After reading over accounts of recent events in Israel, thinking of the moral, political and military issues and challenges involved, speaking with many friends on these topics, I happened upon Tal G. in Jerusalem.
It's not a particularly stirring blog. It's merely the postings of an ordinary person living in Israel. But suddenly, faced with the thoughts and observations of a normal and real person that happens to be living in the center of the chaos, I was moved. I've probably had a lot of emotions building up over this issue for awhile now. Heaven knows I've been doing a lot of thinking on the subject. Without really thinking how odd it would be for this person to get a massive email from a total stranger, I wrote.
Now that I've sent it, I realize that it was written not just to Tal G. in Jerusalem, not just to Israelis in general, but that some of it is for an even broader audience. Before posting it here, though, I should probably edit it. I'm not going to, though, as I don't have the energy for it right now. Instead, I'm just pasting in the full text of the email (originally with the subject header of "An American Perspective") right here. It's long and unedited, so forgive me. Or just scroll on by. Shorter, wittier bits are lower down on the page for your amusement.
Already this is way too much introduction. Here's what I think about Israel:
I recently found your blog.
I don't know you. I don't know who you are or what you're like, beyond the handful of posts you've made so far. And yet I have a lot to say to you.
I've been thinking of everyone in Israel these past few days, and merely seeing the words of an individual living through this mess unexpectedly triggered some powerful emotions. I felt I had to write, to say, "Hang in there."
But I have more to say: I'm sorry. I'm sorry that you are not safe, I'm sorry that there is as much suffering as there is, I'm sorry that there is little sign of hope that this will end peacefully and soon. But beyond being sorry in the sense of "sad", I am also profoundly sorry and apologetic for the lazy, uncourageous, shallow stance taken in the past by myself and by fellow Americans regarding your plight.
Beyond saying I'm sorry, though, I wanted to write to you, perhaps as a proxy for everyone living in Israel, to say that opinions have changed, and to try and explain why a change was needed at all.
You wrote, �What I've seen in American and European media is a total disconnect between what Israel is doing in Ramallah and the 60 or so Palestinian bombings of the past month.�
I just want you to know that the American media itself is disconnected from the opinions of a large number of Americans. Arafat is a murderer. The PLO/PNA has had piles of opportunity to achieve its stated desire of �peace, security, independence�, and yet has consistently thrown it all away in favor of the goal their actions demonstrate: the destruction of Israel. The international community is full of manure. We�re getting it. Honestly, we are.
It�s just taking some time for some of us to reconcile the issues in our minds. Let me give you a personal perspective.
My senior year of high school I was assigned to craft and deliver a persuasive speech. I chose as my topic the position that Northern Ireland belonged to the Irish. A good and longtime childhood friend of mine, the son of Lebanese/Jordanian/Palestinian parents who had fled the region to eventually become American citizens, chose as his position that Israel was an occupying force that was guilty of human rights crimes against Palestinians.
All I really recall from his speech were a couple of descriptions of torture methods that had been practiced on prisoners in Israel - that, and that I was sympathetic to his position. My own speech wasn�t terribly good; I attempted to lay out the entire history of the English/Irish conflict going back to Elizabethan times, and it was far too long and clearly bored my audience (my classmates). But it was a cause I cared about nonetheless.
I think I am common among Americans in my default stance of sympathy for any people or nation that appears to be struggling for freedom and self-determination. It's hard-wired into our culture, for one thing. Also, despite being a superpower since WWII and a hegemon since the fall of the Soviet Union, I and many Americans still instinctively identify with the underdog of any conflict. Kids with rocks are noble when fighting men with guns. Sometimes it seems we intentionally tie a hand behind our back just to level the playing field; we find our dominance embarrassing.
I am of (among other things) Irish ancestry, pride in which is a core element of my upbringing. For what it's worth, I still look upon the history of England's treatment of Ireland as an outrageous and oppressive tale, taken in its entirety. But I do not support the IRA.
What I did not grasp in my teenage years are the distinctions between just wars and just warfare, and between what is right and what is more right. In other words, there are just wars and times when avoiding war is in fact unjust; however you must attempt to pursue warfare in accordance with certain guidelines, or the justness of your cause itself will be destroyed in your attempt to win. Further, the belief in good and evil, right and wrong, is not inconsistent with the understanding that there are relative degrees of each present in most situations; I reject the idea that the world is made up of "shades of grey", while also acknowledging that most people and institutions are not wholly black or white; the world looks grey because we are each composed of many tiny intermingled pixels of black and white.
