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I can't express how many emails I've received in the last week from people identifying themselves as "liberals" (and, overwhelmingly, American Jews); telling me that they agree with my views in almost all areas other than Israel; and then self-righteously insisting that I imagine what it's like to live in Southern Israel with incoming rocket fire from Hamas, as though that will change my views on the Israel/Gaza war. Obviously, it's not difficult to imagine the understandable rage that Israelis feel when learning of another attack on Israeli civilians, in exactly the way that American rage over the 9/11 attacks was understandable. But just as that American anger didn't justify anything and everything that followed, the fact that there are indefensible attacks on Israeli civilians doesn't render the (far more lethal) attacks on Gaza either wise or just -- as numerous Jewish residents of Sderot themselves are courageously arguing in opposing the Israeli attack.
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It's what I learned not long after I married into a Jewish family (overwhelmingly Democratic and progressive). Everything Jewish is good and Israel can do no wrong (let alone the remarks I've endured over the last 20 years about my ancestry but that's a post for another time).
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More to the point: for those who insist that others put themselves in the position of a resident of Sderot -- as though that will, by itself, prove the justifiability of the Israeli attack -- the idea literally never occurs to them that they ought to imagine what it's like to live under foreign occupation for 4 decades (and, despite the 2005 "withdrawal from Gaza," Israel continues to occupy and expand its settlements on Palestinian land and to control and severely restrict many key aspects of Gazan life). No thought is given to what it is like, what emotions it generates, what horrible acts start to appear justifiable, when you have a hostile foreign army control your borders and airspace and internal affairs for 40 years, one which builds walls around you, imposes the most intensely humiliating conditions on your daily life, blockades your land so that you're barred from exiting and prevented from accessing basic nutrition and medical needs for your children to the point where a substantial portion of the underage population suffers from stunted growth.
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It's about valuing certain lives more than others. 5 Israelis are dead and so far, the retribution has taken 500 Palestinian lives. It reminds me of the stories my grandfather told me of how the SS operated when it came to dealing with resistance movements, be they in France, Holland, or Russia. Collective punishment. For the life of a single German soldier, 10, or 50, or a hundred locals would be executed. How is different? How is the invasion of Lebanon in '06 (for the lives of 2 Israeli soldiers) different? To me, they're just excuses to attack and 'end the problem once and for all' (read into that what you will).
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If you see Palestinians as something less than civilized human beings: as "barbarians" -- just as if you see Americans as infidels warring with God or Jews as sub-human rats -- then it naturally follows that civilian deaths are irrelevant, perhaps even something to cheer. For people who think that way, arguments about "proportionality" won't even begin to resonate -- such concepts can't even be understood -- because the core premise, that excessive civilian deaths are horrible and should be avoided at all costs, isn't accepted. Why should a superior, civilized, peaceful society allow the welfare of violent, hateful barbarians to interfere with its objectives? How can the deaths or suffering of thousands of barbarians ever be weighed against the death of even a single civilized person?
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It's this disregard for the lives of innocents that bothers me. There are a million and a half people in the Gaza Strip; are they all guilty of launching rockets into Israel? Should they all be made to suffer? Because they voted for Hamas, who promised them the chance to live a normal life? By that extension (George Bush served two terms), every American should pay for the deaths of those civilians our troops and mercenaries have killed in Iraq. Do you feel you should?
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So many of these conflicts -- one might say almost all of them -- end up shaped by the same virtually universal deficiency: excessive tribalistic identification (i.e.: the group with which I was trained to identify is right and good and just and my group's enemy is bad and wrong and violent), which causes people to view the world only from the perspective of their side, to believe that X is good when they do it and evil when it's done to them. X can be torture, or the killing of civilians in order to "send a message" (i.e., Terrorism), or invading and occupying other people's land, or using massive lethal force against defenseless populations, or seeing one's own side as composed of real humans and the other side as sub-human, evil barbarians. As George Orwell wrote in Notes on Nationalism -- with perfect prescience to today's endless conflicts ... [ems in original]
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The Israelis have been using this strategy against the Palestinians for 40 years and it isn't working; in fact, it's making things worse. And, since we're so closely tied to Israel, blame is cast on us as well for our unqualified support of their actions. We have enough sins of our own to pay for, in the region and throughout the world, without being splattered with the shit Israel is tossing at the fan.
The Palestinians have been squeezed by Israel for 40 years, not just in Gaza, but the West Bank as well, steadily increasing their territory while the Palestinians crowd more people into dwindling acreage.
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As a lifelong supporter of Israel, I long admired the state for its tenacity, its refusal to contemplate surrender or nonexistence, its bravery in the face of daunting odds. But there is a huge difference between fighting the remnants of the great Turkish empire and an assault upon a defenseless civilian population when you have the best army and armaments that the contents of the American Treasury can buy.
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It is time for a Palestinian state, one that functions, one that can police itself, feed itself, and care for its people. Once the average Palestinian has freedom of movement, can support himself, and keep his family safe, groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, and even al-Qaeda will wither and die. These groups are born of hopelessness and desperation and if people can see a future for themselves, they will not resort to violence. The violent groups will be marginalized and eventually go away (or shrink to a manageable size). The Palestinians have not had a future, aside from occupation and embargo, for 40 years.
It's time for a different solution. It's time for the U.N. to take the lead (France's President Sarkozy has been spearheading the cease-fire effort) and for the U.S. to stop giving the Israelis cover by vetoing every Security Council resolution condemning their actions. It's time for us to butt out and let someone without a vested interest try to fix the situation. Too many lives depend on it.
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