Palestinians
Are People Too!
A Reply
by Janine
M. Goffar
The following remarks are presented in reply to
an article at www.spectrummagazine.org
by David R. Larson entitled "Palestinians are People
Too!" The sentences in bold type are from that essay.
First, in
responding to Dr. David Larson's thoughtful and humane essay, it would be
well to highlight areas in which we agree.
Bombing
civilian men, women and children is a beastly act, one that deserves the
strongest possible ethical condemnation. Even in the conduct of war,
some deeds are morally wrong. No matter who does it, or how often,
intentionally attacking noncombatant citizens is one of these.
Enough!
Well
said. The embrace of suicide bombings in any context is
abhorrent. That the Palestinians not only allow but celebrate these
acts cannot honestly be seen as other than a sign of a society that has
lost its moral compass.
"They
aren't people, they're animals!" cried a young woman to a television
reporter after another suicide bombing in Jerusalem. We can
understand her outburst and sympathize....Nevertheless, although we can
understand this young woman's cry, we should not endorse what she
said. The Palestinians are not animals. They are people too.
Exactly
right. But it is interesting that in the media of Israel there is
almost never--I know of no exceptions--a comparing of Palestinians to
animals (this woman would appear to be a rare exception). In fact in
the Jewish faith it is a major sin to do so. One of the great
principles of Judaism is the separation of things holy from things unholy;
thus one must never put a human or a group of humans on a level with the
beasts.
On the other
hand, as those who study both Arab and Israeli media outputs in an effort
to compare them will readily recognize, comparisons of Jews to animals in
Arab papers and on their television programs are endless.
I myself
have countless examples of this in my files. Check out the media
translation web site www.Memri.org as
well as the "Best of the Web Today" column at www.OpinionJournal.com.
Scan their archives of almost any day in recent history, or merely type
"monkeys," "apes," and "pigs" into their
search engines.
Not long ago a
three-year-old girl was interviewed on Arab television. The footage
was shown on Fox News
Channel. She was asked if she liked the
Jews. She replied, "no."
The Arab
interviewer then asked, "Why don't you like them?" to which the
little girl sweetly responded, "Because they are apes and pigs."
Interviewer:
"Who said they are so?"
Little
girl: "Our God."
Interviewer:
"Where did He say this?"
Little
Girl: "In the Koran."
This beautiful
child did not think up these despicable words on her own. Obviously
they have been taught to her. And she was not speaking, as the woman
was, in the passion of just having lost loved ones or countrymen in a
bombing by someone deliberately choosing to murder as many babies and
grandmothers as possible while committing suicide. Another
bomber,
not atypically, situated himself in a group of mothers, standing next to
their strollers before detonating his explosive belt.
It is ironic
to note Dr. Larson's comments describing the terrorist acts: he
calls them "beastly." Perhaps even he, just as the woman
he cites, has some sense that one side is not acting entirely in
accordance with what it means to be human. In another place he
points out that "It is wrong for Palestinians to continue speaking in
favor of driving Israelis into the Mediterranean sea as though expelling
snakes," another interesting conflation of area attitudes and
animals, especially in light of Dr. Larson's primary thesis.
One way
or another, either in suicide or in less dramatic surrenders, some die
just to escape their unending grief.
There is no
evidence whatever that the Palestinians have to resort to suicide bombings
to get Israel to the bargaining table and make painful concessions.
All the evidence, in fact, points the other way. Israel has gone far
out of its way to try to make peace through negotiation. As just one
example, Egypt offered a true peace, and Israel give them all their land
back.
If suicide
bombings are the result of "desperation" and "grief"
brought on by occupation, why aren't the Kurds doing this? Why not
Tibetans? Kashmiris? If here is meant grief of another kind,
well, I can think of a number of people grieving because of situations of
terrible extremity who are not strapping themselves with bombs and
targeting children.
As a free and
democratic society with a wide range of political views that influence
policy, unlike Palestine, Israel has shown itself very susceptible to
moral arguments and appeals to justice. History is replete with
examples that show they are very open to such, as long as those appeals
do not call for conditions that would cause their state to disappear,
either physically or demographically (as the "non-negotiable
demand" for return of all refugees would do).
They
love their homeland, cherish their children, and long for peace.
When their friends and relatives are wounded, they suffer. When
those they treasure are killed, they struggle with sorrow for the rest of
their lives....In all these ways and many others, they are just like us.
The belief
that all mothers and fathers feel the same when their children die is
comforting but untrue. Many statements have been taken from
Palestinian mothers and fathers that express joy and celebration at the
news that their son or daughter has died while murdering Jews.
This is almost inconceivable to those of us in the West who take seriously
the Biblical injunction to "choose life" (Deuteronomy 30:19).
That this is a Biblical command should help us understand that it is not
necessarily automatic in humans to do so, that God did not take it for
granted, and that this impulse can be subverted by evil belief systems.
