jdledell, I've just finished reading your entire blog & commentary. I knew from brief encounters with you on M.J. Rosenberg's blog that I was interested in reading you, but truly, I was not expecting something like this. It is as if you have blown the top off a nightmare.

I have no trouble at all accepting your account of what is happening to Israel, for two reasons. First, I have participated in other Israel/US forums and other writers have alluded to the dark situation in the Occupied Territories, but they were unable to describe it as you have. They were reduced to simply saying, "you have to go there, to see for yourself".

And second, I am thinking about other countries, in South America and elsewhere, where the end result of US imperialistic meddling in the affairs of other nations is always the same production of nightmares. I think Israel may be another casualty of the US Empire. Although, to be sure, the Zionists always did have the tendency to try to harness the imperialistic ambitions of first the British and then the Americans. Hannah Arendt deplored the early Zionist strategy of relying on the imperial power du jour for the security of the fledgling State, rather than on the goodwill of the neighbors.

This is from 'Dragon Slayers' by Corey Robin

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n01/robi02_.html

' ..... Zionist leaders looked to the "great powers" for support rather than to their future neighbors. Arendt's disagreement here was both moral -- "by taking advantage of imperialistic interests", she wrote in 1944, the Zionists had collaborated "with the most evil forces of our time" -- and strategic. At the very moment that imperialism was being challenged throughout the world, Zionism had attached itself to a universally maligned form. "Only folly could dictate a policy that trusts distant imperial power for protection, while alienating the goodwill of neighbors," she wrote. In a 1950 essay, she declared that Zionists simply ignored or failed to understand "the awakening of colonial peoples and the new nationalist solidarity in the Arab world from Iraq to French Morocco". Self-styled realists, they were profoundly unrealistic. They "mistook decisions of great powers for the ultimate realities", she wrote in 1948, when "the only permanent reality in the whole constellation was the presence of Arabs in Palestine."

I don't have the same deep love for Israel that you do, but like you, I do fervently hope that Israel can somehow pull herself out of this tailspin, can yet fulfill her early potential as a light unto the nations. I hope the same for America. Like it or not, our destinies are joined.

It occurred to me that your entire blog, commentary and all, if it were bundled up and sent off to a movie-maker could be the rough draft of a screenplay. It would make a great movie, and it might do some good. The climax, of course, would be the scene at the checkpoint where you tried to attack the IDF soldier with your crutch. The beginning would be when your grandfather took you to Israel in 1955 and explained to you, with his history, why he left it. His explanation makes a fascinating counterpoint to Arendt's. Why don't you send off this material and see what comes back.

Best wishes to you and to the wonderful family you created. Thank you for sharing your life with us.