I am beginning to wonder if one of the greatest tragedies post-WWII and the Holocaust wasn't the creation of the state of Israel. Perhaps we should look on Israel as yet another of colonialism's failures, as European rulers divvied up their once-conquered lands along artificial and arbitrary lines, leaving in their wake a history of civil wars, coups, international conflict, and genocide.
Would Israel have existed without the Holocaust? I'm not talking about the historic/Biblical version...that's as useful as talking about the Roman Empire...I'm talking about the modern version created by the United Nations in 1947 (and yes of course for those completionists, promised by the British in the "Balfour Declaration," which justified the expansion of the British Empire in the great colonial land-shift known as the Great War). From the beginning it was a mess, with the Arab groups rejecting the partition and the UN unable -- like the British before them -- to develop a plan that would make war less likely.
Well, we're sixty years beyond the Israeli declaration of independence, so it's a bit late to put that horse back in the barn, isn't it?
Meanwhile, Gaza's being flattened in an apparent bid to burn down the house and everyone in it to catch a few rats.
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