Name: Anonymous 2010-01-30 21:13
My goal here is a thoughtful and compassionate portrayal of two sides in a prolonged and violent conflict.
I know that replies to this will mostly be knee-jerk ideological tirades proclaiming the soulless and evil nature of one side or the other, or both. But there are some people out there who can read this thoughtfully and seek a better understanding, and those are the readers I hope to reach.
An Israeli narrative:
Millennia ago, we were a great nation. Many times our land was conquered and our people exiled. Many times we returned home and rebuilt our nation. After conquest by the Roman Empire in 70 CE, we lived in diaspora for a long time.
Everywhere we went we tried to be good neighbors. Most of the time our relations with other inhabitants of the region started out peaceful and mutually beneficial. Still, we were always the outsiders -- this was before notions of multiculturalism -- and sooner or later this always resulted in persecution.
In 1895, the modern Zionist movement began. This movement said, "Enough. Enough of being forced to live in diaspora. Enough of being persecuted everywhere we go. It's time to go home. It's time to be a nation again." Zionists began immigrating to Israel in large numbers, purchasing large tracts of land, making it bloom, and building the infrastructure for a modern and prosperous nation.
The persecution of Jews rose to a new level with the Third Reich in the 1930's. We were deprived of even the most basic human rights, and even the most basic animal rights. We tried to emigrate but other nations of the world refused to accept Jewish refugees in significant numbers. We tried to go home to Israel but Britain limited Jewish immigration into Mandatory Palestine to just 15,000 per year.
We were trapped in Europe when the Reich settled on the Final Solution to the Jewish Question: extermination. We were forced into gas chambers and killed with a pesticide, Zyklon B. It was slow and agonizingly painful for the victims, and cost effective for the Germans.
The Reich's imperialist ambitions brought it to war. For a time Nazi victory appeared inevitable, but it was not. The Allies prevailed and the Reich fell. By this time the vast majority of Europe's Jews were dead.
Now our homeland was a moral imperative. After millions of us died because nobody in the world would let us live among them, we had to have a home to call our own. A home where we could always go. A home where we could be safe. A home where we could live as Jews, with Jews. Most importantly, a place where we could protect ourselves, because nobody else in the world would protect us.
Home could only be Israel. This was where we came from. This was where we had returned so many times before. This was where we had longed to return for the last two thousand years. And we were already there in large numbers. We had purchased land, developed that land, and built a home for ourselves. The suggestion that we abandon all that and go live on a reservation in Argentina was never seriously considered as an acceptable alternative.
Britain referred the matter to the UN. There were two populations in Mandatory Palestine, and for the most part Jews lived in Jewish areas and Arabs lived in Arab areas. The UN took a map of the area, colored the Jewish areas in one color and the Arab areas in another, and declared these to be the lands allocated to two new states, one Jewish and one Arab. The city of Jerusalem was to be administered by an international coalition. Fair enough.
On May 15, 1948, Israel became a sovereign state for the first time in almost two thousand years. No sooner had our infant state emerged from the womb than it was attacked from all sides by those intent on its complete destruction. We survived that initial assault. We have been fighting for survival every day since. We will never give up.
An Arabic narrative:
The history of conflict between Islam and Christendom is long and bloody, but this was not our concern at the start of the 20th century. We were at that time subjects of the Ottoman Turkish Empire. They were Muslims, but not Arabs. We wanted independence.
When war broke out between the Ottoman Empire and other imperial powers, we joined the war against the Ottomans. We received assurances that we were fighting for independence, not fighting to become subjects of another empire. Maybe we were naïve in trusting such assurances. Maybe we thought that, having ousted one empire from our lands, we would not so easily be reconquered by another empire that had been weakened by the great war. Maybe we were angry and itching for a chance to take down the Ottomans. Maybe we felt we had no choice. Maybe T. E. Lawrence was the kind of man who could sell ice to Eskimos.
Whatever the reasons, we fought. We fought hard. We fought well. We contributed to the downfall of the Ottoman Empire. And at the end of the war, we were excluded from the peace conference.
We had noted with some concern Britain's declaration of support for Zionism, but we also realized that the Arab nationalist movement and the Zionist movement had some common interests. The two movements reached an uneasy accord, pledging support for each other's state, with our delegation being explicit that Arabic consent to the accord was contingent on England and France honoring their wartime assurances to us.
Those assurances were not honored. The European powers carved up our lands into colonies and puppet states and plundered our resources. We're talking about a lot of extremely valuable natural resources, most notably oil. We fought, but the technological disparity was so great that the balance of power remained in the hands of the white man.
Another great war spelled the beginning of the end for the colonial empires of Europe, but also the emergence of two new empires: the Western Bloc led by the USA and the Eastern Bloc led by Russia. Both empires would do whatever they had to do to prevail in the Cold War and would not be deterred by the rights of Arabs or other peoples whose lands and resources they needed.
