The State of the Blogger

My gentle readers (affectionately known as "you three"), Aine Bina is developing a stomach ache of massive proportions. The Israeli-Lebanon crisis is the cause of my gastro-intestinal woes. This is not an entry, like the last one, that speaks directly to the issue, but rather to the fall-out of the issue. Specifically, my personal fall-out. I am a Zionist. I support Israel's right to exist and its right to defend itself. But that does not mean that I think it is without failing or fault, or that I wish to give it a carte blanche to do whatever it wants. First, no country is without failing or fault, and there is no reason to expect that Israel should be any different from the rest of the world. Second, I do not wish to engage in the sort of rampant ethnic chauvinism that so frequently breeds terrorists and hate-mongers. Yet I find myself in a difficult position. It seems that there is no such thing as a fair and unbiased report of the situation. Of course, it is hard to know what is fair and unbiased when one is already biased. I would not wish to become one of those people (and I personally know at least one) who says "This person holds the same opinions as I do; at last, an unbiased account." And yet it seems very difficult to find the unique person who truly sees the situation for what it is. I expect to recognize this person (or organization) when they can present criticism of all parties involved, because it is false to set up this dichotomy as one of brutal oppressors and brave, pure freedom fighters. It is equally false to look at this as a situation of racist, selfish terrorists and an embattled bastion of democracy and goodness, though that one rings closer to the truth for me in many ways. It isn't that I think Israel is always completely blameless in its actions, but I do think that the major instigators like Hezbollah and Hamas claim to do things in the name of downtrodden Muslims when they really couldn't care less. I don't think Hezbollah's goals are universal health care and a Utopian Middle East free of religious prejudice and intolerance. I don't think Hezbollah expects anyone to think that. It would be so easy to just take the hard-line Zionist stance and insist that Israel is only defending itself and has made no wrong moves in this conflict or in its history at all. But that would be wrong of me. Just as it is wrong of Muslims to say that Hezbollah's actions are justified or that the civilians of many Middle Eastern countries aren't in many cases as horribly oppressed by their own "compatriots" as they are by some great, evil, Westernizing force. There is always a greater complexity to international issues. Always. More so in the Middle East, which has been a center of strife for as long as humanity has kept written records. And it's greatly distressing that I feel as if there is no one that I can trust on this issue, least of all myself.

Once again, Aine Bina finds herself wishing she could move into some nice log cabin in the woods and pretend the world does not exist.