Let me clear my throat
These past couple of years, I've really started to warm up to Israel as a country. The past month has shattered that. I still love my Israeli friends, and think everyday about my amazing trip to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in August 2007. The beauty, resilience and history that I faced convinced me of not only the importance of Israel's survival, but the sight of cardboard colonies in the West Bank and Gaza (visible as we drove down the highways, cordoned off by high fences) was a grim and dark reminder that the stunning landscape lacked justice and fairness. I spent an evening in the mosque (the only mosque) by the King David Intercontinental and heard the Arab Israeli cab drivers seethe. They may live peacefully, but they scrape by an honest living and feel the humiliation and discrimination in an otherwise democratic, sophisticated society.
It's gone too far. I was in third grade when Yitzhak Rabin said, "Enough, enough of blood and tears." The historic image of Arafat and Rabin on the White House lawn with Clinton hung in my primary school library. Two years later I remember my father getting emotional watching the celebrations in the streets over the Oslo Accords. Whoever thought that we'd ever look back to the 1990s with such nostalgia?
I've heard the Obama campaign rhetoric as he strove to win the Democratic vote. I just pray that we don't have another Democrat in office who is so blinded to being a friend of Israel that he forgets to be a friend of everything the United States stands for--justice, human rights and prosperity.
It's gone too far. I was in third grade when Yitzhak Rabin said, "Enough, enough of blood and tears." The historic image of Arafat and Rabin on the White House lawn with Clinton hung in my primary school library. Two years later I remember my father getting emotional watching the celebrations in the streets over the Oslo Accords. Whoever thought that we'd ever look back to the 1990s with such nostalgia?
I've heard the Obama campaign rhetoric as he strove to win the Democratic vote. I just pray that we don't have another Democrat in office who is so blinded to being a friend of Israel that he forgets to be a friend of everything the United States stands for--justice, human rights and prosperity.