"It is hard to remember when exactly moral discourse vanished from our public arena," writes Lily Galili in Israel’s daily Ha’aretz.
This distorted situation has been perpetuated to the extent that it has become impossible to remember that there used to be a different reality. This is what things look like today: Yisrael Beiteinu MK Avigdor Lieberman is proposing to move Israel’s Arab citizens to another country. The counterargument: This isn’t practical. The siege on Gaza is starving its inhabitants. The counterargument: They’re just going to launch more Qassams. Jews are launching pogroms against Arabs in Hebron. Not a good idea at all – it’ll just prompt reprisal actions.
The list is long and astounding. And if revoking citizenship were practical, and if Arabs were to swear on the Koran not to respond to the siege and the pogrom, would it be morally right to carry out all those actions?
Assuming that the answer is no, no one is going to say so aloud. It is hard to find anyone in the public arena, and certainly the political arena, to sound a moral voice and propose clear norms of good and evil.
