Understanding the Palestinian - Israeli conflict for the average American

Tuesday May 21, 2002 19:19

by Tim Wise

By Tim Wise

Israel bars any candidate from holding office who thinks Israel should be a secular, democratic state with equal rights for all.

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Defining Democracy
By Tim Wise

Webster’s New World Dictionary defines democracy as, among other things, "the
principle of equality of rights, opportunity and treatment, or the practice of this
principle." Keep this in mind, as we’ll be coming back to it shortly.

Now, imagine that the United States were to abolish our Constitution, or perhaps
had never had one to begin with. No Bill of Rights. No guarantees of things like free
speech, freedom of assembly and due process of law.

And imagine that Congress were to pass a law stating that the U.S. was from this
point forward to be legally defined as a Christian nation. As such, Christians would
be given special privileges for jobs, loans, and land ownership. Furthermore,
political candidates espousing certain beliefs--especially those who might argue
that we should be a nation with equal rights for all, and not a "Christian
nation"--were no longer allowed to hold office.

And imagine that next month, new laws were passed that restricted certain ethnic
and religious groups from acquiring land in particular parts of the country, and
made it impossible for members of ethnic minorities to hold certain jobs, or live in
particular communities.

And imagine that in response to perceived threats to our nation’s internal security,
new laws sailed through the House and Senate, providing for torture of those
detained for suspected subversion. This, on top of still other laws providing for the
detention of such suspects for long periods of time without trial or even a formal
charge against them.

In such a scenario, would anyone with an appreciation of the English language, and
with the above definition in mind, dare suggest that we would be justified in calling
ourselves a democracy?

Of course not: and yet the term is repeatedly used to describe Israel--as in "the only
democracy in the Middle East."

This, despite the fact that said nation has no constitution.

This, despite the fact that said nation is defined as the state of the Jewish people,
providing special rights and privileges to anyone in the world who is Jewish and
seeks to live there, over and above longtime Arab residents.

This, despite the fact that said nation bars any candidate from holding office who
thinks Israel should be a secular, democratic state with equal rights for all.

This, despite the fact that non-Jews are restricted in terms of how much land they
can own, and in which places they can own land at all.

This, despite that fact that even the Israeli Supreme Court has acknowledged the
use of torture against suspected "terrorists" and other "enemies" of the Jewish
state.

For some, it is apparently sufficient that Israel has an electoral system, and that
Arabs have the right to vote in those elections (though just how equally this right is
protected is of course a different matter). The fact that one can’t vote for a
candidate who questions the special Jewish nature of the state, because such
candidates can’t run for or hold office, strikes most as irrelevant: hardly enough to
call into question their democratic credentials.

But of course, the Soviet Union also had elections, of a sort. And in those elections,
most people could vote, though candidates who espoused an end to the communist
system were barred from participation. Voters got to choose between communists.
In Israel, voters get to choose between Zionists. In the former case, we recognize
such truncated freedom as authoritarianism. In the latter case, we call it democracy.

If it was not already obvious that the English language was dead--what with the
inanities introduced to it by the business-speak of corporate capitalism, such as
"thinking outside the box," "managing one’s human assets," and "planned
shrinkage"--this should pretty well prove the point. If what we see in Israel is indeed
democracy, then what does fascism look like?

I’m sorry, but I am over it. As a Jew--hear me now--I am over it. And if my language
seems too harsh here, that’s tough. Because it’s nothing compared to the sickening
things said by Israeli leaders throughout the years. Like Menachem Begin, former
Prime Minister who told the Knesset in 1982 that the Palestinians were "beasts
walking on two legs." Or former P.M. Ehud Barak, who offered a more precise form
of dehumanization when he referred to the Palestinians as "crocodiles."

And speaking of Barak, for more confirmation on the death of language, one should
examine his April 14 op-ed in the New York Times. Therein, Barak insisted that
democracy in Israel could be "maintained" (ahem), so long as the Jewish state was
willing to set up security fences to separate itself from the Palestinians, and keep
the Palestinians in their place.

Calling the process "unilateral disengagement," Barak opined that limiting access
by Arabs to Israel is the key to maintaining a Jewish majority, and thus the Jewish
nature of the state. That the Jewish nature of the state is inimical to democracy as
defined by every dictionary in the world matters not, one supposes.

Barak even went so far as to warn that in the absence of such security fences, Israel
might actually become an apartheid state. Imagine that: unless they institute
separation they might become an apartheid state. The irony of such a statement is
nearly perfect, and once again signals that words no longer have meaning. They
are but the sounds that emanate from one’s throat and are accompanied by breath
and occasionally spittle. They mean nothing. Define them as you choose.

Interestingly, amidst the subterfuge, other elements of Barak’s essay struck me as
surprisingly honest: much more honest, in fact, than when he had been Prime
Minister and supposedly made that "generous offer" to Arafat about which we keep
hearing.

