{"id":7236,"date":"2010-06-14T18:41:06","date_gmt":"2010-06-15T02:41:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=7236"},"modified":"2010-06-14T18:41:06","modified_gmt":"2010-06-15T02:41:06","slug":"victor-davis-hanson-is-very-confused","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2010\/06\/14\/victor-davis-hanson-is-very-confused\/","title":{"rendered":"Victor Davis Hanson Is Very Confused"},"content":{"rendered":"

Victor Davis Hanson: With Obama and his moral equivalence, Israel is hardly any better than Hamas or Hezbollah or the Palestinian Authority. I wonder, though, if they really believe that.<\/p>\n

What if a Jew says he wants to live in Ramallah because it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a nice place? Arabs live in Nazareth and other places in Israel, so what if a Jew says he wants to be a Palestinian citizen?<\/p>\n

Michael J. Totten: That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s impossible.<\/p>\n

VDH: Jews aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t allowed there.<\/p>\n

MJT: It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s crazy, isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t it?<\/p>\n

VDH: That fact all by itself should tell the Obama administration that there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s something weird about that place and there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no moral equivalence.<\/p>\n

~ Interview with Michael J. Totten<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

VDH\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s implication \u00e2\u20ac\u201d that Palestinians are free to move to Israel at will, while Israelis are not similarly free to move to the West Bank \u00e2\u20ac\u201d is, to say the least, peculiar. Still, he has no need to worry. Any Jew who takes a fancy to the Ramallah area \u00e2\u20ac\u201d whether or not they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve so much as set foot in the region before \u00e2\u20ac\u201d is free to move to any of the several settlements<\/a> that surround the city, where he or she will enjoy tax breaks, cheap housing, and government subsidies. But what about the reverse? What if a Palestinian from Ramallah decides that he or she wants to live in Tel Aviv (\u00e2\u20ac\u0153because it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a nice place\u00e2\u20ac\u009d)? More to the point, what if a Palestinian whose family was driven from the Nazareth area<\/a> in 1948 wants to move to Nazareth? VDH settles for implying (rather than stating explicitly) that they are free to do so, because he clearly knows (but chooses not to dwell on) the fact that this would be impossible. To allow it would be to open the door to the right of return, and thus \u00e2\u20ac\u201d as VDH would surely warn apocalyptically \u00e2\u20ac\u201d the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153destruction of Israel\u00e2\u20ac\u009d.<\/p>\n

It should surprise no one that VDH displays an understanding of the issues at stake that is almost entirely backward. Still, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s revealing that he holds up this particular example as proof that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no moral equivalence\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in the conflict.<\/p>\n

(For anyone who hasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t read it, now is as good a time as any to plug Chase Madar\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s brilliant VDH parody<\/a> from last year\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s American Conservative<\/em>.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Victor Davis Hanson: With Obama and his moral equivalence, Israel is hardly any better than Hamas or Hezbollah or the Palestinian Authority. I wonder, though, if they really believe that. What if a Jew says he wants to live in Ramallah because it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a nice place? Arabs live in Nazareth and other places in Israel, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":70,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-7236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/70"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7236"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7236\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7237,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7236\/revisions\/7237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7236"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=7236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}