sometimes you see why it's hard to negotiate with israelis. that latimes piece by yisrael medad is just...strange. the conclusion appears to be that jerusalem should be immediately recognized as part of israel. but i don't actually get the argument, and the napoleon anecdote is positively weird. is the argument actually that millennia of jewish lamentation should determine geo-political boundaries? (anyway, i guess i find it a bit odd to sob over events of 2,000 years ago, and if i wanted to use sobbing as a political argument, i'd want to evaluate it for...sincerity, immediacy, applicability; i'd want to quantify the sobbing of various peoples in evaluating their claims.)
The "West Bank" never existed as a geopolitical entity until April 1950, when Jordan annexed the area. That annexation, incidentally, was considered by all the world -- except for Britain -- as an illegal occupation. Yet the U.S. has established the "West Bank," with the stroke of a pen, as if it were a state entity.
If the U.S. insists on using boundaries dating to 1948, shouldn't it also use the place names in use at that time? "Judea" and "Samaria" were both names written into the U.N. partition resolution. A baby born to U.S. citizens in Shiloh, for example, should therefore be registered as having been born in "Shiloh, Samaria."
um. is the claim that the interior details of passport entries of american citizens born in the west bank - in their myriads - is a major or substantive or any sort of issue? at any rate, spending the next couple of years on that, or its ilk, will keep us from taking up any actual issue; if nothing else, it's a delaying tactic. why in the world would you insist that if we are (supposedly) consulting the 1948 borders on this massively trivial issue, we should use the names extant (only among israelis!) for place names in that year? obviously, to insist that we call a place by the name it is called in your holy book but not in theirs is just a demand for an empty subordination to your ideology.
and it has some sort of magical claim or force, i think: the names we print on passports are going to, say, ameliorate or erase concrete forms of injustice, or concrete exclusions from citizenship etc. in its typical waffling between realities of the current situation and the teachings of the hebrew bible and the lamentations of millennia, along with talmudic parsings of irrelevant details as slights, we see a consciousness that simply cannot be turned to compromise. and we see, ultimately, a consciousness that doesn't register any practical interests, even its own, that ultimately displays no everyday contact with everyday reality.
the argument, it seems to me, is that all this is ours and your claims have no basis, on the grounds that my religion teaches that it is, or in short, that only we count or have access to the truth. ok, well, i guess if that makes you happy or keeps your traditions alive. but obviously it makes no claim whatever on people who don't share your elaborate and, er, completely arbitrary or contingent belief system. if medad is actually trying to say that the obama admin should do something differently, he needs - putting it mildly - a form of argument that is recognized more widely than in some group of esoteric kabbalists.
this, we might say, is the legitimate function of "reason," of which, as you may know, i am often skeptical. i will argue about what might bring peace or prosperity or reduce oppression and so on. but, like obama and anyone else who is not inside your hermetic discourse, i cannot take seriously as guidelines for policy the names by which places are called in your holy book and suchlike. you cannot take your esoteric doctrines and use them as a mode of outreach, or an appeal to policy-makers who don't really know or care to know what your esoteric doctrines are.
to be honest, i'd like to know who decided to publish that as an op-ed column in the latimes (for which i've written dozens of essays over the years). it just doesn't appear to be comprehensible to anyone outside a small fundamentalist community. how insular or detached from reality that community is is demonstrated by the fact that medad appears to believe he is making some kind of argument for a general audience.