Bradley Burston: I envy the people who hate IsraelHaaretz: At times like these, I envy the people who passionately, frankly, with all their hearts, despise Israel. Hate Israel enough, and the Jewish state's failings and blunders, its self-satisfied blindness and its resultant self-destructive policies, cause not pain, but delight... Hate Israel enough, and you may come to believe not only that the country deserves to be punished to the point of replacement by a different state -- [but also that] Israel may do the job all by itself...
I have made my peace with the fact that this is not the same country I moved to, so long ago. I learned when I first came, that Israel was not the country I'd thought I was moving to...
There was once a time when Israel longed to be a member in good standing of the community of nations... No longer.... Israel, at its highest level, has decided that the job of delegitimizing the Jewish state must not be left to foreigners and amateurs. Showing itself desperate to be a pariah state, Israel will now get it done on its own...
What the far-left from Britain to Berkeley has been unable to bring off -- a sense among Israel's allies that Israel has become a heartless, morally heedless aggressor state worthy of sanction and shunning -- the far-right in Israel's own government, and in particular, its foreign ministry, seems determined to inculcate to the full...
No one can defend this anymore. There's too much that looks bad, and too much of it is true... My wife, who cares about this country as deeply as anyone, was singing this morning, but with a smile I have come to recognize as a sign of pain. '... And they call the state Pariah..'...
Intelligent people who are too smart to be able to see themselves clearly, render themselves stupid. And countries which cannot bear to look, even if they have good reasons, render themselves dangerous -- first of all, to themselves... My father did not flee the Soviet Union just so his son could one day have the chance to live in a place just like it.
