As in all conflicts, each side tries to blame the other. The same is true of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, some would say. ”Those guys have been fighting forever,” people like to say. ”Both sides are responsible for the mess they’re in.”
This lukewarm, wishy-washy, unstudied opinion was recently put forth to me by an acquaintance – OK, by the creator and moderator of this site. He wrote in the comments section of my last post:
“The Israelis are the way they are today partly BECAUSE of the action of the palestinians in the past. You cant comdemn them unreservedly as the sole aggressor and try to construct a narrative that places them squarely on one side of the moral ledger. You just cant.”
Of course, no people are blameless. Everyone has made, and will continue to make, mistakes. But is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict really this eternal tit-for-tat struggle, with no clear side being the aggressor?
Rather than giving you my reply, or simply re-printing what I wrote back to the acquaintance, I give you the words of Jesse Lieberfeld, an 11th-grader at Winston Thurston High School, and winner of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Writing Award for Prose in 2012. Here is an excerpt from his award-winning essay:
“I realized then that I was in no way part of a ‘conflict’;—the term ‘Israeli/Palestinian Conflict’ was no more accurate than calling the Civil Rights Movement the ‘Caucasian/ African-American Conflict.’ In both cases, the expression was a blatant euphemism: it gave the impression that this was a dispute among equals and that both held an equal share of the blame. However, in both, there was clearly an oppressor and an oppressed, and I felt horrified at the realization that I was by nature on the side of the oppressors. I was grouped with the racial supremacists. I was part of a group that killed while praising its own intelligence and reason. I was part of a delusion.”
Et voila.
===
I should have ended there, with Jesse’s powerful words, but I’ll offer one less powerful anecdote – and then I’ll direct you to the comments section of my last post to see how I replied to my acquaintance above, since my wife is trying to sleep and I haven’t the time to rehash my argument in full.
An African friend of mine once said to me, regarding Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein (two “pro-Palestinian” scholar-activists), “You have to admit, this proves that Jews are more open-minded than Arabs. After all, where are the Palestinians who support Israel instead of their own side?”
I asked him where the black South Africans were who supported apartheid, and whether the lack of their existence proved that whites are more open-minded than blacks – since some whites, after all, were against the apartheid regime.
I asked him where were the black leaders in the 1960s who supported segregation (well, Malcolm X at one time, but that was for an altogether different reason)?
Of course, he had no answer for me. He started to say, “But that’s not the same thing.” He left his sentence half-finished and over the next year began to study the history of the Israel. Today, he would no longer ask such a meaningless – and obviously loaded – question. (I’m compressing events some in the interests of clarity/time.)
OK, now go back and read my reply to the acquaintance about casting one side as the aggressor in the conflict – both of you people who actually read this blog. G’night.
I said that the Israelis were not the sole aggressor
your post is trying to refute the assertion that “no clear side being the aggressor”
q.e.d.
also, your African friend made a pretty stupid argument, agreed
I am reasonably sure but not 100% that in your last thread, I explicitly said that I did believe that eth Israelies were overwhelmingly the aggressors *now*.
Your argument ignores my real point (which your readers cant see in context, since you havent put a link to that thread, nor quoted my entire comments).
ANd if you really want to invoke the civil rights movement as an analogy, or apartheid, then explain in both those cases where the suicide bombs, the children on buses, and teh sbarro analogues were?
You do realize that had any of that happened in either of those cases, the outcome would have been set back 50 years?
Cell, a friend of mine said it was the brits to blame.
He said Israel should have been created in Utah, not in the ME.
Then the mormons could have just dead-baptized all the jews into mormonism and there would have been peace.
srsly, the creation of Israel by holocaust guilt-ridden euros and Murrikkkans was unjust.
but Israel exists NAOW.
so deal with it.
let Israel become a citizen of MENA (their neighborhood) and let them adapt their behavior or be driven into the sea.
Aziz, my habbibi…..the past is dust.
Like all evo theory of culture civilizations, the Israelis can adapt or go extinct.
death rocks, and evolution rolls, even in memetics.
And Cell…
tit-for-tat has bee exhaustively studied.
the way for both players to maximize payoff is not to cheat.
Aziz knows this i think.
[Sorry for replying so late, it's a miracle that I even check this site more often than once in six months.]
Aziz, I fear you don’t know your South African history very well. The African National Congress, the party Mandela headed for decades, was designated a terrorist organisation not just by apartheid South Africa, but by Europe and the U.S. On the day Mandela was finally released from prison in 1990, the U.S. State Department still had the ANC on its list of terrorist organisations. It was finally removed from the State Department’s terrorist watch list in 2008.
Also, if one wishes to look at Sbarro’s bombings or Egged bus bombings in Israel, one must also look at the unending violence inflicted first on the perpetrators of those bombings, and then compare it to the violence inflicted on blacks in apartheid South Africa. It’s not even close. Israel has killed tens of thousands of more people, and subjected them to far more violence on a daily basis, than the Union of South Africa ever did to the natives of that land.
(I’m not playing the my-victimisation-is-worse-than-yours card – but don’t trust me: Mandela and Desmond Tutu have both said, on several occasions, that the Palestinians have been subjected to far harsher conditions than they, as black South Africans, ever were.)
Again, I’m not restricting the debate to who is largely to blame NOW – which, Aziz believes, is Israel. I’m specifically discussing who was mostly to blame from DAY ONE. Quick question, Aziz: how familiar are you with Zionist settlement and native dispossession from 1891-1948? How familiar are you with the events surrounding the creation of Israel in 1948, and the wars of ’48 and ’67?
The more important question is: do you trust history and facts, or simply your own arrogance?
And lastly: is this it? Is this the best the American Muslim intellectual establishment has to offer? Are you it? Bring on the Ali Eterazes and Wajahat Alis, then. I have a feeling WA can do better than this.
Shams, of course “Israel exists now”. Whoever lives within its borders should have the right to continue to do so, as well as their descendants, etc. No Israeli should be driven from his home, forced to live in exile, or otherwise denied the basic rights all human beings deserve.
Israel exists now and should prove itself a democracy by extending equal rights to all its citizens (instead of promulgating apartheid), and by ending its illegal 45-year occupation of the WB and Gaza (yes, Gaza is still occupied). It should either incorporate the WB and Gaza into Israel, granting the denizens therein the same rights as Jews within Israel, or end its military occupation, as it is bound to do so by international law*.
*International law, since Aziz wants a footnote for every word in the English language: the 4th Geneva Convention, to which Israel is a signatory; multiple rulings of the International Court of Justice; UN Sec Council Resolution 242, passed unanimously in 1967 and upheld dozens of times in re-votes every year since; multiple other UN Sec Council Resolutions demanding Israel comply with international law in the Territories (Sec Council resolutions are binding, unlike General Assembly ones).
so we agree then cell?
let Israel adapt or go extinct.
so cell….where is your post on Israel’s First Strike on Qom?
lookin’ forward to it.