Thanks I ll edit from the beginning of next month No harm in dropping a reply to your note since writing here is hardly editing wiki Were Michael s mind open to rational persuasion he would have yielded on this long before His objection is at this point ideological More examples will not convince him That we all get things wrong at times is easy to see What is more difficult to understand is why we get things wrong and why we persist in error On the Israeli Jewish side of this common problem there are two elements one cultural one a matter of the politics of image forging to win a global consensus by affecting the way events and history are perceived I think Michael s error is to be classified in the former which is basically rooted in a long tradition of thinking in terms of Jewish exceptionalism and therefore any analogies that may arise from the kind of descriptive language used to characterise Palestinian realities that might remind one of similar Jewish realities is repressed Michael dislikes uprising because there is the possibility that it might create a subliminal nexus with the Warsaw uprising There is a deeper analogy The Romans crushed Bar Kochba s revolt which in the historical literature is often described as an uprising and under Hadrian set out to Romanize Judea The creation of Israel vindicates Bar Kochba but also in rejudaising Palestine creates an implicit structural analogy between the fanatic resistance of Bar Kochba and the PLO Hamas the Al Aqsa type violence esp sacred violence in the name of national restoration This analogy is naturally repugnant to a cast of mind rooted in the myths of Jewish exceptionalism since those who evoke the myth of Masada must at the same time war down a native people who are battling from the redoubts of their rocky bantustans against the judaisation of their native and sacred territory very much as Bar Kochba himself did Rabbinical schools after the failure of Bar Kochba developed a doctrine of submission to foreign states one which lasted until the creation of Israel redeemed the earlier foundational myths of the Book of Joshua and dispelled cringing by recurring to the heroic militancy of the first invasion of Canaan Ironically what is expected of Palestinians is that they cringe before the power of Israel s occupation any phenomenon bearing a generic resemblance to the sicarii or zealotism is dismissed as an appalling Arab cultural trait though in fact it resonates mutatis mutandis with analogies from Jewish history under the Roman empire from Titus to Hadrian where militant fanaticism and zealotism in the name of national autonomy flourished The early Zionists from Jabotinsky to Ben Gurion to Moshe Dayan and Menachem Begin were perfectly aware that their policies bore these ironic resonances Being thorough realists they didn t have to kid themselves Today we live in the fog of public opinion myths where these ironical analogies are elided from consciousness People are raised on the standard clich s endlessly recycled by hasbara machines and underwrite them sincerely because they no longer have much of a sense of history Much could be said of this But this is not the place Regards