In recent weeks, Viewpoints have presented a battery of arguments in defense of Israel's military "response" in the occupied territories. Some of these op-eds (such as Florice Engler's "Good Luck Ariel Sharon," 2/8) have assumed a pitch of indignation at Palestinian audacity, while others (such as E.B. Solomont's "Two sides of the Mideast conflict," 2/20) and Debra Steinberg's "Unparalleled," 2/13) have taken a cooler tone in their "balanced" approach to the issue. All three of these lines of defense however lead to the same morally enervating and politically complacent conclusions - there is no real "fault" to be assigned (to Israel) in the recent violence and that there's nothing to be done about the situation (except of course what Israeli troops are already doing).
These conclusions - and the piecemeal arguments that produce them - are deeply flawed, deaf to history, and morally reprehensible. Neglecting to question the historical injustice and continuing immorality of Israeli colonialism, Solomont, Steinberg, and Engler all doom themselves to pose as apologists for an occupying army that opens fire on rock-hurling civilians protesting in their very own streets.
"The facts are these," Solomont tells us. "The Israelis have weapons and the Palestinians have weapons.... The Palestinians have killed innocent bystanders and so have the Israelis.... It occurs on both sides." While such reductive claims are not exactly lies, they are so terribly misleading as to be damn close. For if the Palestinians have weapons - mainly rocks and small arms - the Israeli's have weapons - helicopters, missiles, tanks, machine guns, and riot gear. If the Palestinians have killed bystanders, the Israeli forces have killed ten times as many.
Then there are the facts that slip Solomont's mind altogether. For instance, the fact that the Palestinians are using violence to resist an army of occupation, while the Israeli forces are using arms to repress the general population. By repressing these important underlying facts behind the "facts," Solomont makes the historical background of the recent uprising unintelligible, and this highly lop-sided violence seem balanced. Thus she may claim, "no one group is to blame - they both are."
Debra Steinberg on the other hand, blankets renowned international institutions that have condemned Israel's "excessive use of force" - such as the UN Security Council - with alleged "bias." According to this scattershot argument, the UN Security Council Resolution 1322 is to be taken with a grain of salt because it "was passed only as a result of the fact that the US abstained rather than veto the resolution."
The fact still remains, however, that 14 out of 15 UNSC nations voted in favor of the resolution condemning Israel, signifying an international consensus. Not even the US can reverse world opinion.
Further dramatizing the violence in the West Bank, Steinberg shows us how "when one, two, or three people are confronted with an angry mob throwing stones, the only possible recourse of action for the soldiers' self-defense - as well as the security of their post - is to use gunfire." However, Steinberg, like most US commentators, fixes on the moment of Palestinian uprising and the Israeli "response;" the Palestinian "mob" spontaneously and without reason, grows and attacks, and the Israelis merely defend themselves - they have no choice. Certainly, such accounts do have a certain credence, as the subjective experience of the Israeli soldier stuck in the occupied territories (on pain of court martial).
But we at Tufts are not post-bound police, and if what we are trying to do is understand the situation, so that we can find the best possible solution and advocate to make such a solution possible, we simply cannot limit our vision to the "moment of violence" itself. Why after all is the mob so angry? Do they have reasons worth discussing? From Steinberg's account I suppose we are simply to assume that it is of the nature of Palestinians to form malicious and malcontented mobs. To think in such limiting frames, however, is to start our story at the end, after alternatives have been foreclosed, and choices made.
Florice Engler, likewise ignoring the history of how the Palestinians came to be so dissatisfied, blames them for being obstinate. She deems the Palestinians' continued demands to return or receive compensation not just "unfeasible," but "insulting... not only is there not room for these people in the places where their homes existed before they left, but more importantly, there is not room for more people in Israel. Israel is a small country; she has neither the space nor the resources to accommodate that many new immigrants." But may I ask: Why is there no room for these people where their homes existed? Or for that matter, why did the Palestinians "leave" in the first place? These simple questions elude us.
And so now Engler's Israel has "no room" for them at all. No room for the Palestinians on land they once owned. No room for the people whose land has been ripped from them, whose economy has been starved and strangled. Where does such thinking lead us?
"I am not advocating war," Engler writes. "In America, we tend to think of either being in a state of war or peace. In Israel, however, there is a third option... an agreement to live peacefully until the time for a real peace presents itself...." However, what Engler's "third option," as well as other "wait and see" patient propositions, ignores is the fact that even when "peaceful living" does reign in the occupied territories, the illegal Jewish settlements and military installations continue to expand. Settlers continue to consolidate past expropriations of Palestinian land and the Israeli state lays the basis for new ones.
This "program for peaceful living" of course, does not make CBS News or The New York Times, but it does drive the Palestinian people deep and deeper into economic misery, political desperation, and social despair. Death for the occupied does not come only in a rain of bullets. To Palestinians living in filthy, crowded shacks, death comes in the form of the sewage that drains from the latrine into puddles in the alleys where their children must play. Death comes daily; poverty and oppression snuff out life, steadily, suffocating, strangling slowly, all of course, codified, that is "peaceful."
There's your "third option." Shhh.
Only the Palestinians refuse to go orderly into the gutter. Don't be fooled, though, there are those who would like nothing better. "I pray for peace daily," writes Sharon-supporter Engler, "But now is not the time for any true peace deal... Sharon has taken office. Things will most likely get worse before they get better. But they will eventually get better."
Reader, when you get a spare moment, take a look at a map, and you can start to see how the situation is "getting better" already: Specks and clots of Palestinian communities shaded in red, choked by ropes of blue and corridors of white - the stripes of an invader tightening its fist, controlling streets, sealing blockades, preparing their forces to "keep the peace" and make "things get better" "Until then - [when things get better,]" concludes Engler, "we continue to pray." Prayers however, are made of words, and when the words we use conceal murder and theft and oppression - when we ignore history, equate stones with bombs, and resistance with repression - when we call original inhabitants "new immigrants," orderly occupation "peaceful living," and justice "insulting"- our perverted prayers insult whomever may be listening. Bowing our heads to the tune of white-washed words won't keep the blood from splattering on our palms. It just keeps us from seeing the stains. But there's a pattern in those colors, and it's worth noticing. Open your eyes.
You can't have an effective right-wing hard-liner like Ariel Sharon without hardware. And the hardware comes chiefly from the US. Billions of dollars worth. We fund the force that makes negotiation unnecessary. And so long as we do, so long as we allow the Israeli state to steal Palestinian land and sweep the streets of protesters with Blackhawks, the Palestinian people will be forced to stake their claim to sovereignty by whatever means they can.
There are other means of course, but that would require something of us. Something more, I'm afraid, than the stillborn prayers we gush with.
Joe Ramsey is studying English in Tufts' Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
