By Patricia Lee Sharpe
While both Hamas and Israel may be guilty of war crimes against civilians last winter, a U.N. fact-finding mission has concluded that Israel carried out “a deliberate disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize” the people of Gaza. This, sadly, is not the first time Israel has been accused of gross disproportionality in response to violence originating in Gaza, which is one very important reason why so many people who used to be Israeli supporters are not very sympathetic anymore.
When I was growing up, we were taught in school to admire Israel because hard-working farmers had planted lush, well-irrigated orange orchards in a desert—an arid, neglected, largely uninhabited land that was Jewish by right of prior possession, to say nothing of the blood-bathed, guilt-inducing politics that had brought the modern state of Israel into being.
Those Other Trees
Only much later did I learn of the much-cherished lemon trees that were being burnt or uprooted when Palestinian houses were bombed or bulldozed by the Israeli army. Or become aware of the countless acres of olive trees, some extremely ancient, that were being destroyed to build Jewish settlements on conquered and occupied lands—and more recently to make way for a wall routed so as to appropriate as much land as possible lest a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine stand-off actually be put into practice.
Never in school did I hear about Irgun, the Jewish terrorist organization whose leaders, years later, would command respect, although evidently their counterparts in Hamas are never to be talked to. Don't even think about respect! Furthermore, much to my shame, I preserved for far too long my orange-orchard fantasy by not paying sufficient attention to some very ugly cases of what we now call ethnic cleansing—murderous operations to rid the newly born state of Israel of its inconvenient population of Arabs. Evidently, the land had not been vacant!
The Eye for an Eye Fallacy
There’s a reason for my willful blindness. My family was not Jewish, but my political consciousness was pricked to life by the mistreatment of Jews in my own country as well as by what my childish eyes saw in the news reels toward the end of World War II. As a little kid, I saw the bodies of the dead piled like firewood and the equally skeletal bodies of the barely living clustered at the gates of liberated concentration camps. At the same time, I also saw signs in America saying “Gentiles only.” I heard neighbors worrying about the neighborhood “going Jewish.” I read about “Jewish quotas” at Princeton and Yale. And I saw a connection.
While both Hamas and Israel may be guilty of war crimes against civilians last winter, a U.N. fact-finding mission has concluded that Israel carried out “a deliberate disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize” the people of Gaza. This, sadly, is not the first time Israel has been accused of gross disproportionality in response to violence originating in Gaza, which is one very important reason why so many people who used to be Israeli supporters are not very sympathetic anymore.
When I was growing up, we were taught in school to admire Israel because hard-working farmers had planted lush, well-irrigated orange orchards in a desert—an arid, neglected, largely uninhabited land that was Jewish by right of prior possession, to say nothing of the blood-bathed, guilt-inducing politics that had brought the modern state of Israel into being.
Those Other Trees
Only much later did I learn of the much-cherished lemon trees that were being burnt or uprooted when Palestinian houses were bombed or bulldozed by the Israeli army. Or become aware of the countless acres of olive trees, some extremely ancient, that were being destroyed to build Jewish settlements on conquered and occupied lands—and more recently to make way for a wall routed so as to appropriate as much land as possible lest a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine stand-off actually be put into practice.
Never in school did I hear about Irgun, the Jewish terrorist organization whose leaders, years later, would command respect, although evidently their counterparts in Hamas are never to be talked to. Don't even think about respect! Furthermore, much to my shame, I preserved for far too long my orange-orchard fantasy by not paying sufficient attention to some very ugly cases of what we now call ethnic cleansing—murderous operations to rid the newly born state of Israel of its inconvenient population of Arabs. Evidently, the land had not been vacant!
The Eye for an Eye Fallacy
There’s a reason for my willful blindness. My family was not Jewish, but my political consciousness was pricked to life by the mistreatment of Jews in my own country as well as by what my childish eyes saw in the news reels toward the end of World War II. As a little kid, I saw the bodies of the dead piled like firewood and the equally skeletal bodies of the barely living clustered at the gates of liberated concentration camps. At the same time, I also saw signs in America saying “Gentiles only.” I heard neighbors worrying about the neighborhood “going Jewish.” I read about “Jewish quotas” at Princeton and Yale. And I saw a connection.
If I am a civil libertarian today, and I am, it’s because a little girl knew that all these things were wrong. And then, like so many well-wishing observers of Israel, I fell into a long corrosive period of self-censoring. Remember the Bible? There was a brave beautiful harp-playing young shepherd who slew Goliath the huge hulking Philistine—and with a slingshot! Unfortunately young David turned into the adulterous, war-mongering, land-grabbing King David. And so with Israel, the very impressive achievement of Jewish survivors who declared they would make themselves strong so Jews would never be victims again. And then, having been attacked, the ex-victims not only fought back, but became oppressors. Yet who dared to criticize? Who wanted to be called anti-Semitic? For years and years the Israeli nukes remained unmentionable, and Israelis had carte blanche to do whatever they wanted to the people in the occupied territories.