You know, the one that would have allowed the maintenance of most Jewish
settlements in the territories, and would have restricted the Palestinian state to the
worst land, devoid of its own water supply, and cutoff at numerous chokepoints by
Israeli security. Yeah that one. The one that has been described variously (without
any acknowledgement of the inconsistency) as having offered the Palestinians
either 93%, or is it 95%, or maybe 96%, or perhaps 98% of the West Bank and
Gaza.

Well, in the Times piece, Barak finally came clean, admitting that Israel would need
to erect the fences in such a manner as to incorporate at least one-quarter of the
territories into Israel, so as to subsume the settlements. So not 93 percent, or 96%,
or 98%, but at best 75%, and still on the worst land.

Furthermore, the fences would slice up Jerusalem and restrict Arab access to the
Holy Basin and the Old City: a direct swipe at Muslims who seek access on a par
with their fellow descendants of Abraham.

That this was Barak’s idea all along should surprise no one. And that such a
"solution" would mean the final loss for the Palestinians of all but 17% of their
pre-Israel territory will likely not strike many in the U.S. media or political elite as
being terribly unfair.

If anything, we will continue to hear about the intransigence of the Arabs, and their
unwillingness to accept these "generous offers," which can only be seen as
generous to a people who have become so inured to human suffering that their very
souls are in jeopardy.

Or to those who have never consulted a dictionary. For once again, it defines
generous as: "willing to give or share; unselfish; large; ample; rich in yield; fertile." In
a world such as this, where words have lost all meaning, we might as well just burn
all the dictionaries.

Sometimes, the linguistic obfuscation goes beyond single words, and begins to
encompass entire phrases. One such example is the oft-repeated statement to the
effect that "Jews should be able to live anywhere in the world, and to say otherwise
is to endorse anti-Semitism." Thus, it is asked, why shouldn’t Jews be able to settle
in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem?

Of course, whoever says such a thing must know of its absurdity beforehand. After
all, the right to live wherever one chooses has never included the right to live in
someone else’s house, after taking it by force or fraud.

Nor does it include the right to set up house in territories that are conquered and
occupied as the result of military conflict: indeed, international law expressly forbids
such a thing.

And furthermore, those who insist on the right of Jews to live wherever they choose,
by definition deny the same right to Palestinians, who cannot live in the place of
their choosing, or even in the homes that were once theirs.

Needless to say, many Palestinians would like to live inside Israel’s pre-1948
borders, and exercise a right of return in order to do so. But don’t expect those who
demand the right for Jews to plant stakes anywhere we choose to offer the same
right to Arabs.

Many of these are among the voices that insist Jordan is "the Palestinian state,"
and thus, Palestinians should be perfectly happy living there. Since Palestinians are
Semites, one could properly call such an attitude "anti-Semitic"--seeing as how it
limits the rights of Semitic peoples to live wherever they wish--but given the
transmogrification of the term "anti-Semitism" into something that can only apply to
Jew-hatred, such a usage would seem bizarre to many, one suspects.

The rhetorical shenanigans even extend to the world of statistics. Witness the
full-page advertisement in the New York Times placed by the Conference of
Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, which ran the same day as
the Barak op-ed.

Therein, these supposed spokespersons for American Judaism stated their
unyielding support for Israel, and claimed that the 450 Israeli deaths caused by
terrorism since the beginning of the second intifada, were equal to 21,000 deaths
in the U.S. from terrorism, as a comparable percentage of each nation’s overall
population.

Playing upon fears and outrage over the attacks of 9/11, the intent was quite
transparent: get U.S. readers to envision 9/11 all over again, only with seven times
more casualties! A brilliant move, indeed.

But of course, honesty--an intellectual commodity in short supply these days, and
altogether missing from the rhetorical shelves of the Conference of
Presidents--would require one to point out that the numbers of Palestinian
non-combatant (that is to say civilian) deaths, at the hands of Israel in that same
time period, is much higher, and indeed would be "equal to" far more than 21,000
in the U.S., as a comparable share of respective populations.

To be honest to a fault would be to note that the 900 or so Palestinians slaughtered
with Israeli support in the Sabra and Shatilla camps during the 1982 invasion of
Lebanon, would be equal to over 40,000 Americans. Even more, the 17,500 Arabs
killed overall by Israel during that invasion would be roughly equivalent to over
800,000 Americans today: the size of many large cities.

In the dictionary such a thing might fall under the heading of terrorism. But
remember, words no longer have any meaning.

Sounding eerily like Adolph Hitler, Ariel Sharon once said, "a lie should be tried in a
place where it will attract the attention of the world." And so it has been: throughout
the media and the U.S. political scene, on CNN in the personage of Benjamin
Netanyahu, and in the pages of the New York Times.

And in my Hebrew School, where we were taught that Jews were to be "a light unto
the nations," instead of this dim bulb, this flickering nightlight, this barely visible
spark, whose radiance is only sufficient to make visible the death-rattle of the more
noble aspects of the Jewish tradition.

Unless we who are Jews insist on a return to honest language, and an end to the
hijacking of our culture and faith by madmen, racists and liars, I fear that the light
may be extinguished forever.

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