The Playgoer: Seth Greenland @ Huffington

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Monday, April 17, 2006

Seth Greenland @ Huffington

One playwright who is speaking out on the "Rachel Corrie" issue is Seth Greenland, over at his Huffington Post blog. But speaking out... against the play. He seems to take issue with her politics, and counters by defending Israel's actions and questioning the canonization of her over martyrs on the other side.

Whatever. The most objectionable of his points to me is:

The spin: She was killed defending Palestinian homes.
The fact: The homes protected tunnels through which weapons were being smuggled to attack Israeli civilians.

Isn't this contested? Especially in the case of the specific home she was trying to protect?

Seth, do you have any evidence she was lying about that particular home?

(The full--unmoderated--comments on this at Huffington give the usual scary diversity of opinion on these matters.)

1 comment:

freespeechlover said...

On Seth Greenfield's post--Yawn, Yawn, Yawn. There is no other place in the world, outside the U.S., where you can't have a reasonable debate about Israeli policy. In the U.S., you will find yourself caught in a whirlpool of over the top, sentimentalized, ignorant views of Israel and its supposed awful daily life, filled with terrorist bombings. What you're not allowed to witness and then say out loud in public is what daily life looks like from the ground up in places like Rafah.

I've spent a lot of time in both Israel and the Occupied Territories, and the difference in daily life is like night and day. Israel does suffer from terrorism but not on a daily basis. Most of the time life is like any first world country. Drive ten kilometers, and you are in a Third World country socio-economically. I've lived through missile attacks by the Israeli military. The weapons disparity between the two sides is one of the least understood aspects of what is not a war but a campaign aimed at keeping Palestinians imprisoned on what remains of their land and then making the world think that there's one embattled democracy against a vast irrational "entity" that must be punished for every act that one of "their's" commits.

Frankly, the entire discussion of Israel and the Palestinians in the U.S., except on the margins, is a great big bore and way behind what is discussed in Britain or Canada, even.