These maps combined show the areas hardest hit by Israel in Gaza (left) and Gaza’s refugee camps (right, in red). There is a clear overlap. Refugees, a class of persons normally in need of the most protection, and in fact afforded special coverage under international law, are suffering the most in Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. This is one enormous reason for the invalidity of any argument which assumes symmetry between Gaza (or Hamas) and Israel.
The simple fact that one side includes the displaced, and the other side the displacers, makes equal treatment of their actions impossible. This is not to say that victims have the right to kill. The rockets that hit young Israelis are equally murderous. It is to say that any analysis that treats all of this in some sort of vacuum or limited chain events in which the rockets play a key role is doomed to fail. Being a refugee is not the same as being a descendant of a settler in a conquering country — those who founded Israel on the land of the Palestinians. The risk is that failing to account for this fundamental dynamic will only perpetuate the moral incongruities driving this cycle of violence, to use the trite phrase.
Even if the primitive rockets came close to matching the ferocity of Israel’s modern military, there would be an enormous moral gap in the historical places of the two sides. Taking Israel’s claims for granted at best means it is circling the wagon as the ethnically cleansed natives attack. A settler-colonial state is never acting in self-defense: its basic posture is one of imposition on another people. That is why absent Israel’s Gaza attacks, and Gaza’s rockets firings, the basic state of things is not peace: but an essential state of displacement created and maintained by either direct violence or the imminent threat of it.
That American media and much of the public has absolutely no understanding of this history and its crucial impact on the contemporary world is what makes the mind-numbing discourse in this nation so infuriating. One cannot understand the world if one’s memory of other places can only reach back a week. How can I argue with someone who has no comprehension of what it means to be a refugee?
This best explains why Palestinians who argue from a place of lived reality want to pull their hair out with some suburban American fluent only in CNNese or policy-wonkisms that have no connection to the worlds they can only depict through their lens of Americacenterisms. This leads to fun arguments, I have to confess. One American supporter of Israel told me to read history books before I talk. I asked him to name one on Israel or Palestine. He couldn’t. Then I listed five supporting my arguments and told him several supporting his viewpoint and their fatal flaws. Such is the problem when one relies only on talking point memos and repeating what he or she hears on TV.
Filed Under Free Gaza, Gaza, israel, media, palestine, television, Will, zionism, zionuts
Will,
Nothing is black and white but extremism is easy to identify. You can be a refugee for several years. But for three generations? The second and third generations are definitely not refugees. Just like Israel absorbed and assimilated roughly the same number of refugees from Arab lands, the Arabs should have absorbed the Palestinian refugees. In fact they have, but they still call them refugees and deny them rights.
If Israel is a settler-colonial state, so are Canada, Australia, China and the US as well as Russia. Most Israelis were born in Israel and have only one citizenship, an Israeli one. They have nowhere to go.
People are not lisetning to you because they don’t know history, but because your interpretation of it is just extreme.
Posted by Anonymous | December 31, 2008, 7:57 amHow do arabs live with themselves? Is it not enough that you hate the rest of the world, but you seem to hate your own people as well. The arab world is huge, and there is more than enough room to store every “refugee” 20000 x over. But you don’t care less about them.
Seriously, what is it like to be an arab? Is there a ball of rage inside you constantly burning? Against, Jews, the west, your own governments, your wives (beatings seem to be the norm) and children (sent to die as suicide bombers)? Even yourself?
Do arabs lack self awareness? Is this genetic, or taught? Is there any recognition by arabs of how insane they are? I am asking this seriously and not to insult, though i realize this is very insulting. I really do want to understand the source of all the rage, well above other communities that have suffered much more and have much less. Any insight would be useful.
Posted by Curious | December 31, 2008, 8:31 am“You can be a refugee for several years. But for three generations? The second and third generations are definitely not refugees.”
Refugee is well-defined in international law and it is a status that does in fact pass on through generations.
Settler-colonial societies strive to be normalized. The US and Canada have not reconciled their pasts but have addressed them through some programs. The US used genocide to quiet counter-claims on its history. However, Israel’s displaced native population is still demanding return and is clearly identifiable today. It is an active state of contestation — so we cannot ignore the refugee problem as your analogy suggests.
Your analogy is apt in some ways though: Israel is only 60 years old — the trail of tears took place about 60 years after the American declaration of independence. We can see Israel is trying to become normalized in regards to its “native problem” in the way the US is. I hope Israel, unlike the US, chooses the humane, progressive path.
I am fine with having an “extreme” explanation because the conventional ones are all easy to dismiss and have in fact proven to lead to misunderstanding of the conflict and its furtherance. When conventional thinking is wrong, one should abandon it.
Will
Posted by Will | December 31, 2008, 8:39 amClearly most Americans do not understand this… which is why the truth escapes them and they remain lost in a web of deceit and misinformation.
This is another excellent post and I’m so glad you wrote it. Hopefully some of the right people will read it, although as the previous two comments suggest their prejudice and bias is so deeply set that they still might not understand (or admit) the truth.
Posted by Karim | December 31, 2008, 9:00 amWhat self-pitying crap this is. Look into the mirror – that is the one to blame for all of the arab’s rage.
