Evening loves. 🕊️
Today's deep-dive is heavy, and still related to the war.
When I wrote my four-parter on Israel and the West earlier this year, I tried to dispel Western ideas that keep getting imposed on Israel, instead of listening to Israel's democratic society.
That issue has come to the fore again.
So, today I contrast Bush after 9/11 with Netanyahu leading up to and after October 7: to remind folks that democracy is complicated, and *always* a casualty of war.
Thank you once again for your hard work. Read once, and a re-read scheduled for the morning. 🕊️
Thank you, Lise.
I was kind of shocked when I went back to the 9/11 timeline and speeches. Bush's era seemed so frustrating at the time... and yet we had no idea then just how much civility US politics still had to lose. There are things Bush said and did then, in the immediate aftermath of atrocity, that no Republican leader would be caught dead doing today.
Rough times for human decency.
@MLClark
Bush's words astonished me as well. I didn't remember that at all, which underlines the fact that we can't always reply on our fragile memories, vague impressions and weighty feelings about things that happened even in recent history. We have to always go back and re-read the documents and listen to the voices speaking at the time.
Perhaps when we re-visit deliberately like that, we'll have a better chance of learning from our mistakes so we can do better. Perhaps.