Dr. Larson may
not have read that the father of a recent suicide mass-murderer, according
to a Reuters report, told reporters he was "very happy to hear"
that his son was the bomber. Or that the Palestinian mother of a
suicide bomber said that she wished she had a hundred sons to give to
martyrdom [1].
Dr. Larson may
also not be aware of a recent statement by Senior Hamas official Ismail
Haniya, in explaining why the Palestinians felt they would eventually
prevail over the Israelis: "Anyone reading an Israeli newspaper
can see their suffering," he said. The Jews "love life
more than any other people, and they prefer not to die." [2]
Perhaps Dr.
Larson did not read that Sheik Ikrima
Sabri, leading clergyman of the
Palestinian Authority, just days before the Tel-Aviv suicide bombing of
June 2001, said in a televised sermon, "The Muslim loves death and
martyrdom, just as [the Jews] love life. There is a great difference
between he who loves the hereafter and he who loves this world. The
Muslim loves death [and seeks] Martyrdom."
Just like us?
For a time the
Palestinians had an exhibit on the West Bank which was a replica of the
Sbarro pizzeria in Israel, where there had been a suicide bombing.
It has reportedly closed due to Israeli and world outrage. Nineteen
Israelis were slaughtered in that pizza parlor, mostly children and
teenagers. Over a hundred were injured. This replica had in it
models of pizza pieces strewn all over the place, along with replicas of
Jewish teenagers' hands and the arms and legs of Jewish children, severed
and lying around. Spattered "blood" was everywhere.
This exhibit
was reported in several, though by no means a majority, of major news
sources around its opening on September 23, 2001, just days after the
attacks on New York and Washington. A photograph
is available of young visitors using the US and Israeli flags as the
doormat for the exhibit. There was said to be a steady stream of visitors.
This exhibit
served as a shrine to what the Palestinians revere. They do not
revere life. They revere suicide, and the murder of Jews. It is
difficult to be so blunt, but these are just some of the facts that
mitigate against Dr. Larson's assertion that we're all the same in what we
value and how we feel. This is a society that has truly lost its
way, and returned to barbarism.
"But not
all Palestinians are like that," one may well retort. No, not
all. But most. Sixty-eight percent of Palestinians support
suicide bombing, according to the most recent
poll; an earlier poll put
the figure at seventy-five percent.
It is an
unsettling irony that this young woman's cry echoes the deceits of those
in another time and place who justified the Holocaust partly because they
believed its victims were not really human beings but dirty and dangerous
vermin.
The Nazis were
the perpetrators of evil; this woman was on the receiving end of immediate
and compelling evil. Hardly a useful comparison. Indeed, I
find no useful lesson whatever can be drawn from the verbal outburst of a
person who has just witnessed what this woman had witnessed.
Unfortunately,
some political leaders around the world leave the impression that this
young woman's spontaneous lament is their studied policy. Her cry is
understandable, their creeds aren't.
Can Dr. Larson
point to a single example of a world leader calling the Palestinians
"animals" or basing their foreign policy on such a belief?
Perhaps this was a careless sentence, or perhaps not, but at the least it
begs evidence.
The most
formal of all rules still applies; equals in equal circumstances ought to
be treated equally.
Equal in
what? Does Dr. Larson really believe there is an equal desire on
both sides for peace as opposed to one party seeking the extinction of the
other?
Currently on
Yassir Arafat's official Fatah website we find the following
statement: "A legitimate Palestinian entity forms the most
important weapon that Arabs have against Israel." There
can be no doubt the intent expressed in this statement is to use a
newly-created
Palestinian state as a launching pad from which to again attempt to
destroy Israel.
But if one
still believes otherwise, here is another inconvenient little item.
The same day that Arafat signed the Declaration of Principles of the Oslo
Accords on September 13, 1993 (for which he received a Nobel Peace Prize),
he went on Jordanian television to say, "Since we cannot defeat
Israel in war we do this in stages. We take any and every territory
that we can of Palestine, and establish a sovereignty there, and we use it
as a springboard to take more. When the time comes, we can get the
Arab nations to join us for the final blow against Israel."
In an email to
me addressing my concerns about the violence on the part of the
Palestinians, Dr. Larson stated he believes that "Israel's continuing
expansion of its settlements in territory the international community
has designated for the Palestinians [is] a subtle but very real form of
violence."
First, while I
am no fan of the settlements, I don't see how one can at all equate
suicide bombings with building settlements (and perhaps he didn't intend
to), but secondly, there is nowhere near international consensus that the
settlements are illegal. For a discussion of this matter, please see
the chapter titled "Settlements" in Mitchell G. Bard's book Myths
and Facts: A Guide to the Arab-Israeli Conflict
(American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, 2001). This book
is also wholly available on the Internet.
