Eyeless in Gaza

First I saw a young protester telling a CNN reporter in Trafalgar Square, "Every single day, as soon as we turn on the TV, we see children there die in the hospitals, adults dying, children dying on the floor. Why, why, why? Why do children have to die? Why do innocent children have to die on the floor? Why?"

And I thought, She's right, those children in Gaza are innocent, every human life is precious, civilians aren't combatants. Doesn't everyone deserve basic human rights like food and water and life itself?

But then I thought, Where was she when 80 or 90 Hamas rockets a day were raining down on Israel? Where were all the television cameras when innocent children in Ashkelon and Sderot were being maimed and killed?

But then I saw pictures of massive devastation in Gaza on the front pages of the newspapers, and I thought, What good does it do if Israel appears to act like its enemies?

But then I heard Shimon Peres tell George Stephanopoulos that Hamas "did things which are unprecedented in the history even of terror. They made mosques into headquarters. They put bombs in the kindergartens, in their own homes. They are hiding in hospitals." Where were all the people of Gaza rising up in outrage when Hamas used them as human shields?

Then I heard Palestinian negotiator Hannan Ashwari say that Gaza was a secondary issue, that the real imperative was to reach a lasting political agreement, not a temporary military outcome, and I thought, She's right, there will be no peace and security for Israel unless a viable two-state solution is reached.

But then I read a blog by Atlantic writer Jeffrey Goldberg recounting his interview with Nizzar Rayyan, the Hamas leader who was killed by Israeli bombs last week. "This is what he said when I asked him if he could envision a 50-year hudna (or cease-fire) with Israel: 'The only reason to have a hudna is to prepare yourself for the final battle. We don't need 50 years to prepare ourselves for the final battle with Israel.' There is no chance, he said, that true Islam would ever allow a Jewish state to survive in the Muslim Middle East. 'Israel is an impossibility. It is an offense against God... You [Jews] are murderers of the prophets and you have closed your ears to the Messenger of Allah.... Jews tried to kill the Prophet, peace be unto him. All throughout history, you have stood in opposition to the word of God.'"

And I thought, How can you negotiate with people who reject your nation's right to exist, and whose version of religion calls you a murderous race? If someone claimed that the best way for America to deal with Bin Laden is to reach a political agreement with al-Qaeda, I'd say that they're nuts, that there can be no negotiation or accommodation with people lusting for a final battle to rid your people from the earth.

But then I heard an Arab diplomat railing against Israel's continuing tolerance of illegal settlements, and I thought, As long as Knesset coalition governments are dependent on ultra-Orthodox parties who have no respect for the law, how can anyone expect Arab moderates to gain enough political power for Israel to negotiate with them, when Israeli moderates can't muster that clout either?

Then I reminded myself that the people of Gaza overwhelmingly voted for Hamas in a democratic election, and I thought, What good is democracy, if it can put terrorists in charge of governments?

But then I read that tens of thousands of Israeli Arabs in the Israeli town of Sakhnin had rallied against Israel's Gaza offensive, and I thought, What Middle East nation except Israel would ensure that anti-government protesters had the right to hold such a demonstration?

And then I remembered reading that former Israeli army chief Moshe Yaalon warned Israelis not to delude themselves about Israel's Arab population, that Israeli Arabs - a fifth of Israel - constitute a potential fifth column.

Then I saw a Teleseker Institute poll saying that 95 percent of Israeli Jews support Operation Cast Lead against Hamas. But then I saw a Rasmussen poll saying that while 44 percent of Americans think Israel should have taken military action against the Palestinians, 41% say it should have tried to find a diplomatic solution - essentially a tie, within the poll's margin of error. And I wondered, How long does diplomacy have to keep failing, how many bombs have to keep dropping, before self-defense finally trumps talk?

I wish I didn't believe that the events now unfolding in the Middle East are too complicated for unalloyed outrage. I wish the arguments of only one side rang wholly true to me. I am the first to accuse myself of paralyzing moral generosity -- the fatal empathy that terrorists prey on. But ambivalence is not the same as moral equivalence, and holy war, no matter who is waging it, makes my flesh crawl.

In Milton's poem Samson Agonistes, Samson - blinded, in chains -- cries out, "Promise was that I / Should Israel from Philistian yoke deliver; / Ask for this great deliverer now, and find him / Eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves." But when Samson shows the strength to shun Delilah, God restores his power, enabling him to pull down the temple and kill the Philistines, though along with himself.

What makes Samson Agonistes a tragedy is the self-destruction that victory entails. I passionately assert Israel's right to exist in peace with its neighbors and within secure borders. But I can't help fearing that its military success in Gaza, should it come, will also entail a tragic cost.

This is my column from The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. You can read more of my columns here, and e-mail me there if you'd like.

Comments

[xxnounxx]

"It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism, colonialization, or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands."
-- Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of militants from the extreme right-wing Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, November 15, 1998.

"Everybody has to move, run and grab as many (Palestinian) hilltops as they can to enlarge the (Jewish) settlements because everything we take now will stay ours...Everything we don't grab will go to them."
-- Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of the Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, Nov. 15, 1998.

"Israel may have the right to put others on trial, but certainly no one has the right to put the Jewish people and the State of Israel on trial."
-- Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, 25 March, 2001 quoted in BBC News Online
Ariel Sharon
Prime Minister of Israel
2001 - present


THIS IS ZIONISM..THIS IS WHAT AMERICA SUPPORTS.

[xxnounxx]

"If we thought that instead of 200 Palestinian fatalities, 2,000 dead would put an end to the fighting at a stroke, we would use much more force...."
-- Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, quoted in Associated Press, November 16, 2000.

