Ehud Olmert in Haartez: Israel Is Conducting a Systematic Campaign of Ethnic Cleansing and Crimes Against Humanity in the West Bank
Lots of people will share piece this and shout SEE?!?!? SEE?!?!, but they shouldn’t, because it’s a tapestry woven from a dozen kinds of ambivalence. My read: OT1H, Olmert is working through the five stages of grief; OT2H, he’s trying to chart a new and better course — not just for himself — in a context where everyone who politically matters can be assessed on a scale that runs from directly complicit to guilty ‘af.’ If you read his essay that way, as an exploratory rather than confirmatory text, you’ll see that the majority of it is devoted to a scholastic exercise in finding guilt without assigning it. Why? Because he’s trying to give a crazy quilt of conflicting constituencies face-saving ways to moonwalk out of the corner Israel has painted itself into. That’s a Good Thing, and if your political beliefs are so “absolute” that you can’t acknowledge it as such, then you live in a fantasy land and have no business imposing your views on a world where nothing is ever absolute.