shame, and anger
by tobybee
If you read the Age today, as I just did, you would have seen three articles about Israel’s actions, two of which are nothing but horrifying. The first explains that, yes, in the 1990s Israel took dead peoples body parts without permission from the people themselves (prior to their deaths) or their families. They removed corneas, skin, heart valves and bones from Palestinians, Israelis and foreign workers. When accusations about this practice were made in a Swedish newspaper earlier this year, the Israeli government flatly denied it. And now we learn that it is true. And though they say that the practice has ended, I don’t see how we can believe them.
The second article talks about the impact of Operation Cast Lead on the children of Gaza, and their parents. It says that 75 percent of the children in Gaza have at least one symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder. One in ten of these children has every symptom. And the problems aren’t just from the bombardment that took place: because of Israel’s continued blockade of Gaza, the materials for rebuilding houses, for providing proper food and educational materials, are not getting into Gaza. People are still living in tents, in overcrowded conditions. Because Israel bombed the sewage treatment plant in Gaza in 2006, there is raw sewage being pumped into the Mediterranean, so when families play in the water – one of the few recreational activities available to them – they are getting sick.
So I read these articles, and I wonder how anyone justifies these practices. What has to happen to one’s brain, to one’s sense of humanity, to be able to assert that these are acceptable things for a Jewish State to be perpetrating? Without a doubt, this is not my idea of Jewishness. My Jewishness disavows these actions.
jew on this 
I think where you go wrong is attributing to your “Jewishness” your inclination to disavow the actions of some of your fellow Jews. I also condemn such actions, but I’m not Jewish, so to what am I to attribute my inclination to condem their actions? To my Irish/Scottish/Germanness?
I hardly think so. Where one hails from is important in many ways, but the answer which fits all cases is that moral and ethical sensibilities arise as an integral part of the *human* condition. Not the Jewish condition, or the Irish/Scottish/Germanic condition, etc.
I guess in the context of discussing the actions of the Israeli State, which makes a claim for being a Jewish state, and thereby claims to a great degree, I think, to determine the parameters of Jewishness, it is important that those of us who are Jewish and do not support the actions of that State say so in the name of being Jewish. I’m trying to (perhaps not clearly) demonstrate that what Israel is doing is not inherently Jewish, and that there are other ways in which a Jewish morality and ethics is enacted. So it is important, I think, that I say that it is in the name of my Jewishness that I disavow these actions of the Israeli State.
Also, I really don’t believe in a universal human condition/ethics etc. We may get to the same answer from different origins – for me it is my Jewishness here, for you it may be your Irishness etc – but how we get there matters, and has a particular history and context. I just don’t think that such universals as a human condition exist, as the concept seems a bit ahistorical to me.
So another way of looking at it is, you’re saying that the Israeli State “isn’t being Jewish” whenever it does bad things. What makes you think anyone should believe you when you claim this? It’s not as if Israel doesn’t have a history of bombing civilian Arab populations, or of trampling people’s human rights.
“Also, I really don’t believe in a universal human condition/ethics etc. … I just don’t think that such universals as a human condition exist, as the concept seems a bit ahistorical to me.”
You, and those before you in the “Humanities” section of universities throughout the world, are the ones who demand an untenable universality regarding the human condition – you demand that *nothing* be considered universal. But science doesn’t agree with you that there are no universals. From physics to chemistry to biology to anthropology, it’s patently obvious that there are universals, the only question is what exactly they are. And the challenge is to see clearly what they are, together.
To insist that ethics has no foundation, other than the preferences and proclivities of the particular culture in question, seems to me to be a belief destined to produce a mindset which would think nothing of denying an outside group the same rights enjoyed by an in-group. And as it happens, this, to my eyes, is precisely what Israel appears to be guilty of doing in its treatment of Palestinians.