It's impossible to watch Americans and other nationals being evacuated to warships from beaches in Lebanon without remembering The Exodus, the ship that brought Holocaust survivors to Palestine before any of it became Israel - and to which the British refused landing permission. The refugees eventually made it to the beaches....
This may sound trite, but I can't help thinking that the scenes convey a message: the Jewish homeland is in the wrong place, and the United States should stop bending over backwards to support the Israeli government when it thinks that two wrongs make a right. The Holocaust was wrong, the occupation of land legally given to the Palestinians is wrong.
Of course, at this particular moment, the United States is probably using Israel to further its aim of regime change in Syria and Iran. But that would be a mistake too.
George Lakoff's book "Whose Freedom", a much needed, if somewhat textbookish endeavor to help people think better about freedom, is just on time to help people understand that the world - and its governments - are basically divided between authoritarian father figure concepts of freedom, and nurturing family views of freedom. A must read for those who doubt that it could be wrong to take out a Ba'athist authoritarian government or a populist grass roots organization like Hezbollah. We may not agree with the religious inclinations of the latter, but the same is true of the Wahabi regime that rules Saudi Arabia.
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