An Alternative to Grievances
Israel Must Recognize the Tragedy for Palestinians, and Palestinians Must See the Need for a Jewish Homeland
As a retired professor of law and ethics who has called Santa Barbara home for the better part of 40 years, and as a progressive Jew, I am surprised and dismayed at the Independent‘s lack of journalistic judgment in printing the UCSB academics’ piece without any effort to verify their factual allegations.
These professors allowed their opposition to a Jewish homeland in the Middle East to lead them to ignore a basic tenet of scholarly work: evaluate the evidence first (that is, don’t leap to conclusions). They jumped on the Hamas bandwagon by assuming, without any factual support, that the rocket that landed in the hospital parking lot was Israeli. The evidence from reliable sources (Associated Press, the Canadian government) has concluded otherwise: the rocket was not Israeli but was a misfire from somewhere in Gaza. What would cause otherwise solid academics to ignore a basic requirement needed to establish the very legitimacy of the academic project? They don’t state it, but it seems clearly to be their opposition to the Jewish state.
Their piece also reveals a serious moral failing. Hamas is a jihadist organization, dedicated to not only destroying Israel as a political entity but also to murdering as many Israelis as possible in the process. This homicidal mindset and political program has been rightly condemned worldwide as immoral, yet no such condemnation comes from these academics. They gave lip service to suffering in Gaza and in Israel, but could not bring themselves to condemn Hamas, or their unprecedented massacre, after invading Israeli territory in the worst pogrom since the Holocaust (of least 1,400 Jewish and some Arab and Bedouin civilians killed).
They know very well what Hamas’s charter says: “From the river to the sea.” They are in a position to know, unlike young Americans mindlessly chanting in the streets, what it actually means: extermination of every Jew living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean sea. Clearly, nothing Hamas actually does, has done, or will do to Jews in Israel, or anywhere else in the world, merits their unqualified condemnation.
Words matter, and our print media is in a key position to make sure those words represent the whole truth, and that they help to avoid, rather than exacerbate, the looming conflagration in the Middle East. Rather than echoing, elevating, and magnifying meaningless slogans, in my opinion, a truly “progressive” position would include an understanding of the full history, going back centuries before the British, Germans, and Ottoman Turks “colonized” the Middle East. Here are some points to consider in understanding that history and what it will take for something positive to emerge from this bloodshed:
• Israel will come to accept the fact that the creation of the contemporary Jewish State in their ancestral homeland also inflicted an enormous tragedy on the resident Arab population, physically and psychologically.
• Palestinian Arabs will come to understand that the Holocaust was real, that the world community of nations utterly failed to do what they could to minimize the number of Jews (and others) murdered, that Jews simply had to have a homeland where its residents could be safe from future outbursts of anti-Semitism, and that the only appropriate place for that homeland was in the Middle East.
• Israelis will come to realize that its settler program in the occupied territories and the attitudes that underlie and justify the mistreatment and denial of equal and fair treatment of its Arab citizens have proven to be an unsustainable disaster for the Israeli state. Creating a non-jihadist state for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza is the only way to co-exist.
• Both sides must come to realize and accept that not all displaced Palestinians and their descendants will be able to physically return to their pre-1948 homes and villages, but will, instead, accept restitution and reparations adequate to address the harms they have suffered and continue to suffer.
There will be a reckoning for all war crimes and crimes against humanity, regardless of who committed them.
The alternative is each side continuing to nurse its grievances and insisting on the other side’s capitulation/surrender. As long as this attitude prevails, there will be no peace, and people on both sides will continue to suffer and die.
