed. So I dropped it, but have been doing the reading and going to class anyway. It’s pretty much a perfect arrangement — I get to read and think about books I love, but I don’t have to write any papers or take any tests.
The last couple of days, though, I’ve been thinking not about Northanger Abbey
Israel wasn’t something I heard talked about much until I got to Hampshire College, where a large percentage of the student body is Jewish. Israel was an important topic, and nearly everyone supported it wholeheartedly. A number of my friends harbored fantasies of joining the Israeli army. I didn’t have much of an opinion myself, but I thought of support for Israel as a liberal stance.
Fast forward eight years to our current day post-9/11 world. While I get the impression that no one wants to be on record as being anti-Israel, I’m encountering more and more liberals who at least have Palestinian sympathies. Did I misunderstand the issue before? Or is this a shift that’s taken place over the last few years?
If it’s a shift, where’s it coming from? A reaction to the neo-con support of Israel? Or something about the issue itself? I certainly can understand taking it up as a human rights issue — but why now?
As was the case in 1999 when I first heard about the issue, I still don’t feel like I know enough about the situation to have anything close to an easy to explain opinion about it. However, though obviously one-sided, Palestine woke me up enough to start wanting to know.
goin to school in moco, plenty o’ jews. i have never really cared too much about politics but people would talk about it frequently enough..some of my friends were geeks into that “model UN” thing and geek it up that way. it all seemed like conjecture, a feeling which was probably impacted by our high-school ignorance.
i feel even more ignorant about it now than i did then.
I know little about the details, but, while I support the right to the Israelis to have a country, I don’t in the slightest blame the Palestinians for being pissed that their land and country was taken away to give it to someone else. My grandfather got completely upset with me for saying that.
What does “your comment is awaiting moderation” mean anyway? Do you think I’m spam?
I get somewhere around a hundred spam comments every day, so I have it set up to automatically hold most comments for moderation. I could just blacklist all comments including the word “viagra”, but what if someone has something legit to say on the topic?
The blogging world is full of tough decisions.
Yeah, I have a few other friends who get spammed like mad. Somehow, my blog is much better protected, and I don’t get spammed.
Welcome back, stranger. Glad school is progressing well.
I know I’ve written about this issue before, either on your blog or somewhere else, but in my opinion the establishment of Israel in 1948 was a large (and I’d have to say avoidable) error. At some point, someone had to realize that placing a Jewish state in a region of Muslim states was a bad idea. I’m not against Israel — it’s an important ally in the Middle East — but I do believe any reasonable person has to at least acknowledge that “Palestinians” have a legitimate argument.
However, and I do not mean to trivialize the seriousness of the issue, I personally think the killing and dying that has occurred for the past 50+ years over a sliver of land in the desert is ridiculous.
Re Ross:
I definitely feel more ignorant now than I did in high school/the early years after.
When I was about that age I remember people dismissing me with, “Oh, you’re young, you think you know everything.” And at the time I thought, “Oh, you’re an asshole, you don’t get it so you think no one else can.”
And here I am, not so many years later, amazed at how much more complex the world is than it seemed at 18. I know that one of the world’s oldest adages is something along the lines of, “The older I get, the less I know,” or maybe, “The more I know, the less I know,” but…I’m starting to believe it.
I’m in Beirut, surrounded by buildings that were bombed out by US-made missiles during the war with Israel last summer. I go to pubs with my Shiite friends (yes, most are not fanatics; many are liberal and do indeed drink) and listen to their heartbreaking stories about losing their homes (and their journals, photographs, paintings, CDs and other minor things that are priceless and irreplacable). I see the ramshackle structures and tents of this country’s refugees – Palestinians who fled from the wars with Israel in 1948 and 1967, and Lebanese made homeless in 2006. I make trips to the South of the country, where you still have to take great care to avoid stepping on an American-made cluster bomb.
I am glad to know that people in the US are asking themselves questions.
You do flit across my mind in quiet moments. I am glad I found your blog and can see what you are writing and doing. Take care.