Roots of Steele

Here's more of the same. The unrelenting Jonathan Steele:

Perhaps the ugliest part of the Israeli settlers' behaviour was their corruption of youth, with parents instigating their children to wrap themselves in prayer shawls and sob or shriek defiance.

No one who spends time in Gaza's Palestinian communities can avoid being saddened by the ubiquitous focus on the gun, which also diverts children from normal growing up. It appears on graffiti everywhere alongside the names and faces of those who died by violence, in suicide attacks or shot down by Israeli fire. Almost every teenage boy aspires to use a Kalashnikov or hand grenade. At a recent wedding, I saw a dancing mother twirl a rifle in both hands above her head like the baton of a majorette.

Trapped in their Israeli-enforced ghetto, Gazans can at least claim that this pervasive and corrupting militarism is the legacy of a decades-long national resistance movement to defend land that belongs to them.

This passage provides a beautiful illustration of how an apologia works. Observe: these Israelis are corrupting their children; so too, of course, are the Palestinians, but they 'at least' can say this is 'the legacy' of their land having been taken and resistance to that. If you now say that this is making an excuse for the corruption of the children, the answer will be... 'no, no, to explain isn't to justify; just looking at causes, etc. and so forth'. But the action of the Israeli settlers must also have causes, no? In fact, yes. Everything does. But these aren't mobilized by the understander with an 'at least' and a 'legacy of'. The understander only deploys causes (to play on that word) to which he or she is sympathetic. (See also here.)

Note, further, this from Steele, under the cover of criticizing racism:

As they were dragged off, some Israeli zealots had no shame in minimising the Holocaust, absurdly comparing unarmed Israeli police to the Gestapo. Others used racist insults. "Jews do not expel Jews," they shouted, presumably wanting to imply that only non-Jews do it. They apparently did not realise that most people will see the irony in terms of contemporary rather than historical events - "Jews do not expel Jews ... Jews expel Arabs."

He's quite right about the shamefulness of minimizing the Holocaust here. But that is what Jews do, is it - we expel Arabs? Some days I pinch myself. This is the Guardian I'm reading. Not enough of its readers seem to see any cause for shame in what it repeatedly prints.