"I no longer believe that an independent Palestinian state, run by this terrorist group or that one, is the best solution."  

in a serious argument the above quote would have been followed by another suggestion of what to do. the problem is that there are only two other options and both are many times worse.  First, Israel continues the occupation indefinitely and denies the palestinian's democratic rights.  second, Israel grants the palestinians democratic rights and by doing so destroys itself.  

 if option one is chosen, the settlers will colonise the west bank to a point that option two will be inevitable.  

views like the one expressed by sheinin will be the cause of israel's destruction. 

The Arabs should be sent back to Saudi Arabia where their ancestors are from.  The occupation of Jewish land by the Arabs must stop.  How can Jews be settlers in their homeland?  The ignorance about Israel is amazing.  The West Bank, Samaria and Judea, is a part of the Israeli homeland.  The indigenous Jewish people can't colonize their own land.  The Arabs are the real settlers.

There's a piece of me that wants to be welcoming to new acquaintances, but, honestly, this post makes it hard. And it's the sort of thing that gives efforts to adjust for gender imbalance a bad name.....

I attended CCNY back in the early '60's. At that time, that gritty Gothic academy was still a magnet for brainy working class and middle class kids, the jewel of the City University system. Our student newspapers would regularly boast of the high percentage of our degree-earners who went on to graduate and professional schools (as I recall, we shared the top spot on alternate years with Stanford-how luscious to hump uptown on the #1 train, knowing that we'd bettered the dandies at Palo Alto).

A year or two after I graduated, the college abandoned its long-standing grade-based entry policy and replaced it with open admissions. Designed to correct the racial imbalance at CCNY, the policy turned out to be a disaster (by the way, most of the "beneficiaries" of open admissions were not people of color at all, but white working class kids). The kids were academically unprepared or dispositionally disinclined to pursue a rigorous academic program and dropped out in droves, adding another rough patch to what for most of them had already been a pretty dispiriting stroll through academe.

In much the same way that CCNY's idea to create balance by focussing on some one-dimensional and essentialist notion of what it takes to represent the rainbow of human possibility turned out flawed, so has Jewcy's search for gender balance given us...Karol.

1. Yes, we were flooded with images of weeping Israelis during the Gaza pullout, but this is a phenomenon to be interrogated. Why was it more newsworthy to picture the distress of illegal occupiers finally ceasing their criminal behavior than to document the ongoing misery to the Palestinians these thugs caused? Some of these settlers had been living in New Jersey, for pete's sake, until a few years before they were removed from Gaza, yet we were asked to identify with them as though were not simple criminal interlopers. Odd.

2. Citing the awful conditions in Gaza without referencing the near-total lockdown Israel has perpetrated upon the Gazans from the instant of its withdrawal is simple journalistic malfeasance. 

3. I had an uncle who, I'm sorry to say, would regularly insist that the way black people behaved in the projects demonstrated how hopeless it was to try and get along with them; "Look, we give them perfectly good places to live and they wreck them! What can you do?" This Q.E.D. is, I trust, pretty unpersuasive to (most of) the Jewcy community. Yet here we see its exact analogue.

4. Interesting to hear Karol predict that a West Bank pullout would lead to its "...crumbl(ing) under the violence, mismanagement and general corruption that seems to be the hallmark of Palestinian leadership". She needn't hypothesize; the West Bank is crumbling as we speak, dismembered by unrelenting Israeli expansionism, vulnerable to whatever incursion or assassination Israel deems warranted, and mismanaged both by Abbas and its actual rulers in Tel Aviv, whose own record of corruption is nothing to write home about.

So tell me, please, what has been added by our knowing that a borderline-racist, uninformed and jejune opinion has been produced by a woman? How are we better off? If there were no picture and her first name were spelled with an "e" instead of an "o", she'd be a Czech man, as far as anyone'd know. And how would the world be different?

My take? Be open to all comers, and see what happens. If no female potential Cabalists produce anything as spirited, novel and engaging as the women on the other Jewcy blogs do, more's the pity and we have some interesting conversations before us, but Jewcy's work is done. You do no gender any favors by running pedestrian Arab-bashing in an effort to address an unsettling observation about gender representation. Might as well recall Batya to active duty.

Anyway, why would you feel the need to feminize a blog that boasts Weiss and Strawn as founding members? 

Ismail

<i>in a serious argument the above quote would have been followed by
another suggestion of what to do. the problem is that there are only
two other options and both are many times worse.</i>

You say yourself there are only two options, and I agree.  So what "suggestion" would you like from me?  Israel needs to remain in the West Bank while instituting democratic reforms.  I want to see the Palestinians electing a leadership that isn't completely murderous and corrupt.  I don't think that's asking for so much.

Ismail, it's cute that you go right for the "racist" canard, it tells me how seriously to take you right off the bat.  You're clearly unable to have anything resembling a serious discussion about the situation in the West Bank and Gaza.  You want to talk racist?  How racist is it that you don't think the Palestinians can live in their own state alongside Jews (ie: why do the settlers need to be removed in order for there to be a Palestinians state)?  Why are they the only people on earth that are incapable of this?

