Where Peace Comes To Die

Another interesting piece from today's Haaretz, this one by Bradley Burston. In it he sets out "ten ways to make sure that peace stays dead":

1. There is only one side to any story. My side.

2. The people on the other side, children included, are undeserving of sympathy.

3. Even the maimed and the dead on the other side are undeserving of sympathy.

4. The term massacre may only be used to describe casualties on my side.

5. The automatic fire, bombing, shelling or other lethal action taken by my side are acts of self-defense. If there are fatalities as a result of fire by my side, whether intentional or incidental, they deserved to die.

Pro-Israel version I: Palestinian terrorists are to blame for the deaths, as they operate in residential areas, drawing fire that kills innocent civilians.

Pro-Israel version II: They're all terrorists. They all deserve what they get.

Pro-Palestinian version I: Suicide bombings, Qassams and drive-by's are the only defense that a vastly out-gunned people has against well-armed occupation forces.

Pro-Palestinian version II: All Israelis ultimately serve in the army, so all are legitimate targets.

6. The concept of drawing comparisons of moral equivalency or mutual responsibility for violence is, in all cases, obscene, disgraceful, artificial, mendacious. All political, military, social and religious modalities can be reduced to pure victims and pure villains, which is to say, Us and Them, which is to say, Us and animals/murderers/mass-murderers/racist genocidalists/Nazis/Hitler.

Option 7A: The goal of the left, the center, this newspaper, its writers, even some of its readers, is the destruction of the state of Israel.

Option 7B: The destruction of Israel is a worthwhile goal.

8. If I am a pro-Israel extremist, responding to a pro-Israel moderate, I should attack and dismiss the writer as a whiner, a crybaby, a defeatist, a moron, a wimp, an imbecile, a self-hater, an extreme leftist, naïve, brainwashed, a pipe-dreamer, duped by the pro-Arab bias of the mass media, a traitor.

9. If I am a pro-Palestinian extremist, responding to a pro-Palestinian moderate, I should immediately dismiss the writer as a sell-out, a fool, misguided, an Uncle Tom, unaware of the real facts, duped by a the pro-Israel bias of the mass media, a traitor.

10. The depth of my conviction, that is, the degree of my extremism, is directly proportional to the distance from my home to the Holy Land. The farther away, the more foaming-at-the-mouth my fanaticism.

Gee Brad, you've got a point there. In fact, you've got ten of them.