from: Serbs, Kosovars, Israelis, Palestinians: The bewildering politics of Kosovo in Israel. (From SLATE, copyright 1999 Microsoft) By David Plotz >... But beneath Israelis' sympathy for Kosovars lurk more perplexing reactions that illuminate the anxieties of a state where a beleaguered ethnic minority seeks independence, the byzantine nature of Israeli electoral politics, and the enduring weight of the Holocaust in Israel--but not the weight you'd expect. Israeli doubts about Kosovo begin with Israeli doubts about Palestinians. Palestinian newspapers and leaders have compared the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo to the Palestinian "nakba" of 1948, when thousands of Palestinians fled Israel and ended up in permanent refugee camps. (This analogy has been endorsed by the likes of the Economist [!!], which called the flight of the Palestinians an unpunished ethnic cleansing.) Palestinians also claim that the West's intervention to preserve Kosovar autonomy confirms their right to independence. "We will ask the international community to intervene to end the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and to expel the settlers from it," said Ahmed Abdel Rahman, the Palestinian Authority's Cabinet secretary, citing the Kosovo bombing as exemplar. >Most Israelis are merely irritated with this Palestinian claim, viewing it as an unseemly attempt to exploit the Kosovo crisis and as a faulty analogy. (An Arab invasion of Israel in 1948 prompted the Palestinian flight, not an Israeli invasion of Arab territory.) But Israel's far right has taken the Palestinian claim seriously. The far right views Kosovo not as tragedy but as threat, "a dangerous precedent." Some right-wing Knesset members have called for an end to the airstrikes: If the West intervenes on behalf of an independence-seeking ethnic minority in Kosovo, one asked, "couldn't it happen here, too, in a different variation today or tomorrow?" >The Serbs only exacerbate Palestinian righteousness and Israeli right-wing paranoia by calling Kosovo Serbia's "Jerusalem." If Kosovo is Jerusalem, that means that either a) Israel's hold on Jerusalem is unjustified, as Palestinians argue; or b) Serbia's hold on Kosovo is justified, as a few fringe-right Israelis are now hinting....< Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/JDevine.html Bombing DESTROYS human rights. US/NATO out of Serbia now!
