Nounsandverbs' Corollaries to Godwin's Law:

1) Bringing the Israel/Palestinian conflict into any discussion is the semantic equivalent of making comparisons to the Nazis and/or Hitler.

2) Once the Israel/Palestinian conflict is brought into a discussion, the discussion is finished -- as, according to Godwin's Law, it would be in the case of a comparison to the Nazis and/or Hitler.

3) All discussions regarding the Israel/Palestinian conflict are futile. There should be none.

Corollary #3 is why I am disabling comments -- I have no desire to police a discussion which would most certainly need policing. Y'all are welcome to say what you want -- on your own journals. And many of you have.

Anyway, I don't have much to say about the current hostilities in the Gaza strip -- although I have been reading about them a fair bit, in both the mainstream and "alternative" press, in left-wing and right-wing outlets, in "unbiased" and proudly biased media.

I find the killing of innocents deplorable, no matter which side the innocents or the killers are on. I wish we didn't live in a world where people found it necessary to commit such actions.

As to whether such actions are necessary, and by whom -- I won't be dipping a toe into that argument.

I will say a few other things. Since I've already brought up Godwin's Law: I've read several things comparing Israel to Nazi Germany for its current actions. That comparison might be somewhat apt if Jews in Germany in 1932 had embarked on a sustained program of shelling German towns -- and if Germany, after nearly a decade of this, had then decided it was "forced" to exterminate the Jews. (And even then the analogy does not hold. The Jews in 1930s Germany were ostensibly German citizens; they were denied citizenship and subsequently exterminated by their own government. The non-combatants in the current hostilities are citizens of Palestine; they are being killed by a country with which their government is at war. The killing of non-combatants is deplorable in both cases, but the two cases are not remotely similar.)

I have one more thing to say -- about the word "Zionists." The word was coined at the end of the 19th century to describe the organized movement of Jews who wanted -- and built, by mostly legal means -- a state on the land that is now the state of Israel. It was never a neutral word -- no one has ever been neutral about anything involving Jews -- but it did not become an overtly derogatory term until recently. It is used by terrorists and their sympathizers as code for all Jews. It allows them to claim that they are not anti-Semitic -- since their hatred is ostensibly directed not at Jews, but at "Zionists." More recently, its definition has been expanded to include any individual or government perceived to be an ally of Israel -- including Americans.

I would like to stand up and say -- as I think more people should -- that I am a Jew and an American. I don't think everything Israel does is right, just as I don't think everything America does is right. But I refuse to have any discussion about those issues using inexact terminology. I am a Jew and an American. That is what I am.