Israel-Palestine: Get a Grip

Few subjects bring out the idiocy in otherwise smart and reasonable people quite like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Enter any gathering here on Berkeley's campus, mention the word "Palestine," and watch as brilliant academics transform at once into blathering lunatics. The principle applies regardless of whether the individual in question supports the Palestinians or the Israelis.

I normally approach this strange phenomenon by studiously avoiding discussions of the topic with anyone in my life. Whenever the conflict flares up, I go into hibernation until it dies down again.

This time I've decided - unwisely, probably - to lay my position on the line. In doing so I will likely attract a barrage of condemnation from most everybody I know. The upside is that whenever someone tries to draw me into this argument in the future, I can wash my hands of it simply by pointing them to this blog post and running away.

Most people who have a strong opinion on the conflict tend to regard one side as "good" and the other as "bad." The Palestinian (Israeli) cause is fundamentally just, while the Israelis (Palestinians) are a bunch of conniving brutes who flat-out refuse a reasonable compromise. As always in international politics, reality is far too complex to warrant such one-sided judgments.


Extremists and the perpetuation of hostilities

To me, it is short-sighted to regard one community as innocent and the other as malevolent. When I look at the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, I rather see the same thing I observe in almost every other civil conflict around the world. On each side you have a faction of relatively moderate leaders pitted against a group of extremists. The moderates tend to be receptive to compromising with the other side. They seek support among their constituents by posing as the party of reason.

The extremists, by contrast, cast themselves as the defenders of the nation from enemy aggressors. Paradoxically, however, they must continue stoking this external threat in order to justify their political existence. Without it, there is no rationale behind their quest to hold positions of power. In this way, extremists thrive on discord and violence. They gain political advantage by undermining any and all peace efforts initiated by the moderates.

Remarkably, this dynamic holds in practically every civil conflict around the globe, from Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Congo to Chechnya, Georgia, Sri Lanka, Kashmir, Turkey/Kurdistan, and Colombia. In the case of Israel-Palestine, the moderates take the form of the Labor Party and Kadima on the Israeli side and the PLO and parts of Fatah among the Palestinians. The extremists on the Palestinian side consist of Hamas; Fatah's military wing, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades; and Hezbollah, a militant group operating in southern Lebanon. Among the Israelis, the extremists are to be found in the Likud Party, segments of the religious right wing, and the Jewish settlers in the West Bank (and, previously, Gaza).

Palestinian and Israeli extremists engage in a symbiotic dance, each undertaking provocative and often violent actions that unwittingly promote the interests of the other. The pattern is eminently predictable; each time moderates among the two sides seem close to an agreement, the extremists step in to scupper it.

In the early 1990s the Oslo peace process, which ended the first Palestinian uprising, terminated abruptly when a radical Jewish settler assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the only Israeli politician with enough authority to oversee the full implementation of the accords. His successor, Shimon Peres, restarted peace negotiations but failed to win re-election in 1996. Why? Just before the elections were held, Hamas carried out a string of suicide bombings, sparking outrage among Israelis and springing Binyamin Netanyahu, his hawkish opponent, to power. This was precisely the outcome desired by Hamas, who wanted to ensure that Peres' peace initiative never got off the ground.

In 2000, the two sides were arguably as close to a settlement as they had ever been. It was at this time that Ariel Sharon, then the leader of the opposition Likud Party, staged his famous visit to the Temple Mount, one of the holiest sites in both Judaism and Islam. While Sharon could not have predicted the scale of the response, he surely knew his action would prove incendiary. Fatah responded by sending trained Palestinian youths into full-fledged rebellion against Israel. The second Palestinian uprising thus began. The resulting violence hardened Israeli public opinion and, in elections held a few weeks later, propelled Sharon and Likud to power.

Further examples abound. In 2002, on the eve of a major peace summit in Beirut, a Hamas youth blew himself up in the "Passover Massacre." Later, in 2006, Hezbollah crossed the Lebanese border to attack and kidnap a contingent of Israeli soldiers. The results must have exceeded their wildest expectations; the incursion brought on a massive retaliatory response by the Israeli army, killing scores of civilians and solidifying Hezbollah's standing as the exalted defenders of Lebanese Muslims and Palestinians. Israel's current offensive in Gaza began in similar fashion; this time, Hamas escalated its rocket attacks in the weeks preceding the assault, prompting the heavy-handed Israeli reaction you are now witnessing.