Israel took that land in a war of
aggression that it did not start, just as it did not start any of the five
previous wars waged against it, in an attempt to provide itself with a
margin of safety. The UN resolutions addressing the issue were
deliberately left vague as to how far back the Israelis must eventually
withdraw. They were left vague in large part due to the need to wait
and see how peaceful the Palestinians would be toward Israel, and that
answered is
unfortunately being delivered daily.
The
settlements are considered illegal in Palestine, of course. This was
made brutally clear, according to The Jerusalem Post, in 1997 when
the Palestinian Authority's "justice minister," Freih Abu
Medein,
"said publicly that the death penalty would be demanded in PA courts
for anybody who sold land to Jews."
Third, that
Palestinians demand a land free of Jews (i.e. all settlements removed)
while Jews are expected to live in a land where one-fifth of its
citizens are Arab is nothing short of contemptible.
Fourth,
then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered to give most of this land back, in
his history-making proposal at Camp David in 2000 to obtain peace,
but this offer was declined. Not only was the offer declined, but it
was at that precise moment that terrorism against Israel was stepped up.
Not scaled back, stepped up. There is no doubt in my mind the
Israelis would offer the same thing again, and more even, if they could
believe that real peace would be the outcome.
That
settlements are not the cause of the violence of the Palestinians, nor
would the violence end if the settlements ended, becomes plain when one
recalls that the violence against Israel, and indeed the most bellicose
rhetoric, began long before there were any Israeli settlements on the West
Bank. This is but one example of how knowledge of the history of the
area greatly helps to illuminate things, and so cannot be ignored.
A local radio
commentator, Dennis Prager, recently traveled to Israel in an effort to
ascertain for himself what were the attitudes of the citizenry there. He
interviewed many Israelis at random on the street. Almost without
exception, to his question "How do you feel about Palestinians?"
he received something like this answer: "We do not hate
them. We are willing to make peace, and to make compromises for
peace. But now we aren't sure they want peace anymore. We just
wish they would leave us alone."
At the same
time, a poll of Palestinians as reported in The Wall Street Journal
indicated that "a majority saw the destruction of
Israel as their
goal in the current intifada." And Palestinian mothers are
saying, as this one, "I prayed from the depths of my heart that Allah
would cause the success of [my son's suicide] operation]. I asked
Allah to give me 10 [Israelis] for Muhammad, and Allah granted my request
and Muhammad made his dream come true, killing 10 Israeli settlers and
soldiers. Our God honored him even more, in that there were many
Israelis wounded....I began to utter cries of joy and declared that were
were happy."
Most Americans
are unaware of these realities, relying as so many do on television for
their news. In order to really understand what is going on, one must
dig deeper; one would do well, for example, to read both sets of papers,
Arab and Israeli, available on the Internet in English. One should
read the most knowledgeable opinion writers and the most factual histories
available. Radio also has a better record of providing context and
background and honest journalism than TV, which relies heavily on
images. Images and short sound bites can be extremely misleading.
We are
usually on safer ground if we condemn deeds instead of those who commit
them. It is much easier to realize that some actions are wrong than
it is to know that those who perform them are evil.
A whole essay
could be devoted to the question of whether what we do is a large part of
who we are. I believe it is. Deeds are not abstractions.
They don't exist apart from the people who do them. In any case, one
cannot respond to motives and underlying feelings, especially
since, as Larson points out, one cannot know them.
Most of what we
humans do has very mixed origins. We humans can respond most
accurately only to actions. When people behave as though they wish
us dead, our best response is not to start to psychoanalyze why they might
wish this, but to act to prevent it.
Whether the
Palestinians are justified in feeling as aggrieved as they do is also a
topic for another essay. But their grievances are unlikely to be
mollified by anything Israel could do or give up short of dismantling
their state and jumping into the sea. As mentioned earlier, a
majority of Palestinians say they want Israel fully destroyed, and there
has never to my knowledge been a poll or survey that suggested
differently.
A larger
question that might be asked is, Don't Israelis treat Palestinians
generally like animals? Hardly. It is a great irony and beyond
dispute that peaceful Arabs in Israel in fact have more civil rights than
Arabs in every other part of the Middle East, including Palestine.
In Israel Arabs can speak and write freely. Their women can work and
go to school. They are free to own property, practice any religion
they please, and even start a political party. Israeli Arabs can
vote in the democratic process; in fact there are Arabs who have been
voted onto the Israeli Knesset (parliament) and serve Israel there to
this day. Some of them are or have been activists in nonviolent
pro-Arab organizations.
Palestinian
Arabs who show any support for Israel, on the other hand, are lynched
without trial and hanged by their feet in the public square of Ramallah. [3]
Sometimes the only way forward
is to stop looking backward. This is one of those cases.
