{"id":5722,"date":"2009-06-25T13:29:31","date_gmt":"2009-06-25T13:29:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=5722"},"modified":"2009-06-25T13:29:31","modified_gmt":"2009-06-25T13:29:31","slug":"the-evasive-passive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=5722","title":{"rendered":"the evasive passive"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>(In Providence, RI, for a Civic Education Institute) Tony Judt recently wrote a New York Times <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2009\/06\/22\/opinion\/22judt.html\">op-ed<\/a> decrying the Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League played his customary role by providing an angry letter of rebuttal. The substance of his letter begins, &#8220;Isrealis settled in the West Bank because it was deemed part of the historic home of the Jewish people. &#8230;&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I love &#8220;it was deemed.&#8221; That must have taken a while to come up with. Consider the alternatives. &#8220;The settlers deemed that the land was theirs&#8221;? That sounds a little imperialistic, doesn&#8217;t it? &#8220;The Israeli government deemed the land useful to them&#8221;? Not a helpful message for the ADL director to publish in the Times. &#8220;God gave the land to Jews forever&#8221;? Some people believe that&#8211;some Jews and some fundamentalist Protestants. It&#8217;s not, however, a line that Mr. Foxman wants to take, nor does it have a lot of force in international law or diplomacy.<\/p>\n<p>Thus the passive&#8211;the great, responsibility-ducking passive&#8211;followed by a few strong active sentences with Arabs as the subjects. (&#8220;They rejected opportunities for peace.&#8221; &#8220;[T]hey rejected the United Nations resolution &#8230;&#8221;) So <em>they <\/em>did (those few with the power to make decisions); but the Isreali government also made choices, and now the mess is theirs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>(In Providence, RI, for a Civic Education Institute) Tony Judt recently wrote a New York Times op-ed decrying the Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League played his customary role by providing an angry letter of rebuttal. The substance of his letter begins, &#8220;Isrealis settled in the West Bank because [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5722"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5722\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}