Are two human lives worth the same anywhere?
Read more: Are we not worth the same?Why is a dead Israeli child a tragedy but 50 dead Palestinian children are collateral damage?
If the British had flattened Dublin over an IRA operation, would the world be saying that Britain has a “right to defend itself”
I hear about the war in Gaza. I thought a war was when soldiers on both sides of a conflict die. What is it called when a country carpet bombs a strip of land shorter than the M1? I would have called it a massacre.
Hamas is evil they say. Because they kill babies they say. So when Palestinian babies are crushed under the rubble of Israeli missiles what does that make the IDF? Heroes it seems.
Each bomb dropped creates a wind that’s blows out the candles of mutual understanding, of reconciliation. All Israelis do not hate all Palestinians. All Palestinians do not hate all Israelis. But every time another bomb drops it gets harder for them to see their shared humanity. The IDF will bomb the whole region into darkness.
Isreal either needs to set us free or wipe us out. This middle ground they are trying to walk on will not serve them forever. Every generation will see a fresh massacre of Isrealis while ever the Palestinian people have to live by the rules of a government that deplores them. Each attack will see a fresh massacre of Palestinians. Each dead Palestinian will create another fanatic. It’s hard to see your enemies as anything other than evil when they kill your family. After all, we are also human. If you prick us, we bleed, if you tickle us, we laugh, and if you wrong us, we will want vengeance. Vengeance is rarely righteous, but it is powerful. So the cycle goes on, each time we kill the other not because of what they have done, but because of what they are. We know our enemies not by their name but by their creed. This same a priori hate is what fuelled the pogroms from antiquity to the 20th century.
What makes me the saddest, what really makes be think that humanity cannot be saved, that justice cannot prevail and that our notions of fair are doomed, is that if any nation on earth should understand the horror of religious intolerance. The terrible consequences of hate upon one group purely based on their religion, it is the children of Isreal. In a bitter twist, it is this historic injustice which they use as the basis of their displacement, subjugation and ethnic cleansing of the Arab people. Six million Jews died during the holocaust. Instead of being the foremost in hatred of religious violence, this is used as a reason, and a sort of grotesque mathematics takes place. 50,000 arabs died, we still have 5,995,000 to go. Ignoring the fact that Palestinians are being kept in a state of constant suppression, constant fear, constant risk of loss of land or life at the hands of a government that actively despises them.
The irony is that there is no friend like a palestinian friend. No other type of friend I have had in the world would give so much nor cares so much as a Palestinian one. Friendship and hospitality run through the grain of the culture like the thick rich knots in olive wood. And the truth is that the empires of today are the footnotes of tomorrow. It is a far stronger security to create a shared sense of peace in a shared state than it is to forever marginalise and harass a whole section of society.
It could be that in tomorrow’s world, when the answer comes from America to the entreaties of Israel “look to your own defences” that in those days it is the Palestinians that save the Israeli Jews from the voracious anger of the Arabs who have never known a Jew but learned to hate Israel from its history. It is in those days that the freindship of the Palestinian people will save them from annihilation. Israel has strength and money today strongly supported by the US. Tomorrow it may have to look to its own self preservation in the face of angry neighbours. In those days they will gain more from the friendship of Palestinians than their enmity.
There are those that think that the hatred’s are ingrained. That it is impossible for these two sets of Semitic people to live without hate. It is easy to imagine the Briton at his dining table reviewing the latest news of trouble in the Irish provinces to make the same assumption, that these two peoples, born of the same blood, but divided by their creed, could never be reconciled, that theirs is a future of only blood and anger. But time has proved that type of thinking wrong, and its entirely feasible that if the UK rolled their tanks into Derry tomorrow, many more Protestants would be out in protection of their neighbours, their friends, their colleagues, people whose children they have met, than would be out encouraging the British troops.
When I was a child living in Palestine my father would tell me that you cant judge a man you don’t know. That you cannot blame every Israeli for the actions of their government. I think he took this view because he knew Israelis, he spoke their language. He had Israeli freinds. Years later when we lived in England his Israeli friends came to stay with us. He shared his home with them. I was surprised by this, I was a teenager now and my own black and white views of the world told me that these people were evil. But my father would say “even on one hand each finger is a different shape, you cant make Israelis all look the same any more than you can make your fingers equal.”
The sounds of Isreal were the sounds of my childhood. I grew up with as much Eyal Golan and Hiam Moshe as I did Abdel Haleem and Oum Kulthoum. The cultures and the people are not so different. My father was almost killed by Israeli settlers on a couple of occasions. One time they dragged him from the truck he was in and put a gun to his head on the side of the road, but it was also Israeli soldiers that saved him that day. He was supported by the Palestinians, but he was also hurt by them too, They interrogated him for crossing the border so often and beat him so bad he bears the scars to now.
The point is that it is not impossible for the two peoples to live together. But with each passing year of enforced seperation each side loses sight of the humanity of the other. It is very hard to hate a man when you know the names of his children. But it is easy to hate a man you have never met if ‘his people’ killed your own children.
So the only people who gain anything are the fanatics. They reap rewards from the blood shed by innocent people. If Israel really wants security for its people, it needs to free the Palestinians. If a two state solution is the answer then it must be a free state. It cannot be bombed to rubble each time there is a breakaway of violence from Palestine. If it is a one state solution then the Palestinians must feel that in some way they have some semblance of equality, if not of outcome then of opportunity. But it is impossible to live indefinitely under the submission of a government that has made no secret of the fact that it despises you.
All the Palestinians want is what everyone wants. Freedom. The ability to see some sort of decent future for their children. A future that doesn’t come crumbling down every time their overlords feel threatened and decide that every palestinian is a terrorist, a sympathiser or a terrorist in waiting. The irony being that it is this mentality that creates the terrorists. They either need to wipe us out or set us free. I am sure there are many Israeli fanatics with their own idea of a final solution to the Palestinian problem. But in that case gas chambers are more humane than starvation, not just of the bodies of the Semitic Arabs but of their future.
Putting off this question indefinitely will lead to more israelis burying their children as well as more Palestinians. I suspect that the Israelis who lose their loved ones are not consoled by the fact that ten times as many Arabs have to bury their loved ones too. I hope they are not, because it would show just how little we as a species have progressed.
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