I would agree that historical memory
and a people's constant dwelling on it can serve as a barrier to peaceful
coexistence. Sometimes past injustices do have to be put behind us,
and progress based on the current "facts on the ground."
But what has to be determined before a people can be asked to forget the
past is whether anything has changed. For this a knowledge of the
past is still essential.
In this case, nothing really has
changed. The very same desire that animated the Arabs in 1948 to set
out to destroy Israel animates them still. The vast majority of
Israelis and their leaders have always envisioned peaceful coexistence and
have been willing to make concessions for that, while very little Arab
behavior and rhetoric, past or present, has indicated the same
desire. And what is happening with these terror bombings is not the
past. It is the present.
Scripture teaches that it is a
good idea to give up the hope of getting even.
Anyone who believes Israel is doing
what it is doing in order to get even is simply uninformed. Israelis
are doing what they are doing to protect themselves and their very
existence, which is the same thing they have been doing for more than 50
years, and the same thing the United States is doing vis a vis al Qa'eda.
They can do no other as long as peace is not on the horizon, and terror
replaces negotiation.
"'No, if your enemies are
hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for
by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.' Do not be
overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good" (Romans 12:
18-21 NRSV). Following this advice would be more effective and
efficient than many current policies.
The U. S. was widely vilified for
dropping food and aid packages into Afghanistan even as we were fighting
the Taliban. It seems no amount of trying to "feed one's
enemies" would be appreciated in the Arab world. Still, we are
called to this, and Dr. Larson is right to point it out.
An interesting story came out of
that area during the recent Israeli military terror-routing incursions
into Palestinian territories. An observer spoke with one of the
Israeli physicians on the scene in the West Bank who was treating the
injured from both sides. The physician told this observer that
Israel had brought in hundreds of units of blood from hospitals and blood
banks all over Israel, in order to save Palestinian lives, but that the
Palestinians refused to accept this blood because it was from Jews.
Rather than turning on his heels and walking away, the Israeli general in
charge of the operation ordered Israel's own military aircraft to fly to
Jordan and obtain blood from Arabs, which would be more acceptable to the
Palestinians who were dying.
The reporter who heard this
narrative was a well known screen writer who was in the area to write
an article on the situation as seen by a casual observer. Nevertheless,
he could not get his story onto any of the major US or European news
outlets, despite the fact that he had taken the time and trouble to
independently verify it from several sources, a basic journalistic rule
ignored all over the Arab world, and indeed often in our own media.
On May 29, 2002, Dan Gordon, the
screenwriter who noted this story, was interviewed on the Dennis Prager
radio program, KRLA 570 am (San Bernardino) and 870 am (Los Angeles) and
syndicated nationwide. Tapes of all Prager's shows are available
through his website. It can be visited by clicking here.
It is tempting, if ultimately
unimportant, to wonder what would have been the Arab response were the
situation to have been reversed.
We know what happens when
every reprehensible deed prompts an equally pathological response.
It does seem Dr. Larson is here
morally equating the violence of Israel in their attempts to defend
themselves and ferret out the infrastructure of Palestinian terrorism with
the suicidal violence of the Palestinians that indiscriminately murders innocent Israeli citizens. To me this requires a stretch
of the moral sense beyond any minimally responsible position--or possibly
just an ignorance of the facts, which might be understandable given the
distortion often seen in the media.
For a riveting set of three articles by United Press International's
senior analyst on how American and especially European media blatantly
distorted the recent Israeli incursion into Jenin, for example, visit the
following articles by Martin Sieff: "Part
One: Documenting the Myth;" "Part
Two: Why Europeans Bought Jenin Myth;" and "Part
Three: How Europe's Media Lost Out."
Has Israel been perfect? Far
from it. But there is absolutely no equivalence. A casual
examination of these things will not do. One has to look as
thoroughly as possible at the whole picture to understand the moral chasm
that exists between these two societies.
Why not support a different
approach?
Ehud Barak did. He was not
only turned down, but his generous offer, which surprised most observers
including Bill Clinton with how far it went for peace, was rebuffed
without so much as a counteroffer.
Only when a majority of Arabs and
Arab leaders truly want peace with Israel and are willing to make
compromises, as Israel has shown its willingness to do on many occasions,
will there be a solution. Until then we should stop fooling
ourselves.
Only one side really desires peace with coexistence, and
is willing to make major, painful sacrifices for it. The way forward
would best be found by first acknowledging that truth.
Responses are welcome. I am interested in honest evidence and sound reasoning on all sides
of this very complex issue.
Endnotes
1. From a Fox News Channel
report that aired in mid-April, 2002.
2. Hockstader, Lee:
The Washington Post, March 28, 2002. "Suicide Bomber Kills At Least
19." (Registration and fee for retrieval.)
3. Williams, Daniel. The
Washington Post, March 22, 2002. This is by no means an uncommon
occurrence.
|