For anyone that refers to any part of Israel as 'occupied lands' pisses me off.  I'm not going to get into a debate in which logic maintains that Israel is the Just one...that Israel is the morale one.  I'm just gonna say that possession is 9/10ths of the law.  Come try to get your land back!!!  The last time you tried (and collectively too) it was a miserable failure and only served to make Israel stronger...come try again you animals!!

"Anyway, why would you feel the need to feminize a blog that boasts Weiss and Strawn as founding members? "

This is very unfair to Josh, Ismail. 

...is that his remark is supposed to be a put-down!  Gender justice 101, Ismail: the association of feminine with the negative is inherently problematic.  That in order to bring someone down and illustrate weakness, one would call a person a "pussy" while in order to illustrate strength they would say a person "has balls."  That in order to say something negative about Mike or myself you would refer to our supposed femininity.  Let's be fair to Mike, though as long as we're dwelling in the paradigm where male=good and female=bad--I've worn FAR more fishnet and eyeliner than he ever has, I promise. 

Ismail...

You were at CCNY in the 60s and no one gave you a good lesson in gender, social history. Tsk, tsk...

If we sit in the west bank until the palestinians come around as sheinin suggests, the settlers will continue to build and implement their plan of making the w. bank inseparable from Israel proper.  that is unless sheinin wants to stand up to the settlers in the west bank and start disbanding new outpost.  if you thought the pullout from gaza was bad, wait and see what happens when they try to take on the settlers in the west bank.   pulling out from the west bank is the only way forward and the only option for israel. what ever happens after that, at least israel will remain a jewish state. sheinin's suggestions will be the destruction of israel as a jewish state.  its too bad that those who love israel the most (ie the settlers and conservatives like sheinin) will be the one to destroy it.

Karol-

"Ismail, it's cute that you go right for the "racist" canard"

Actually, I qualified my comment with the term "borderline" out of a sense of fairness to you; while your comment suggested racism to me, I could imagine that you might have had something else in mind. Talking as you did about the state of Palestinian society without reference to the political nexus in which those unlucky people find themselves contains to my way of thinking a whiff of racism, in just the way that my uncle's pronouncements about black Americans did. If I misunderstand you, you have my apologies.

"You want to talk racist?  How racist is it that you don't think the Palestinians can live in their own state alongside Jews (ie: why do the settlers need to be removed in order for there to be a Palestinians state)?  Why are they the only people on earth that are incapable of this?"

Well, funny you should ask. As it happens, I absolutely believe that Palestinians can live in a state alongside Jews-in fact, the idea of one state for both people seems to me the only sensible solution to the present mess.

If the people of the region decide to choose a two-state solution, however, I would absolutely support the right of Jews to live in Palestine with identical rights to its other citizens, endorsing as I do the modern notion of citizenship as having no connection to religion, genetics or culture. Pity this enlightened view isn't shared more widely among Israelis, don't you think?

You're kidding about why the settlers need to be removed, right? If this is a serious question, well, sorry, but this isn't my week to cleanse the Augean stables.

Michael-

Thank goodness someone out there has a sense of humor.

Josh-

I think your proposal for your first freshman theme is fine. Carry on.

Your remarks reminded me of the observation that adolescent males happen upon cunnilingus and think they discovered it. I'm very happy for you that you've become aware of the normative aspects of gender and am glad you've decided to maintain your admirable vigil lest transgressors creep in. We may all sleep more easily. 

Guys, believe me, I out-sissy either one of you with one flaccid wrist behind my back; can't throw a ball, no interest in sports, great cook, unparalleled eye for design, etc. And I'm quite fond of myself just as I am, so there was no intention of valorizing (note to Josh: use this in second draft) conventional notions of maleness. I was making a silly joke, based mostly on those waifish (not waqfish) pix. Sometimes it helps to give a guy the benefit of the doubt.

Adam-

You young fellers don't remember, of course, but gender issues were not on the front burner in those heady days. At CCNY, they were barely on the stove.  Kate Millet, Shulamith Firestone and Germaine Greer, to take some representative popular expositors of feminism at the time, all published their major work in 1970, and I'm talking about 1964-1968. While I'm sure there were some folks at the college looking at gender, this field was in no way as visible as it is now. In fact, I'll bet you'd scour a course catalog from that time in vain looking for a single course on gender-not counting, of course, the standard remarks about that subject one would find in a basic soc or anthro text. Sad to say, lefty males of that time were not exemplars of gender enlightenment. I include myself, of course, and assure you that I've recited countless Hail Marys since, hoping to atone, at least in the Holy Virgin's eyes, for my unspeakable behavior towards the unwaxed and earthy houris who, incredibly and to my infinite gratitude, found themselves stirred by the endless political pilpul of me and my companions. Hail Marys and a lifetime of cooking for my wife and daughter. 

Enough penance?  

Ismail

The only solution is to send the Arabs back to their homeland of Mecca.  When did a Palestinian country, people, culture, language ever exist?  Jews, like Golda Meir, were at one time called "Palestinians" because they lived in the territory of Palestine, which had nothing to do with the Arabs.  There should never be a country for a "people" that don't exist.