Dan Callahan: Eva Marie Saint, Oscar-winning star of "On the Waterfront" and "North by Northwest," dies at 102
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Advocate: Samuel Alito blames marriage equality for America’s "decisive" turn "against religious liberty"
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Hot Cat of the Day: A change of seasons
Someone really needs to conduct research on how a single topic can overtake a person's entire life and personality, which perhaps ironically makes me think of her counterparts on the other side: I'm looking at you, #FreePalestine loons, who act as though the story began in 1948. You can condemn the suffering and displacement of Palestinians without acting as though Israel was created in a vacuum. Its founding came after centuries of antisemitic persecution, expulsions and pogroms across Europe and elsewhere, culminating in the Holocaust, when six million Jews were murdered and much of the world had proved unwilling to protect them -- or even, in many cases, to give those fleeing persecution somewhere to go. None of that erases what happened to Palestinians -- or what is happening to them now. But neither does Palestinian suffering erase the history that made the idea of a Jewish homeland seem not merely desirable to many Jews, but a matter of survival. Which is also why chanting "From the river to the sea" isn't the uncomplicated call for liberation some people seem to pretend it is: no matter what the speaker intends by it, many of us hear a demand for a future in which the Jewish state no longer exists.
My husband made a good analogy at dinner last night: the Crusades are now largely remembered as a bunch of fanatical Christians invading Muslim lands and slaughtering people in the name of religion. And plenty of that happened. But the Crusades didn't spring from nowhere, either. They came after centuries of conflict between Christian and Muslim powers, including Muslim conquest of formerly Christian lands. None of that excuses the slaughter and brutality of the Crusades. The point is that starting the clock at 1095 produces a much simpler story than understanding what led to 1095 -- just as starting the Israeli-Palestinian story in 1948 does.
