I often read The Student Life expecting the worst arguments and unfortunately, it often delivers.
But Rebecca Golden's op-ed, titled misleadingly, "The Israel/Palestine Conflict: A 'Proportionate Response,'" finally provided the response to the anti-Israel arguments that have become far too commonplace at the Claremont Colleges. Go out and get a copy of The Student Life for this powerful rebuttal to the old saw about Israel's "proportionate" responses.
Those of us who have become friends of Israel find ourselves shaking our heads at the kinds of silly arguments written up in the most recent Claremont Port Side or in past issues of The Student Life.
The final paragraph is one of the strongest.
A "sense of historicity" shows that the Middle East is rife with dozens of fault lines -- religious, ethnic, geographic, gender, generational, and economic. Israel did not create these fault lines, and blaming Israel as the root cause of the Middle East problems won't solve any of them. There's nothing terribly interesting about disagreeing with Israeli policies, since not even any two Israel's [sic] can agree on Israeli policies. But placing all of the problems of the Middle East on a country with a tiny fraction of the area's land and population is, well, a bit much.
