My letter to the NYTimes RE "Come Home to Israel"

RE: Come Home to Israel
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/06/opinion/cohen-come-home-to-israel.html?_r=1&ref=global

Dear Editor,

Cohen takes the right approach in realizing that American Jews really should be outraged by Israel's brutality and injustice vis-a-vis the Palestinians, but I think he is wrong to assume Israel will never lose U.S. support. Modern history clearly shows that modern nation states can and do shift from friend to enemy to friend. Personal and political and economic relationships are not locked in stone, they continuously change for better or worse.

Cohen is also wrong to still believe that Israel's "Jewish Democracy" is worth preserving: Jewish people are worth respecting & protecting (and so are Palestinian people), and Jewish identity is worth shaping (as is Palestinian identity- and Israeli identity), but coercing taxpayers into funding Israel's Jewishness (or Palestine's Islamification) is a bad idea that can not help but have increasingly detrimental ramifications.

A fully secular two state solution ASAP to once and for all end the cruel insanities, the violence, the bigotry and the religious extremism created by the Israel-Palestine conflict really is the best way forward.

Sincerely,
Anne Selden Annab

NOTES
"Palestinians, since the inception of the PLO in 1965, have espoused a secular philosophy for their liberation and have prided themselves on their respect for political plurality." Joharah Baker Hamas Should Watch its Step

"Hillary Clinton said over the weekend that requirements for women to ride in the back of some Jerusalem bus routes reminds her of segregated busing during the height of the civil rights era in the south. She also said that the country's growing religious right reminds her of Iran, according to press accounts of her closed-door remarks in Washington. " Hillary Clinton compares parts of Israel to Jim Crow south: Over the weekend, Hillary Clinton targeted rising religious extremism in Israel, something that could one day open a rift between the US and the Jewish state.

"Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home - so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world."Eleanor Roosevelt

GROWING GARDENS FOR PALESTINE