Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

In the debate on Middle East, both sides worthy of criticism

By Jerry Long

When debating what level of support the United States should give to the state of Israel, the "self-hating Jew" may have a range of options.

The self-thinking Gentile, unfortunately, is allowed only two: Love it or fund it.

We must accept the arrogant defiance of the Israeli statesman bluntly telling us to stay out of his country's internal affairs as he strolls up to Capitol Hill to pocket billions of our tax dollars.

Above all, we must never suggest that Palestinians have as much right to their own independent state as the Israelis do, lest we be portrayed as modern-day Kristallnacht enablers.

Personally, I have never considered the phrase God gave this to us an acceptable policy position. As though some Ancient Omnipotent Landlord mistakenly drew up a lease agreement with a 3,000-year sublet option. Yes, the Palestinians refused to compromise in 1947, but if the Lenape showed up today with a 300-year-old claim to the Delaware Valley, I doubt we'd be packing up and partitioning.

Yes, there have been Jews on the land for millennia, but there have also been Palestinians. And before either, there were Canaanites and Philistines amid the milk and honey. The Jews dealt with these peoples the old-fashioned way: They smote some, co-opted others, and constantly made bloody war among themselves. In fact (on the off-chance that facts matter to the discussion), the entire period of a "Greater Israel," the basis for the current settlement controversy, lasted no more than 80 years and ended around 920 B.C.

Some Jewish groups are properly unceasing in their efforts to teach the world the lessons of the Holocaust. But when a country institutes a policy of preemptive assassination, it may be about time to ask what lessons Israel has learned, and from which side it learned them.

While Israeli government rationales have never been strangers to hypocrisy, shouldn't someone at least mention that if the British had pursued a strategy of assassinating militants deemed to be threats to security, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir would have been killed in the 1940s and Count Folke Bernadotte, the man appointed U.N. mediator in Palestine in 1948 (and promptly assassinated), would have spent the 1950s in a suite at the King David Hotel?

So Yasir Arafat is a terrorist - but should Israelis then feel superior because their current prime minister is merely a war criminal? Granted, Arafat must exert greater control over his murderers - but couldn't Sharon have trundled down from his perch above Sabra and Shatilla to stop Christian Phalangists >from bashing the heads of Palestinian children against stone walls? OK, Yasir Arafat is a corrupt fraud - but should the United States really be in the business of denying a people their rights based on the inadequacies of their leader?

Please spare me the hackneyed analogies about how Americans would feel if subjected to terrorist bombings from Canada. Last time I checked, we weren't surrounding Montreal with troops. We weren't diverting the water supply of Edmonton, bulldozing homes on the outskirts of Toronto, or erecting roadblocks and checkpoints throughout Quebec.

Perhaps there can never be peace in the Middle East as long as Arafat is alive. But there will also never be peace until the Holocaust is seen for what it was: a rancid and unspeakably obscene chapter in a 20th-century book of depravity that includes Armenians, Cambodians, Rwandans and Kulaks - and not an Accountability E-ZPass for a government to view its policies as somehow beyond criticism.

Meanwhile, the United States continues to deplore all violence while pursuing policies that indulge the lunacy of the settlers and fuel the lunacy of Hamas. Our government can never be an honest broker of Arab hopes until it finds the political courage to cease being a willing executor of Israeli demands.

These are the only absolute truths about the Middle East: Barbarity and goodness exist on both sides while innocent children are dying.

Jerry Long (JerryBeggar@aol.com) and his brother Joe are known as the satirists - the Sturdy Beggars.