Answering "Whose evil is worse? Whose good is greater?" is usually very difficult, and so is often shied away from. It is also not obvious on the face of it that the real truth behind the adage "the end does not justify the means" is that unjust means will destroy any claimed just end. The adage isn't correct as given, really. Nothing "justifies" anything. Just ends require just means, and if your means are unjust, then either you will not accomplish your ends or you are fooling yourself as to what your true ends are.
So now I better understand this. When General William Sherman gutted the culture, economy and morale of the Confederate States of America a century ago, he and the Army of the West were not only pursuing a just end (the eradication of the vile practice of slavery), but were in part successful because they used just means. Sherman is often reviled for attacking the buildings, livestock and livelihood of the American South, while his counterpart Grant generally gets a pass despite having participated in the deaths of tens of thousands of soldiers drawn from the ranks of the Confederacy's sons. To simply say "Attack army good, attack farms bad" is wildly irresponsible.
I could go on about justice in war and warfare, but I won't. I'm only touching on it to illustrate the deep complexity of the issues that must be considered and analyzed before knowing what is right and what is wrong. Yes, the world is profoundly complex, but this does not mean that there is not underlying everything the discretely good and the discretely evil.
And so the American view of Israel. I still have issue with the nature and method of the creation of the modern state of Israel, as do many Americans. I have long wanted justice and self-determination for the Palestinian people living there with you, and I am not alone in this. But to stop thinking right there, declare Israel an unjust occupying force, and thus close the topic, is wrongheaded and lazy.
A number of realizations have slowly turned me from a mild Palestinian sympathizer to, first, passively supporting the Israeli cause and later on, now, someone who outright sees the radical Palestinian movement as an enemy of civilization. It has been a journey of many steps.
Israel has elections. While there is evil and good mixed in the hearts of every one of us, I believe that if humanity does not have a general tendency towards good, then we at least have a tendency to want to appear as good. Because of this, democratic states are more inclined to be better than other states. While a sole king or dictator may choose to follow his or her evil desires, for a sufficiently large democracy to be more evil than good requires not one, but thousands or millions of people to all not only choose evil, but the same evil.
Israel's press demonstrates a commitment to tolerance and plurality that is greater than is found in the press of its enemies. Paying attention to international journalism on the web shows this quite clearly. Israeli newspapers and magazines illustrate a fairly wide spectrum of opinion, frequently correct and criticize one another, and generally host what appears to be a reasonable debate. Arab news sources, on the other hand, are rigidly controlled by their host states, and seem capable only of mouthing the prefab agendas of the Israel-must-be-annihilated-crowd. Public disagreement is a sign of honesty in a society, and the signs before us these days should incline us to distrust anything that has at its source the Arab press.
In prosecuting the respective sides of this conflict, both sides have done wrong at times. However, Israel has the decency to be embarrassed by its mistakes, and by and large does not codify evil practices into its intended strategies. For the militant radical forces arrayed against Israel, however, monstrous acts are the very core of their strategy.
Asymmetrical warfare is necessary for any underdog when the normal means of self-defense and self-liberation are not available. However, terrorism is not the only form of asymmetry available to Palestinians. Against a democratic government, Ghandi's approach of passive resistance is not only effective, but often morally required. True, were Israel a dictatorship, the use of force would be the only means of changing its ways, but it is not. It's also true that Ghandi's approach involves sacrifice and suffering, but we are talking about a group that praises martyrdom and calculatingly incinerates its own children for the cause.
The radical Palestinian movement claims as its end freedom. This plays well to Americans, but it is a calculated lie. Perhaps at some point in history the progenitors of today's groups believed they sought freedom and self-determination, but some of their words and nearly all of their actions today directly clash with this notion. Out of the mouths of Near Eastern heads of state, Islamic religious leaders, Arab journalists, and the leaders and spokespersons of all the various other enemies of Israel pours forth a constant call for the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews. That these same sources will, for foreign media, occasionally hide or contradict such statements of hatred and intended genocide does not erase what they say to their own people. They have to be lying to someone. Further, their actions do nothing to demonstrate they want anything other than the destruction of Israel. Most notably, the outright rejection of agreements that would grant them their "peace and freedom" show what they do and do not seek.
In half a century of conflict, the enemies have shown amazing creativity when devising ways of destroying Israel, but seem totally uninterested in building anything of their own that will stand as a rational and just government for their people. The terrorists do not represent "their" people in any official way and have done precious little towards that end. Yes, often war precedes the rational founding of a new government, but, for God's sake, we're talking decades of near total inaction on this front. If Arafat were truly serious in wanting a free Palestinian state, you'd think he'd have come up with more than he has by now.
