By Tom Kando
By now, most people are well informed about the latest fight between the Israelis and the Palestinians:
1.
The trigger was the assassination by Israel
of Ahmed Jabari, a Hamas military leader. In retaliation, Hamas started
to lob hundreds of rockets from Gaza onto Israel. In return, Israel
began the massive bombing of Gaza.
2.
As usual, the death toll has been
lopsided: half a dozen Israelis
vs. more than 160 Palestinians. Every Israeli death is avenged by more than 20
Palestinian deaths.
3. Using this criterion leads one to condemn Israel more harshly than Hamas. One moral measure has always been: he who kills the most is the most evil.
4. But the uneven death count is purely the result of uneven technology. Hamas’ (Iranian) rockets are just not very good (yet), and Israel’s “Iron Dome” defensive shield did a good job at deflecting 90% of the rockets. The low Israeli death toll is not for want of trying by Hamas. If Hamas could, it would wipe out all six million Israeli Jews. Their rockets are most certainly aimed indiscriminately at cities, hospitals, schools, children, hotels, etc. Don’t tell me that one side’s actions are morally superior to the other’s. Every day, hundreds of rockets rained down on Israel, even reaching Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. As President Obama said on November 18, “There's no country on Earth that would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders.”
5.
Then there is history - another moral
criterion: Who has more historical
right to “the turf” over which they have been fighting since 1948 - and
before? For some information
about this, check out my August, 2011 post:
1948
was a disaster for the Palestinians: hundreds of thousands
of them were expelled from what became Israel, and hundreds of thousands more
left of their own volition, anticipating
returning immediately after Israel’s defeat - which did not occur. Sixty years
later, those hundreds of thousands of refugees have turned into millions. One of the Palestinians’
demands is the “Right of Return.” How
could this happen, without undoing the Jewish state?
Even
if you take the position that Israel and Zionism were a mistake, it’s too late to go into reverse.
Israel exists. No reasonable person can
advocate abolishing Israel. So this renders history (and my 2011 blog
post) irrelevant.
6.
The present bloody flare-up, the plight of Gaza and the shenanigans on the West
Bank: Israel’s blockade of Gaza is wrong, as are the appalling living conditions of those desperate people. Continuing to build Jewish settlements in Palestinian territory on
the West Bank is also wrong.
7. This way, things can only get
worse. One worry is that Arab politics are becoming more and more
“Islamized.” “Islamism” and Sharia law
are ascendant, meaning that Islam is
increasingly becoming not only a
religion but also as a political ideology, somehow an antidote to Western influence. Regression
towards theocracy and the growing role
of religion in politics are worrisome.
The separation of Church and State and the secularization of politics are
one of the Western world’s great
accomplishments. It took the French Revolution, the American Revolution, and other revolutions to achieve this. Hopefully,
the infusion of religion into politics by “Islamism” will in time become
as harmless as the role of religion is
in European political parties which
still call themselves “Christian Democratic,” but are in fact largely secular.
8. The “Peace Process:” it isn’t
clear whether this is a never-ending quest, an illusion, an unsolvable problem.
Equally unclear is why this is primarily
a US responsibility. Do not other
countries have as much at stake in the
Middle East?
9. There is only one reasonable solution: TWO STATES.
What part of TWO STATES don’t they
understand? Of course, the devil is in
the details. Right of Return, West Bank settlements, land swaps, etc. A myriad
details must be worked out. But those are
working points, and they ARE solvable.
I have just mentioned some of the considerations which lead so many of us to CONDEMN one side or the other. Condemnation is unproductive, yet that is what we mostly do. So instead, why don’t you judge things for yourself.
10 comments:
My daughter is in the West Bank teaching Palestinian children in school. She's spoken to people on every side of this issue hoping to find a solution. She loves both Palestinian and Jewish people. Unless people can stop fixation on nationalism, learn to forgive and accept one another and aim at a common future it will be very difficult.
