One of the great things about NCR is that it is home to many voices. Oftentimes I find myself nodding in agreement with what I read posted by other contributors and other times I find myself shaking my head.
But, it is not often that I find something that makes me feel sick to my stomach. Alas, Renee Schafer Horton's post about Israeli settlements was jaw-dropping.
Especially offensive were these sentences about her trip to Israel and her visit to Yad Vashem: "Going to the Holocaust museum and realizing that what was done to Jews then is similar to what Jews do to Palestinians now. For instance, the Germans made Jews wear yellow stars; in Israel, Palestinians have to have green license plates."
Do tell? In what way precisely is Nablus similar to Auschwitz? Are there crematoria? Does Horton understand that the Jews wearing the stars were the lucky ones, the ones who were not immediately exterminated? For all of my problems with the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, and for all my distaste at the politics of the settlers, is extermination a goal of the Israeli government? If so, they are woefully ineffective.
Horton goes on to wonder why everyone can't just get along, showing a naivete about the politics of the region that rivals the naivete of Donald Rumsfeld.
She then launches into an exercise in moral equivalence that was stupefying. You can mourn the plight of the Palestinian people without engaging in this sort of foolishness.
