On Thu, 14 Nov 2002, Liza Featherstone wrote:
> But I do blame my careless reading partly on a legitimate irritation
> with Lerner: the friendship and solidarity between these communities
> seems like something to foreground, not stick in the PPS of a rant about
> the need to condemn terror. In fact, though I don't disagree with him
> about the importance of condemning terror and murder, I'd also say that
> genuine friendship and solidarity among peoples is a hell of a lot more
> important.
You're completely right, I feel exactly the same, and you weren't a careless reader, he was a sloppy writer. I just think he mumbled it the way he did because he's a bad writer rather than because of how he thinks. For all his faults, this theme of genuine friendship and solidarity among peoples has always been Lerner's main bag, he's downright goopy with it. So I think when he broadcast this email, he didn't see himself from the outside and realize he needed to foreground it once again, that that's a message that can never been taken for granted, even from him. He was too possessed with his main point, which I have to admit, he did manage to bug me with. Namely that this would be the perfect murder if you were Hamas, and you wanted to kill all chance of compromise. Of course, then you should attack the compromisers and kill all compromise. It's elementary extremist strategy, it's been used in lots of resistance movements, and Metzer would fit in perfectly precisely because it was so exemplary. But instead this attack was claimed by the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, which is al-Fatah, which most of us have been thinking up until now have at least some sense in their head, and which have been rumored lately to have been trying to talk some sense into Hamas along the lines of keeping attacks outside the green line to emphasize that this is over the territories. But this makes it look like their ranks are filled with idiot gunsels too. Which, if you take it seriously, suggests there aren't any Palestinian armed organizations left that have any sense when it comes to how attacks affect their cause.
That doesn't mean there aren't lots of people left to build peace on. But it is a little unsettling. I hope it's not a trend and that these guys are outliers.
Michael