The main difficulty of the Two-State Solution is that so far the Palestinians have been unable to defend and police their own territory. In the past, when they were given more autonomy, the Palestinians were unable to prevent the infiltration of foreigners and weapons to use the Palestinian land as a staging ground to attack Israel. I think if the Palestinians prove capable of controlling their borders that Israel would accept a two-state solution.
I sense a big difference in tone between the 2011 "turf post" and this one from 2012.
The first post feels very unbalanced to me. As you state now yourself at point 5. To me this unbalanced position was exemplary for a more general US stance.
I am very happy to read you have shifted somewhat and I hope it is something we will see as well in American foreign politics.
@Gordon I think the lacking capability of controlling the border originates in a lack of consensus on the need of this, which is caused by a lack of trust in a better future.
My hope is more and more negotiations will be opened and will start to be more open. I hope this can initiate some public trust in peace solutions.
But in my opinion more and more ground has been conquered on the Palestinians like colonialism anno 2000's. The solution I see has to do with the undoing of many of them, for peace agreements, supported by popular Palestinian groups like Hamas.
The very longterm solution I see is one none-religious state. But I am afraid I won't live to see that day. (And I hope to live more than half a century at least.)
The Christian West fancies itself a genuinely perplexed outside observer of Israel's struggle with her Middle East neighbors. We Westerners like to kibitz and imagine ourselves as fair and balanced rational observers, watching in enlightened horror as ancient antipathies are acted out on the shifting sands of a faraway land.
To understand the roots of the tragedy we are witnessing we must look back through the centuries to the rise of Jewish sect of Christianity. The mythical foundations of the Jewish OTHER as the killer of Christ runs very deep, and still lurks in even the most secular of Western minds -- even among Jews themselves!
The Arab-Islamic mythic tradition does not share this deeply rooted Jew-hatred that has expressed itself in blood-letting throughout Europe for almost 2000 years, and reached it nadir (thus far at least) with the Holocaust, circa 1945,
In other words, the Arab-Islamic tradition has never been anti-Semetic. Their tolerance of infidels is as legendary as their very prideful tradition of perpetual vendetta against those whom they believe have stolen their honor.
If we understand this greater history, we can see that the Jews remain caught in the Christian death trap narrative ---a Europe that has systematically expelled them and an Arab-Islamic Middle-East that regards them as tools of the Western imperialistic infidels who dishonored them and must be cleansed from their homeland.
It took almost 30 years (up until the first Intifada) for Arab-Islamic strategists to understand how to turn European anti-Semiticism to their advantage by appropriating and rekindling the Christian narrative of the Jews as insidious and subversive eaters of children -- in today's version, Palestinian children.
I can see only one possible outcome -- a second Holocaust. The next time around it is likely that the collateral damage attending the campaign to cleanse the world of Jews will be somewhat greater than 65 years ago.
Our rationality--science, technology and all the other trappings of our imagined enlightenment -- are mere illusion. Our very awareness is forever rooted in deeply wrought moral mythic narrative. We are not just an audience watching a passion play, trying to be fair and balanced. We too are passionate players who must choose between good and evil.
you write:
"The trigger was the assassination by Israel of Ahmed Jabari, a Hamas military leader. In retaliation, Hamas started to lob hundreds of rockets from Gaza onto Israel. In return, Israel began the massive bombing of Gaza."
It's pretty easy to discover that the upsurge in rocket launching from Gaza began in October, a month before the killing of Jabari.
As far as Gordon’s comments are concerned, I couldn’t agree more.
I also bask in the newly won approval I receive from Johnny. Alas, I am not one of America’s policy makers, so whatever newly acquired enlightened attitudes Johnny is assigning to me, they don’t matter much...
As to Marc, his words are as impressively eloquent as always. I only hope that his dark prognosis is incorrect.
To Dwight:
According to the Israel Security Agency, Palestinians fired 116 rockets at Israel in October. But in just the ONE WEEK following the assassination of Jabari (Nov. 14-21), the number was 1,456. So as you can see, the assassination was a direct cause of the sharp escalation, even though there had been a fluctuating number of rocket attacks before that ( which I by no means condone).