I'm getting ahead of the story. Rewind to 1948, with the Cold War in its infancy but its direction already apparent, and the establishment of the modern state of Israel.
By this point in the narrative, our distrust, fear, and hatred for the West should be understood. Israel was strongly tied to that world. Most of the people came from Europe and most of the money came from the United States.
You know how angry we can be about a few American military bases on the Arabian Peninsula. That's nothing. Here the West was establishing an entire sovereign nation right in our midst. Millions of people with their disgusting Western culture that so offends our values, but more importantly a clear military threat. Israel's ties to the West and Jewish industry and ingenuity painted the picture of a near future in which the mightiest military in our part of the world would belong not to Arabs, nor even to Islamic peri-Arab peoples (Persians, Northern Africans, [fill-in-the-blank]stanians, etc.), but to the West.
We were determined to nip the threat in the bud. And we tried. Oh boy, did we try. But despite all our efforts, we failed.
If you're American, try to imagine a Communist/Islamic/SkyNet/Whatever state, hostile to you and with a military more powerful than yours, being established in Delaware. It's a scary thought. If a flood of Christian refugees emerges from Delaware, the cause of compassion would be served by taking them in and giving them new homes in Maryland, Pennsylvania, or almost anywhere else in the country; the cause of propaganda would be served by keeping them living in miserable conditions in horrible places like refugee camps, New Jersey, and enemy-occupied Delaware, and even generations later insisting that the only acceptable home for the descendants of those refugees is in Delaware. In our world, propaganda won out over compassion.
I'll be honest with you. We're not really concerned about the plight of the Palestinians. If we were, we would take them in. Or, every now and then, you might hear some voices from among us advocating the non-violent tactics of Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Such tactics would quickly result in an independent Palestinian state with peace, prosperity, and relative security -- but Israel would still be there, and that's not acceptable. So we do what we can to cultivate chaos and hatred all around Israel. If we can't eliminate Israel, then we'll make their existence as difficult, dangerous, and expensive as we can. Peace would only make Israel stronger, and the last thing we can afford is to strengthen the Western presence in our lands.
Now it's your turn to be honest. The cynicism isn't just on one side. Support for Israel isn't about sympathy for the historic plight of the Jews and their right to their homeland. If you cared that much about them you would have welcomed refugees and bombed the rail tracks to Auschwitz. Support for Israel is more about the strategic benefits that America and associated powers derive from having a strong and staunch ally in that part of the world.
The enemy isn't just the Jews. The enemy is the whole White Christian-Secular world. Five million Jews are on the enemy's front line in our lands, so naturally they incur a disproportionate amount of enmity.
I know that replies to this will mostly be knee-jerk ideological tirades proclaiming the soulless and evil nature of one side or the other, or both. But there are some people out there who can read this thoughtfully and seek a better understanding, and those are the readers I hope to reach.
An Israeli narrative:
Millennia ago, we were a great nation. Many times our land was conquered and our people exiled. Many times we returned home and rebuilt our nation. After conquest by the Roman Empire in 70 CE, we lived in diaspora for a long time.
Everywhere we went we tried to be good neighbors. Most of the time our relations with other inhabitants of the region started out peaceful and mutually beneficial. Still, we were always the outsiders -- this was before notions of multiculturalism -- and sooner or later this always resulted in persecution.
In 1895, the modern Zionist movement began. This movement said, "Enough. Enough of being forced to live in diaspora. Enough of being persecuted everywhere we go. It's time to go home. It's time to be a nation again." Zionists began immigrating to Israel in large numbers, purchasing large tracts of land, making it bloom, and building the infrastructure for a modern and prosperous nation.
The persecution of Jews rose to a new level with the Third Reich in the 1930's. We were deprived of even the most basic human rights, and even the most basic animal rights. We tried to emigrate but other nations of the world refused to accept Jewish refugees in significant numbers. We tried to go home to Israel but Britain limited Jewish immigration into Mandatory Palestine to just 15,000 per year.
We were trapped in Europe when the Reich settled on the Final Solution to the Jewish Question: extermination. We were forced into gas chambers and killed with a pesticide, Zyklon B. It was slow and agonizingly painful for the victims, and cost effective for the Germans.
The Reich's imperialist ambitions brought it to war. For a time Nazi victory appeared inevitable, but it was not. The Allies prevailed and the Reich fell. By this time the vast majority of Europe's Jews were dead.
Now our homeland was a moral imperative. After millions of us died because nobody in the world would let us live among them, we had to have a home to call our own. A home where we could always go. A home where we could be safe. A home where we could live as Jews, with Jews. Most importantly, a place where we could protect ourselves, because nobody else in the world would protect us.
Home could only be Israel. This was where we came from. This was where we had returned so many times before. This was where we had longed to return for the last two thousand years. And we were already there in large numbers. We had purchased land, developed that land, and built a home for ourselves. The suggestion that we abandon all that and go live on a reservation in Argentina was never seriously considered as an acceptable alternative.
