For a few classes a week I serve as an inclusion teacher for 7th grade history. Two lessons have really stuck with me, and for lack of the time and energy it would take to buffer this connection, I'll just admit to having a one-track mind.

Lesson One: The American Revolution

"Give me liberty or give me death"-Patrick Henry

Why did this remind me of Palestine? I remember biking over the Jeff Davis bridge after school the day we did that lesson, and suddenly thinking about the Cult of Death, or rather the Paletsinian obsession with dying and killing. It's a popular substitute for meaningful dialogue on terrorism. David Brooks, an NYTimes columnist, wrote an article on it in 2004:

This cult attaches itself to a political cause but parasitically strangles it. The death cult has strangled the dream of a Palestinian state. The suicide bombers have not brought peace to Palestine; they've brought reprisals. The car bombers are not pushing the U.S. out of Iraq; they're forcing us to stay longer. The death cult is now strangling the Chechen cause, and will bring not independence but blood.

But that's the idea. Because the death cult is not really about the cause it purports to serve. It's about the sheer pleasure of killing and dying.

It's about massacring people while in a state of spiritual loftiness. It's about experiencing the total freedom of barbarism - freedom even from human nature, which says, Love children, and Love life. It's about the joy of sadism and suicide.
Read the rest, it's very uplifting.

Why does our own freedom fight go in the "good box" and Palestine's in the bad? Mr. Brooks waxes sociological without context, the oxymoron.

Give me liberty or give me death. What was the American Revolution but a "shaking off" of the British occupation, an intifada?

Interesting post on this subject-Aaron's Israel Peace Blog


Second Lesson: Presidents and Precedents

The following is a quote from George Washington's Farewell Address, regarding the dangers of foreign attachments:

The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest.

...a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation), facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; gilding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation.

Of the countless reasons George might be doing backflips in his grave, one in particular stands out: our relationship with Israel. I'd like to think my senators and representatives can speak their minds on the billions of U.S. tax dollars that fund Israel's illegal occupation. I'd like to think they could voice their concerns, or choose not to support it...and keep their jobs. That's what I would hope for my democratically elected officials.

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, assert that while the nature of a lobby is to exert political pressure, there is something especially disturbing about this "special relationship."

"No lobby has managed to divert U.S. foreign policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that U.S. and Israeli interests are essentially identical." They argue that "in its basic operations, it is no different from interest groups like the Farm Lobby, steel and textile workers, and other ethnic lobbies. What sets the Israel Lobby apart is its extraordinary effectiveness." According to Mearsheimer and Walt, the "loose coalition" that makes up the Lobby has "significant leverage over the Executive branch", as well as the ability to make sure that the "Lobby's perspective on Israel is widely reflected in the mainstream media." They claim that AIPAC in particular has a "stranglehold on the U.S. Congress", due to its "ability to reward legislators and congressional candidates who support its agenda, and to punish those who challenge it."

Another reason I am inspired by 7th grade history. And depressed by it.

Read more about the Israel Lobby in the London Review of Books, the most circulated literary/political magazine in Europe. It is a fortnightly publication.

(I like to use the word 'fortnight.')

Jerusalem Post on the London Review of Book's "virulently anti-Israel" stance.