On both sides of the conflict, then, one can observe a small group of elites who cynically bolster their own power by keeping ordinary people locked in a semi-perpetual state of violence. Granted, it is only the Palestinian extremists that deliberately target civilians. Does this mean their Israeli counterparts are to be regarded as more virtuous? Hardly. The extremists on both sides will do anything they can get away with. It is simply that the Israeli ones can get away with less. Israel, an internationally-recognized state that seeks normal relations with most of the world, cannot afford to be seen intentionally and indiscriminately blowing up Palestinian civilians. Therefore, Israel's leaders - even the extremists among them - go to considerable lengths to avoid such displays.

Hamas, by contrast, is not bound by the niceties of diplomatic relations and international treaties. Since they have far less at stake, they can send their suicide bombers into Israeli cafes without fearing serious consequences. They are also free to use as weapons of war the very Palestinian civilians they claim to be defending, firing rockets into Israel from launchers stationed in heavily-populated areas. That way, any retaliation by Israel has a high probability of killing these civilians and stoking more rage of the kind on which Hamas thrives.

If you insist upon taking a strong moral stand on the Israel-Palestine issue, then at least direct your hostility where it is due. Refrain from silly and simplistic condemnations of one side in favor of the other and dispense your venom towards the extremists who reign over both.


Stifle yourself, please

Even then, however, you must explain why you are so concerned with this particular conflict over the many other worthy candidates the world has to offer. Most of these other disputes are equally, if not more, deserving of your outrage. If you are Jewish or Palestinian, or even simply Muslim, your preoccupation with Israel may be justified. If you do not belong to any of these communities and still find yourself furiously pounding your fist over what is happening in Palestine, then a bit of self-reflection may be in order.

Why, for example, do you support the Palestinian cause while ignoring the plight of the Sahrawis, oppressed under Moroccan domination since 1976? Or the Kurds' struggle against Turkey, whose military regimes have brutally crushed their quest for independence? Why are you not similarly enraged at India's occupation of Kashmir? Or Sri Lanka's ham-fisted repression of its ethnic Tamil population? The list of embattled minority groups goes on and on. If you are to persist in your cheerleading for the Palestinians, then you must promote all of these other causes as well - unless, that is, you are unburdened by a desire for logical consistency.

Palestine's armchair activists, when pressed on this point, give a common reply. There is, they admit, nothing special about the injustices endured by the Palestinians. Their anger, they claim, stems instead from the fact that their tax dollars are supporting these injustices by way of the billions America provides each year to Israel in the form of aid.

This argument fails to stand up to scrutiny, however. The US extends similar aid, directly or indirectly, to Turkey, which represses its Kurdish minority; to Colombia, whose military and paramilitaries terrorize rural peasants suspected of sympathizing with the FARC rebels; and to Egypt, which brutalizes, jails, and tortures its own population. Yet when it comes to these other instances, Palestine's Upper West Side crusaders fall strangely silent.

There is, I believe, another explanation for their arbitrary rage. Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories offers up the stark image of rich white people oppressing poor brown people. This pattern harks back to European imperialism in the Third World along with America's own mistreatment of its African-American population. The concept is an easy one for Westerners to digest.

Yet most of the oppression in the world today is perpetrated by poor brown people against other poor brown people - think of sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and the rest of the Middle East. Unlike white-on-brown injustice, the notion of brown-on-brown repression is too complex for many people in the West to fit into their simplistic moral frames. Aren't the dark-skinned people of the world supposed to live together in harmony and unite against the White Man?

Thus, when it comes to mass rape, mutilation, and murder in Congo, most people in the West just turn away befuddled. But when the Israeli army bulldozes homes in the West Bank, the legions of "progressives" start plastering their Volkswagen Jettas with bold-lettered bumper stickers.

At best, we can chalk up this tendency to ignorance; most people are simply unaware of what's happening in these other places because the media devotes less coverage to them. At worst, however, it is a subtle form of racism. Many of us in the West expect a higher standard of conduct from prosperous white people than we do of impoverished brown people. How else to explain why the Israelis' comparatively light treatment of the Palestinians monopolizes everybody's attention while the bloodletting in Congo barely merits a headline? The total body count in Palestine since the second uprising began in 2000 numbers several thousand. In Congo, five million people have been killed since 1997. Yet when was the last time you heard your aunt, the professor of comparative literature who routinely rants about the Israeli occupation, say anything at all about Congo? Or Zimbabwe? Or Colombia?

If you feel compelled to render judgment, then at least apply some logic in how you apportion it.