An editor's notebook
Hoyt, Robert G.
AN EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK THE LAND IS HOLY KEEP IT THAT WAY If "spin control" means getting others to see a situation the way we want it to be seen, it's neither good nor bad in itself; it can be...
...They are still atrocious...
...particularly if those who now control them can give up control generously and with grace...
...The problem is in distinguishing between the artful but true and the merely tricky...
...I'll be doing it here...
...This stuff may not be of much use to spin controllers defending U.S...
...because sources are cited and rebuttals are given space...
...Enter spin control, focusing in large part, as so often, on motives...
...Partisans of the Israeli government say that George Bush and James Baker are using U.S...
...I have always approached the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as essentially a political issue, involving questions both of abstract justice and doable pragmatism...
...I still reject the claim...
...Treasury to lower interest costs (though, by the time this reaches print, it may have abandoned the effort...
...Cain was practicing spin control when he asked the Lord, "Am I my brother's keeper...
...The Jewish contributors, who define themselves as religious Zionists, convinced me that the Israeli claim to all of Palestine based on sacred history is not (for these writers at least) a political ploy but an honestly held belief...
...Being perhaps overfamiliar with the misuse of religion to justify the unjustifiable (the Crusaders screamed "God wills it...
...Why should the U.S...
...Defenders of Bush and Baker say that Israel is using its clout in Congress to bully the administration into abandoning its own principles, thereby sapping the already feeble peace process and clearing the way toward outright annexation of the territories...
...Are these things really happening...
...We all have it done unto us, we all do it unto others...
...Giving up the territories, in their view, would be like accepting an amputation for the sake of the health of the whole body...
...because B'Tselem gets its funding from mainstream U.S...
...The paperback book is Voices from Jerusalem: Jews and Christians Reflect on the Holy Land (David Burrell, C.S.C., and Yezhezkel Landau, eds...
...because the booklet's language is restrained, nonemotive...
...on their way to slaughter...
...What the essayists (Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Jewish...
...The Bush administration says fine, so long as none of the housing goes up in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip...
...Hanging on to them and continuing to subjugate their population would be a more serious violation of Torah...
...a tiny acreage where events took place that are momentous to all of us...
...American, Armenian, Israeli, Dutch, French) convey is a realization that the Holy Land, despite all the unholy things that go on there, is indeed a holy land...
...The booklet is convincing to me because it conforms to things I've seen for myself and read about elsewhere...
...policy...
...The atrocities it reports are not as murderous as those committed by the current regimes in, say, Syria or Iraq...
...it can be done by fair means or foul, for evil or noble ends, clumsily or with art...
...and Israeli foundations...
...Paulist Press, 176 pp., $9.95...
...it wants loan guarantees from the U.S...
...and because, despite their coolly detached style, the Israeli compilers seem to me to be asking an anguished question: "What are we doing to ourselves...
...The booklet is published in Jerusalem by an Israeli human rights organization called B'Tselem which monitors the behavior of the security forces in the territories...
...So was Lincoln when he gave the Gettysburg Address...
...What persuaded me of their sincerity was their willingness to make territorial compromises for the sake of peace and justice...
...it helps me and maybe others...
...what is fair, what will work...
...A booklet and a paperbound book I've scanned this week have deepened, hardened, and softened these views...
...the burning at the stake of Jews and heretics had churchly sanction), I have always rejected and resented the claim by religious Zionists that all parts of Eretz Yis rael belong to the state of Israel by divine election...
...Why should the rest of the world accept such an outcome...
...In the space available I can't fully explain why the essays in Voices have "softened" (I can't think of a better word) my once near-scornful rejection of the Zionist claim...
...The Christian essayists deepened my grasp of the sacredness of this place for us...
...why should Palestinians of any or no faith accept subjection in or ouster from their ancestral lands because of a particularist interpretation, one they do not share, of the Hebrew Bible...
...ROBERT G. HOYT 4: 10 April 1992 Commonweal...
...Israel needs housing to accommodate new arrivals from the former Soviet Union, and must borrow money to pay for it...
...help pay for it...
...the reports are painful to read...
...dollars to bully Israel, interfering in its internal affairs and domestic politics, favoring Labor over Likud, putting Israel at risk by ignoring its legitimate security concerns, thereby revealing anti-Israeli or anti-Semitic attitudes...
...Since 1969, when I visited the region, I have held that Israel can be not less but more secure—and more democratic, truer to the best elements of Judaism and Zionism as I understand them, and even happier—if the peoples of the disputed territories come to know with certainty that eventually (and rather soon) they will be able to govern themselves...
Vol. 119 • April 1992 • No. 7
