>First, you have me wrong - particularly the pious comment. I'm secular.
My apologies, but I was thinking of the pious tone of some of the things I've read in Tikkun...
>Second, do you think its possible that violent resistance - of this sort -
>when practiced by the oppressed, might possibly lead to the oppressed
>becoming morally indistinct from their oppressors?
No, but I do accept that the oppressed can become oppressors. I don't think that Hezbollah are morally indistinct from the IDF. That's simply untrue, both quantitatively and qualitatively.
>The Jewish/Zionist experience during the 20th century is quite
>instructive. I personally decided during the last Lebanon war - when I
>came of draft age - to not do my obligatory IDF service on this basis.
>
>I've never regretted it.
That pleases me more than you would bear to hear. However. Regarding the Zionist experience, surely the point here is that an ideological clique was able to persuade people on the basis of quite pressing and obviously rational fears that they should take to Palestine? Let me put it like this: if LEHI had used its methods in Munich rather than Palestine, I wouldn't have had a problem. If Haganah had been busily blowing up German railroads, I think I should have considered them heroic. In this case, Hezbollah is not colonising or ethnically cleansing anyone, nor is it stealing land. It is engaging in tactics that I personally would not use (because I tend to prefer political mass action to military vanguardism), and I certainly don't think it's a good or even wise tactic to send rockets into Haifa. But it is not indistinguishable from its oppressors.
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