Britain referred the matter to the UN. There were two populations in Mandatory Palestine, and for the most part Jews lived in Jewish areas and Arabs lived in Arab areas. The UN took a map of the area, colored the Jewish areas in one color and the Arab areas in another, and declared these to be the lands allocated to two new states, one Jewish and one Arab. The city of Jerusalem was to be administered by an international coalition. Fair enough.
On May 15, 1948, Israel became a sovereign state for the first time in almost two thousand years. No sooner had our infant state emerged from the womb than it was attacked from all sides by those intent on its complete destruction. We survived that initial assault. We have been fighting for survival every day since. We will never give up.
An Arabic narrative:
The history of conflict between Islam and Christendom is long and bloody, but this was not our concern at the start of the 20th century. We were at that time subjects of the Ottoman Turkish Empire. They were Muslims, but not Arabs. We wanted independence.
When war broke out between the Ottoman Empire and other imperial powers, we joined the war against the Ottomans. We received assurances that we were fighting for independence, not fighting to become subjects of another empire. Maybe we were naïve in trusting such assurances. Maybe we thought that, having ousted one empire from our lands, we would not so easily be reconquered by another empire that had been weakened by the great war. Maybe we were angry and itching for a chance to take down the Ottomans. Maybe we felt we had no choice. Maybe T. E. Lawrence was the kind of man who could sell ice to Eskimos.
Whatever the reasons, we fought. We fought hard. We fought well. We contributed to the downfall of the Ottoman Empire. And at the end of the war, we were excluded from the peace conference.
We had noted with some concern Britain's declaration of support for Zionism, but we also realized that the Arab nationalist movement and the Zionist movement had some common interests. The two movements reached an uneasy accord, pledging support for each other's state, with our delegation being explicit that Arabic consent to the accord was contingent on England and France honoring their wartime assurances to us.
Those assurances were not honored. The European powers carved up our lands into colonies and puppet states and plundered our resources. We're talking about a lot of extremely valuable natural resources, most notably oil. We fought, but the technological disparity was so great that the balance of power remained in the hands of the white man.
Another great war spelled the beginning of the end for the colonial empires of Europe, but also the emergence of two new empires: the Western Bloc led by the USA and the Eastern Bloc led by Russia. Both empires would do whatever they had to do to prevail in the Cold War and would not be deterred by the rights of Arabs or other peoples whose lands and resources they needed.
I'm getting ahead of the story. Rewind to 1948, with the Cold War in its infancy but its direction already apparent, and the establishment of the modern state of Israel.
By this point in the narrative, our distrust, fear, and hatred for the West should be understood. Israel was strongly tied to that world. Most of the people came from Europe and most of the money came from the United States.
You know how angry we can be about a few American military bases on the Arabian Peninsula. That's nothing. Here the West was establishing an entire sovereign nation right in our midst. Millions of people with their disgusting Western culture that so offends our values, but more importantly a clear military threat. Israel's ties to the West and Jewish industry and ingenuity painted the picture of a near future in which the mightiest military in our part of the world would belong not to Arabs, nor even to Islamic peri-Arab peoples (Persians, Northern Africans, [fill-in-the-blank]stanians, etc.), but to the West.
We were determined to nip the threat in the bud. And we tried. Oh boy, did we try. But despite all our efforts, we failed.
If you're American, try to imagine a Communist/Islamic/SkyNet/Whatever state, hostile to you and with a military more powerful than yours, being established in Delaware. It's a scary thought. If a flood of Christian refugees emerges from Delaware, the cause of compassion would be served by taking them in and giving them new homes in Maryland, Pennsylvania, or almost anywhere else in the country; the cause of propaganda would be served by keeping them living in miserable conditions in horrible places like refugee camps, New Jersey, and enemy-occupied Delaware, and even generations later insisting that the only acceptable home for the descendants of those refugees is in Delaware. In our world, propaganda won out over compassion.
I'll be honest with you. We're not really concerned about the plight of the Palestinians. If we were, we would take them in. Or, every now and then, you might hear some voices from among us advocating the non-violent tactics of Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Such tactics would quickly result in an independent Palestinian state with peace, prosperity, and relative security -- but Israel would still be there, and that's not acceptable. So we do what we can to cultivate chaos and hatred all around Israel. If we can't eliminate Israel, then we'll make their existence as difficult, dangerous, and expensive as we can. Peace would only make Israel stronger, and the last thing we can afford is to strengthen the Western presence in our lands.
Now it's your turn to be honest. The cynicism isn't just on one side. Support for Israel isn't about sympathy for the historic plight of the Jews and their right to their homeland. If you cared that much about them you would have welcomed refugees and bombed the rail tracks to Auschwitz. Support for Israel is more about the strategic benefits that America and associated powers derive from having a strong and staunch ally in that part of the world.
The enemy isn't just the Jews. The enemy is the whole White Christian-Secular world. Five million Jews are on the enemy's front line in our lands, so naturally they incur a disproportionate amount of enmity.