"I would have joined a terrorist organization."
-- Ehud Barak's response to Gideon Levy, a columnist for the Ha'aretz newspaper, when Barak was asked what he would have done if he had been born a Palestinian.
Ehud Barak
Prime Minister of Israel
1999 - 2001

[xxnounxx]

"(The Palestinians) would be crushed like grasshoppers ... heads smashed against the boulders and walls."
-- Isreali Prime Minister (at the time) Yitzhak Shamir in a speech to Jewish settlers New York Times April 1, 1988
Yizhak Shamir
Prime Minister of Israel
1983 - 1984,
1986 - 1992

"Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories."
-- Benyamin Netanyahu, then Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister, former Prime Minister of Israel, speaking to students at Bar Ilan University, from the Israeli journal Hotam, November 24, 1989.
Benjamin Netanyahu
Prime Minister of Israel
1996 - 1999

"The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more"....
-- Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel at the time - August 28, 2000. Reported in the Jerusalem Post August 30, 2000

[xxnounxx]

"[The Palestinians] are beasts walking on two legs."
-- Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, speech to the Knesset, quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk, "Begin and the 'Beasts,"' New Statesman, June 25, 1982.

"The Partition of Palestine is illegal. It will never be recognized .... Jerusalem was and will for ever be our capital. Eretz Israel will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And for Ever."
-- Menachem Begin, the day after the U.N. vote to partition Palestine
Menachem Begin
Prime Minister of Israel
1977 - 1983

"The settlement of the Land of Israel is the essence of Zionism. Without settlement, we will not fulfill Zionism. It's that simple."
-- Yitzhak Shamir, Maariv, 02/21/1997.

[xxnounxx]

"[Israel will] create in the course of the next 10 or 20 years conditions which would attract natural and voluntary migration of the refugees from the Gaza Strip and the west Bank to Jordan. To achieve this we have to come to agreement with King Hussein and not with Yasser Arafat."
-- Yitzhak Rabin (a "Prince of Peace" by Clinton's standards), explaining his method of ethnically cleansing the occupied land without stirring a world outcry. (Quoted in David Shipler in the New York Times, 04/04/1983 citing Meir Cohen's remarks to the Knesset's foreign affairs and defense committee on March 16.)
Yitzhak Rabin
Prime Minister of Israel
1974 - 1977,
1992 - 1995

[xxnounxx]

"This country exists as the fulfillment of a promise made by God Himself. It would be ridiculous to ask it to account for its legitimacy."
-- Golda Meir, Le Monde, 15 October 1971

"We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, What is to be done with the Palestinian population?' Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said 'Drive them out!"
-- Yitzhak Rabin, leaked censored version of Rabin memoirs, published in the New York Times, 23 October 1979.

[dwdp]

Do you have a shred of evidence that Hamas hides in hospitals and puts bombs in kindergartens?
Please note: IDF press releases do not count as evidence.

I note that the U.N. has flatly contradicted the IDF claims that Hamas was firing out of that U.N. school that got shelled. How many more times does the IDF have to lie before they lose credibility with the media?

[Leatherhelmet]

Get your head out of the sand.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xjsfBGt4ik

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLbZyWZI3hU

[RoseMerry]

Good article. It is a complex situation. But hiding in a mosque is not as hideous a terrorist act as killing children. Isreal's response to the missile's is either gross out of proportion or they have not publicized the acts by Hamas enough. It seems to me they have looking for an excuse to get even with Gaza for electing Hamas.

Will it ever end? I wish I could say my nation was any less morality bankupt. May in the next few years, we will recover our morality.

[ro1942]

If it's realey that hard to figure, take a look at the 1947 borders and then look at look at them in 2008. A picture says a thousand words.

[msfisk777]

1/11/09
4:08pm
Indianapolis

My question is this:

if everybody in Israel and Gaza now suffers
from PTSD (and they probably do) then what
do you expect to happen?

Cooler heads will have to make the peace.

[jazzman]

Complicated isn't it? That's why one wishes the leaders of our political parties would not just walk in lockstep to the Israeli war party lobbyists and pass resolutions that just blindly support Israel's actions. One would wish for nuance, balance, and leadership from our political leaders but alas, we sit back and watch as they become not only complicit but cheerleaders in the slaughter that doesn't have to be.

Shame on both Democratic and Republican congress people for passing these stupid resolutions. They do not represent me nor 50% of the American people.

[yque53]

HuffPost's Pick

Here are some simplistic suggestions; Israel abandon its' apartheid policies and resume its' stature as a socialist model, and Hamas abandon its' push for the extermination of Israel and all Jews to get down to the serious business of effectively building a Palestinian State. They need to live as NEIGHBORS, not just in peace.

[flyingmonkey]

Makes perfect sense. If only one side would go first.

[kay628]

"too complicated for unalloyed outrage" Are you kidding? The Israeli government supported by the U.S. government invades and murders a civilian population. Count the bodies and quit with the intellectual claptrap. It is not complicated! Outrage is the only sane response!

[flyingmonkey]

Outrage towards both sides is the only sane response. Neither cares for civilian lives, that much is clear.

[noam4prez]

This is not a situation where both sides are equally wrong. Israel has all the power. Israel has all the responsibility.Oh wait - the U.S. is a thousand times more powerful than Israel.

The U.S. has all the responsibility.

[jmpurser]

I try to remember that there is no good solution and we have no friends there. It's a war between mad men and even the gods and demons left them to it long ago.

[ForTheChildren]

Clever self-deception. Truth is simple but we, with our desires, complicate things, more or less deliberately. Sincerity is an essential virtue, long known to be deprecated by politicians and philosophers. It is the rulers, not the people, who call the shots, and no ruler ever cared more for the people than for the rule. War is an abomination and has never done more than kill innocents to preserve rulers. There is always another way, if only...
Be sincere.