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The real Palestinian problem
On not pitying Palestinians: A reply
Dan Rottenberg
Do the Palestinians deserve pity?
Our prolific contributor Robert Zaller says he used to think so but no longer does. "Among stateless or secessionist peoples," Robert wrote recently in BSR, " they are the least deserving of sympathy, and if we actually want to do them good, we should tell them so." (See "On not pitying the Palestinians.")
Zaller ticks off a laundry list of reasons why he's abandoned the Palestinian cause— reasons that are undeniably valid but also, in my opinion, irrelevant.
Unlike most oppressed peoples, Robert points out, the Palestinians don't merely yearn for liberation; they also yearn for Israel's destruction. They responded to the Camp David peace proposals of 2000 not with counter-proposals but with an intifada that cost 2,300 lives. They encourage women and children to become suicide bombers and blow up innocent civilians. In a poll of 1,000 Palestinian youngsters aged nine to 16, Robert reminds us, 73% expressed the wish to die as martyrs.
"Rarely if ever," Professor Zaller concludes, "has any society been so morally self-condemned."
Deficiency of wisdom
If you accept this sort of broad generalization about the 1.3 million descendants of Ishmael who live in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, you could take condemnation of Palestinians much further— i.e., they're not merely violent, they're stupid too. They may be endowed with the courage to fight and die for a Palestinian state, but they seem utterly lacking in the wisdom and imagination necessary to create a viable state without fighting and dying.
When you hear the leaders of Hamas or Hezbollah declare that violence is the only solution to tyranny, you have to wonder: Has anybody told these people about Solidarity, Vaclav Havel, Nelson Mandela, Corazon Aquino, even Boris Yeltsin? Do they know that the Berlin Wall, the Soviet Union, the Marcos regime, South African apartheid and even the butcher of Belgrade, Slobodan Milosevic, all fell without a shot being fired? Hello?
In a media-driven world, where the effectiveness of nonviolence and the futility of violence have been demonstrated repeatedly over the past generation, isn't the Palestinians' apparent preference for violence a reflection of their own intellectual deficiencies?
But of course all Palestinians don't think alike. Many would be happy to coexist peacefully with Israelis in their own state or in some other arrangement. One such Palestinian is Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president. Another is Professor Hanan Ashrawi, the Palestinian Authority's former spokesperson, a passionate advocate of human rights and gender issues who has joined hands with Israeli feminists to challenge what they perceive as the real culprit in the Middle East: domination by macho males.
Surely these and other moderates are not insignificant players in the Palestinian community. Yet they've received little support or encouragement from Israel or the West. Instead they've been left to twist in the wind while they're drowned out or demonized by Palestinian hawks.
The guilty party
But just for the sake of argument, let's suppose that all Palestinians are violent and stupid. Do they therefore forfeit any claim to our sympathy?
The operative answer, I would suggest, comes from Victor Hugo: "If a soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness."
The Palestinians are souls who've been left in darkness. As a consequence, they've done a lot of dumb and dangerous things. Pace Hugo, the relevant question is not who committed their sins, but who caused their darkness?
God knows there's plenty of blame to go around, beginning with the Israeli government under Ariel Sharon, which unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005 without making any provision for a civil society there. Now the Israelis claim to be shocked, shocked, that Gazans have voted the Hamas terrorists into power. In such a void, whom did the Israelis expect the Gazans to embrace? Thomas Jefferson?
But of course the Jews who run Israel have themselves spent much of the past thousand years in various kinds of darkness, so their paranoia must be forgiven as well.
"I destroy my enemy when I make him my friend," Abraham Lincoln observed. The Middle East right now suffers from a surplus of people who, for various complex psychological reasons, need to turn friends into enemies. Indeed, in a world where so many souls have struggled in darkness for so long, the truly relevant question— in the Middle East or anywhere else— is neither who committed the sin nor who caused the darkness, but who will light a candle.♦
To read responses, click here.
Our prolific contributor Robert Zaller says he used to think so but no longer does. "Among stateless or secessionist peoples," Robert wrote recently in BSR, " they are the least deserving of sympathy, and if we actually want to do them good, we should tell them so." (See "On not pitying the Palestinians.")
Zaller ticks off a laundry list of reasons why he's abandoned the Palestinian cause— reasons that are undeniably valid but also, in my opinion, irrelevant.
Unlike most oppressed peoples, Robert points out, the Palestinians don't merely yearn for liberation; they also yearn for Israel's destruction. They responded to the Camp David peace proposals of 2000 not with counter-proposals but with an intifada that cost 2,300 lives. They encourage women and children to become suicide bombers and blow up innocent civilians. In a poll of 1,000 Palestinian youngsters aged nine to 16, Robert reminds us, 73% expressed the wish to die as martyrs.
"Rarely if ever," Professor Zaller concludes, "has any society been so morally self-condemned."
Deficiency of wisdom
If you accept this sort of broad generalization about the 1.3 million descendants of Ishmael who live in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, you could take condemnation of Palestinians much further— i.e., they're not merely violent, they're stupid too. They may be endowed with the courage to fight and die for a Palestinian state, but they seem utterly lacking in the wisdom and imagination necessary to create a viable state without fighting and dying.
When you hear the leaders of Hamas or Hezbollah declare that violence is the only solution to tyranny, you have to wonder: Has anybody told these people about Solidarity, Vaclav Havel, Nelson Mandela, Corazon Aquino, even Boris Yeltsin? Do they know that the Berlin Wall, the Soviet Union, the Marcos regime, South African apartheid and even the butcher of Belgrade, Slobodan Milosevic, all fell without a shot being fired? Hello?
In a media-driven world, where the effectiveness of nonviolence and the futility of violence have been demonstrated repeatedly over the past generation, isn't the Palestinians' apparent preference for violence a reflection of their own intellectual deficiencies?
But of course all Palestinians don't think alike. Many would be happy to coexist peacefully with Israelis in their own state or in some other arrangement. One such Palestinian is Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president. Another is Professor Hanan Ashrawi, the Palestinian Authority's former spokesperson, a passionate advocate of human rights and gender issues who has joined hands with Israeli feminists to challenge what they perceive as the real culprit in the Middle East: domination by macho males.
Surely these and other moderates are not insignificant players in the Palestinian community. Yet they've received little support or encouragement from Israel or the West. Instead they've been left to twist in the wind while they're drowned out or demonized by Palestinian hawks.
The guilty party
But just for the sake of argument, let's suppose that all Palestinians are violent and stupid. Do they therefore forfeit any claim to our sympathy?
The operative answer, I would suggest, comes from Victor Hugo: "If a soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness."
The Palestinians are souls who've been left in darkness. As a consequence, they've done a lot of dumb and dangerous things. Pace Hugo, the relevant question is not who committed their sins, but who caused their darkness?
God knows there's plenty of blame to go around, beginning with the Israeli government under Ariel Sharon, which unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005 without making any provision for a civil society there. Now the Israelis claim to be shocked, shocked, that Gazans have voted the Hamas terrorists into power. In such a void, whom did the Israelis expect the Gazans to embrace? Thomas Jefferson?
But of course the Jews who run Israel have themselves spent much of the past thousand years in various kinds of darkness, so their paranoia must be forgiven as well.
"I destroy my enemy when I make him my friend," Abraham Lincoln observed. The Middle East right now suffers from a surplus of people who, for various complex psychological reasons, need to turn friends into enemies. Indeed, in a world where so many souls have struggled in darkness for so long, the truly relevant question— in the Middle East or anywhere else— is neither who committed the sin nor who caused the darkness, but who will light a candle.♦
To read responses, click here.
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