As for Arafat himself, Israel demonstrated something important in acquiescing to the establishment of the Palestinian Authority. Either Arafat wanted peace or he wanted destruction. Either he was in command of his side and thus should be negotiated with, or he wasn't and was thus irrelevant. Both questions have been tested, and while neither has been individually answered, we now have an aggregate answer that is actionable. His recent past shows that only one of two cases is possible: a.) Arafat is capable of stopping the bloodshed on his side but chooses not to, or b.) Arafat is incapable of maintaining the peace on his side. Either way, any agreement, negotiation, discussion or treaty with him is pointless.
Finally, there is the issue of the sins of the fathers. Much of the world accuses America of being without "culture", "immature", "too young to understand". All crap. A nation is not a person. This is something Americans sometimes forget, but most other people seem not to accept at all. Each nation on this earth is composed of and run by human beings whose personal age, experience and wisdom as absolutely limited by their personal lifespans as individuals. A nation that has stood for a thousand years is no more "wise" than one that has stood for a single generation. All the accumulated knowledge and wisdom beyond that is communicated through speech and writing, which are both essentially just as available to those outside the nation as those inside it. Furthermore, what a nation did in the past has no intrinsic moral bearing on the present. Nations are merely constructs; reality consists only of individuals. The only rational way of viewing a nation's justness is in terms of the current behavior of its current population and government. If all the people that participated in committing a particular evil - or good! - are dead, then the "nation" itself that committed those acts is dead as well, with a new nation standing in its place. History teaches us valuable lessons, but arguing over the justness and morality of what one nation may or may not have done to other in previous generations is meaningless compared to what is and is not the facts of the current circumstances. This, ironically, cuts against many of the arguments found on both sides of the dispute. In the end, though, it leads me to see today's Israel and her enemies of today in a much clearer light. When I gave my speech in high school, I was dead wrong to try to make a case for the "original sin" of English occupation. Those who seek reparations for the descendants of American slaves are dead wrong. To say that Abdul must kill Benjamin because the nation that Benjamin's father founded was done without the consent of the Turkish government that once ruled over Abdul's ancestries is hysterical lunacy.
There are only so many responses available to someone witnessing a fight between two other groups: 1.) choose a side and help it, 2.) attack both sides, 3.) stay out of it. The world seems to be split between siding against Israel and staying out of the fight altogether. No side is purely right, so to avoid picking a side is merely cowardly and lazy. The only rational reason for choosing the third option is not knowing which way to go, and that excuse only lasts so long.
Finally, the actions and methods of the terrorists are grossly evil, whereas Israel's response is merely harsh. They target children. You knock down buildings. They execute "collaborators". You imprison lawbreakers. They determine their own justice. You have laws. Israel is not pure; innocents have been hurt and killed by Israeli forces, but to imagine that the terrorists would have taken any pains at all to avoid slaughtering the silly pacifists that recently visited Arafat, were those nuts to have formed "human shields" around Sharon in a similar situation is absurd. By their actions, the terrorists you are inflicted with declare that it is acceptable to intentionally target children and other innocents to further their own personal agendas. By not choosing sides in this fight, the world at large is telling the terrorists that they are right.
Is it any wonder that the bloodshed continues? Is it any wonder that thousands of Americans died in a single day at the hands of similarly reprehensible monsters? Without choosing sides, how can we expect anything but more of the same?
Each of these ideas took time to come to. Synthesizing them and applying them to the situation in Israel took more time. But now I get it.
Since the September Atrocity, I have seen many other Americans go through a similar evolution of thought. Some don't require the same degree of over-intellectualization I needed. Some do. Honestly, I'm embarrassed it took me so long, and am ashamed to admit ever having had romantic ideas about the Palestinian cause. Dispelling the lazy romanticism surrounding the "fight for freedom" and the support of the "underdog" requires at least some rigorous thinking about unpleasant and difficult subjects, though, and it doesn't happen overnight. Many Americans are still going through the process and have yet to arrive where I stand. The American media have all sorts of other hang-ups that seem incurable and that at least will always lag behind the will and opinion of the American public. Don't get depressed by what you see there; the American press is not a representation of the American people, but is in a dialogue with us. They are one side of a discussion, and frankly they are also very poor listeners.
On the other, less heard side of the conversation many Americans are choosing a democratically elected Israel over a movement that targets children - their own as well as their enemies' - who by their actions show they want destruction despite their meaningless words of peace, who, were they to gain even what they claim as their goal, would merely set up yet another uneducated, dictatorial, corrupt and oppressive little kingdom so much like the ones that funded, harbored, and supplied the human excrement that attacked us in September and wish to attack us again.
More and more, we get it.