A Telling Encounter
Little by little, as my sympathies grew less one-sided and more complex, I got up my courage. I spoke out. I wrote. Yet I hadn’t quite realized how completely I had come to view an arrogant land-grabbing Israel as the primary obstacle to peace in the Middle East until I was being introduced to a well-connected Israeli visitor at a party just this past week. In that moment, I found myself thinking that I did not want to shake this person’s hand. I did not want to chat. Nor could I trust myself to make nice. But I could not escape, so I decided to make the most of the encounter. I’d try out my current thinking, which is this: the founders of Israel chose a disastrous narrative to live by.
Israel, I suggested, had chosen to recreate the very condition of walled-off isolation in which so many Jews had earlier been forced to live, a ghetto, a shtetl. Instead of expressing some solidarity with other peoples who’d also been slated for extinction by the Nazis (read about the massacres of Slavs and gypsies as well as Jews in Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Rule Europe by Mark Mazower), and with the Armenians who’d been murdered in the tens of thousands by the Turks, or the Amerindians of which it was said, “The only good Injun is a dead Injun,” or later the Tutsi in Rwanda or the non-Arabs of Darfur, Israel would, decade after decade, claim singularity as the God-given land of God’s chosen people, and Israelis would jealously defend exclusive ownership of the Holocaust brand by arguing that they have suffered more than any other people. Perhaps they have. But moral snobbery, a self-aggrandizing holier-than-thou stance, unfortunately, is not endearing. Eventually it even becomes self-defeating—especially since Judaism tends to be a fairly exclusive club, unlike Islam or Christianity, which grow not only by natural increase but by actively encouraging conversion.
A New Narrative is Possible
In fact, during that unexpected encounter over wine and hors d’oeuvres last week, I was interrupted well before I’d finished my exposition, because my thinking, it seems, wasn’t as heretical as I’d imagined. My new Israeli acquaintance didn’t want to quarrel. He agreed. Israel needs a new world-welcoming narrative because the old one, the one proposing to make ex-victims invincible, then blackmailing the U.S. into supporting the fantasy, has come to a dead end.
Isn’t it time for the U.S. to insist that those lemon and olive groves must be replanted and watered and nurtured and allowed to flourish alongside the orange orchards that no longer seem so admirable? Yes, there are many Arabs, who, quite understandably, still resent the fact that the Europeans chose to solve their “Jewish problem” by giving Arab land away. But the more or less resigned and acquiescent majority won’t be willing to suppres the violence-prone until a wholly sovereign Palestine—not a Swiss cheese faux Palestine—is well underway.
A Telling Encounter
Little by little, as my sympathies grew less one-sided and more complex, I got up my courage. I spoke out. I wrote. Yet I hadn’t quite realized how completely I had come to view an arrogant land-grabbing Israel as the primary obstacle to peace in the Middle East until I was being introduced to a well-connected Israeli visitor at a party just this past week. In that moment, I found myself thinking that I did not want to shake this person’s hand. I did not want to chat. Nor could I trust myself to make nice. But I could not escape, so I decided to make the most of the encounter. I’d try out my current thinking, which is this: the founders of Israel chose a disastrous narrative to live by.
Israel, I suggested, had chosen to recreate the very condition of walled-off isolation in which so many Jews had earlier been forced to live, a ghetto, a shtetl. Instead of expressing some solidarity with other peoples who’d also been slated for extinction by the Nazis (read about the massacres of Slavs and gypsies as well as Jews in Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Rule Europe by Mark Mazower), and with the Armenians who’d been murdered in the tens of thousands by the Turks, or the Amerindians of which it was said, “The only good Injun is a dead Injun,” or later the Tutsi in Rwanda or the non-Arabs of Darfur, Israel would, decade after decade, claim singularity as the God-given land of God’s chosen people, and Israelis would jealously defend exclusive ownership of the Holocaust brand by arguing that they have suffered more than any other people. Perhaps they have. But moral snobbery, a self-aggrandizing holier-than-thou stance, unfortunately, is not endearing. Eventually it even becomes self-defeating—especially since Judaism tends to be a fairly exclusive club, unlike Islam or Christianity, which grow not only by natural increase but by actively encouraging conversion.
A New Narrative is Possible
In fact, during that unexpected encounter over wine and hors d’oeuvres last week, I was interrupted well before I’d finished my exposition, because my thinking, it seems, wasn’t as heretical as I’d imagined. My new Israeli acquaintance didn’t want to quarrel. He agreed. Israel needs a new world-welcoming narrative because the old one, the one proposing to make ex-victims invincible, then blackmailing the U.S. into supporting the fantasy, has come to a dead end.
Isn’t it time for the U.S. to insist that those lemon and olive groves must be replanted and watered and nurtured and allowed to flourish alongside the orange orchards that no longer seem so admirable? Yes, there are many Arabs, who, quite understandably, still resent the fact that the Europeans chose to solve their “Jewish problem” by giving Arab land away. But the more or less resigned and acquiescent majority won’t be willing to suppres the violence-prone until a wholly sovereign Palestine—not a Swiss cheese faux Palestine—is well underway.