What we have here is a continuum of positions ranging from Johnny’s end to Dwight’s opposite end.
I was really glad to read this. Personally, I'm very torn about this sad situation. I know people on both sides of the "line in the sand" - my friend Luke, who recently moved back to Tel Aviv to care for his elderly mother and is really regretting that choice, and my friend Sara, who currently lives in Sacramento because her job/home/life in Palestine were destroyed. Maybe it's no surprise to you, but neither of them feels like the other side is totally at fault. I'm going to forward your post to both of them and ask them if they'd like to weigh in with their comments.
"Palestinians fired 116 rockets at Israel in October. But in just the ONE WEEK following the assassination of Jabari (Nov. 14-21), the number was 1,456. So as you can see, the assassination was a DIRECT CAUSE of the sharp escalation"
What a very odd view of causation. Only 116 rocket attacks in October, likely "caused" in part at least, by Jabari's leadership. Yet the Israeli attempt at eliminating the cause of lethal action against her citizens is to transform her defensive actions into the cause of 1,456 rocket attacks.
So it's the Jew's own damn fault for defending themselves. That's just what the Nazi's said when they executed women and children in Warsaw in retaliation for those few Jews who fought back.
There is no double entry book keeping system that can settle the matter of good v. evil. No science will serve in this regard.
If there is an assassination on a given date, and it is followed by many hundreds of rockets during the following days, then you have cause and effect. Call it a “fight,” a “war,” an “escalating cycle of violence,” mutual retaliation,” or whatever.
Did I say that it was “the Jew’s own damn fault for defending themselves, as the Nazis said when they executed women and children in Warsaw in retaliation for those Jews who fought back”?
I explicitly condemned Hamas’ attacks, both in my post and in my comments. Nowhere did I condone it, or Jabari’s actions.
Marc has the aggravating habit of putting words in other people’s mouth (mine, mostly). It’s a dishonest and underhanded form of argumentation. It’s called jerking someone’s chain.
As an Eastern European of Jewish extraction who lost friends and relatives during the Holocaust, I find Marc’s words extremely offensive.
A Dutch perspective:
Good article. Israel’s American-supported, tightly organized, long-term expansion policy will only aggravate the conflict with Palestine and foster more terrorism. The fact that the Netherlands abstained in the UN vote about Palestine’s status as an observer-state, I find weak and regrettable. And that’s my judgment.
Mrs. John....
The "Dutch perspective provided by Mrs. John.... shows that there ARE two sides to this issue.
Let me use this opportunity to clarify a few things, pertaining to my dispute with Dwight and Marc:
The dispute began with my statement that the recent week long “war” was TRIGGERED by Jabari’s assassination on November 14.
Dwight then reminded us that Hamas had been lobbing rockets at Israel BEFORE November 14.
I admit that I did not give enough weight to this. At the same time, the numbers show that the assassination was followed by a VAST increase in rocket attacks. So my initial statement that the greatly escalated conflict was (in part) TRIGGERED by the assassination remains correct.
In my reply to Dwight, I made a second error: I began to call the assassination a “cause” of the war. I suppose I should have said “contributing cause,” or stuck with the word “trigger.”
Then, Marc chimed in, and he went totally overboard. In his version, my initial word “trigger” not only became “cause,” but also “fault.” According to Marc, I said or implied the same things as Hitler did, namely that the Jews were are fault for this war because they defended themselves, just as the holocaust was also the Jews own damn fault.
I had to remind everyone that I am Jewish, that I lost friends and relatives to the Holocaust, and that I condemned the Hamas rocket attacks repeatedly on my blog.
So, yes, I made two errors: (1) I overlooked that there were also many rocket attacks already before Nov. 14 (even though they were far fewer than thereafter). (2) I used the word “cause” in my replies to their comments. I should have stuck to “trigger.”
But my opponents’ intransigence lead them to a totally disproportionate reaction.
The “Dutch perspective,” above, reminds us that there is plenty of blame for both sides - which was the point of my original post, and which was totally lost in the heated exchange that followed.
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