Posted by Tester | December 31, 2008, 9:06 amWill,
There is international law, and there is common sense. In fact, international law ONLY in the case of Palestinians defines second generation refugees. That does not make sense to most people.
Carrying a grudge for generations is extreme. That is conventional thinking. Extremist never think they are extreme. But your view of is extreme and counter to most Western intuitions and moral standards.
Furthermore, the fact that you are part of the Arab world does not help you because it seems you demand standards from Israel that have never been implemented in the Arab world.
Posted by Anonymous | December 31, 2008, 9:42 amAnon: There is common sense, and then there is good sense.
Posted by Salma | December 31, 2008, 9:50 amI want to agree with you and find a reason to side with the Gazans, because I know these things are never one-sided. But frankly, your a prior reasoning escapes me, as does your blindness to the culpability of Palestinians who deliberately target civilians — ranging from indiscriminate rocket fire into Israel, to suicide bombers, to opening fire on wedding parties.
Only if one accepts as a first principle that Israel should not exist does anything else you say make sense, and I don’t see how we rationally can deny the existence of Israel. It has existed for 40 years now with UN recognition, and eternal pissing and moaning about the injustice of it all is at best useless and at worst counterproductive, because it eliminates any credibility the allies of the refugees might otherwise have.
The Palestinians could have their own state by now, with all the Jewish settlements dismantled, a jointly held, demilitarized Jerusalem, and reparations for refugees. They have opted for violence instead, and Israel has been only too happy to oblige them.
Posted by Rocket88 | December 31, 2008, 11:30 amSorry, I meant “a priori” and “60 years.” Too much multitasking.
Posted by Rocket88 | December 31, 2008, 11:32 amInternational law that placed Palestinians in refugee camps is neither common sense nor good sense—it has maintained sixty years of nonsense.
There are no refugee camps in the United States. Furthermore, if a state tried to put discriminatory laws related to refugees as found in the Middle East into place here in one of the United States, the U.S. Supreme Court would overrule such laws in about one minute.
It is Middle Eastern nonsense that maintains Palestinian strife.
Posted by JAS | December 31, 2008, 12:33 pm“”The simple fact that one side includes the displaced, and the other side the displacers, makes equal treatment of their actions impossible.”"
The Palestinians were every bit the displacers as well. Or do you think, if they had won the war of 1948, that the Jews would be sitting pretty in Palestine today?
The Israeli Arabs fare far better than Jews would had the Palestinians won in 1948. This is not to excuse continued discrimination and mistreatment — I support groups like the New Israel Fund that work for a more progressive, pluralistic, peaceful Israel — but you don’t get to claim ‘victim’ status if you’d have done far worse if you’d had the better guns.
FACT: At the time 1948 happened, EVERYONE who lived in Israel/Palestine had a basic HUMAN RIGHT to live there.
FACT: Neither side is perfect. Both side treated the other poorly.
FACT: Had the Palestinians ‘won’, their treatment of the ‘losers’ would almost certainly have been worse than the Israeli treatment of the ‘losers’ has been.
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Posted by Jackpot | December 31, 2008, 4:47 pm“Only if one accepts as a first principle that Israel should not exist does anything else you say make sense”
So, by your logic, because Apartheid South Africa existed for decades, the world should have recognized and accepted it? Very Reagan-esque surely, but morally wrong. So too with Apartheid Israel. One state with equal rights for all including an unfettered Palestinian right of return. But of course, we all know – as Olmert himself publicly stated was his worst nightmare – that equal rights for all people regardless of race or religion is Israel’s greatest fear. Wake up, a country that fears the end of racial discrimination is on the wrong side of morality.
Posted by Jamal | December 31, 2008, 5:51 pm“”So, by your logic, because Apartheid South Africa existed for decades, the world should have recognized and accepted it? “”
Apartheid South Africa codified different classes of citizens based on race. Speaking as a matter of law, in nearly every facet of life Israel grants its citizens equal rights. To the extent that those legal promises are not met (i.e. housing discrimination against Israeli Arabs), the Israeli system provides ample ways for its citizens to fight to perfect that society, just as the American system does.
The main injustices here are about actions Israel takes against people who *aren’t* citizens of Israel; this is fundamentally different than the South African case, and it makes a poor comparison, but some people like it because the word ‘apartheid’ has a nice jarring ring to it.
Israel’s relationship to the West Bank reminds me more of, oh, Syria’s relationship to Lebanon.
Except that when that relationship comes up, the KabobFest writers tend towards being apologists for Syria.
Oops!
Posted by Joe | January 1, 2009, 12:26 amWell Joe, you’re just wrong and it shows that you are only looking at things through the lens of the oppressor. Israel provides a facade of law, but a reality of discrimination everywhere. And the funny thing is, even that facade of law is in some cases not even that. Any state that says point blank as Israel does, that one race has rights that the other doesn’t (the right to immigrate from anywhere on the planet and gain instant citizenship that Palestinian Arabs don’t, the right to buy land anywhere in the country that Palestinian Arabs don’t have, the right to establish towns and communities that Palestinian Arabs don’t have, the right to protest without getting shot and being able to know perpetrators will be punished that Palestinian Arabs don’t have, the right not to have your land permanently expropriated with no or unfair compensation that Palestinian Arabs don’t have, the right to have state resources equally distributed to you which Palestinian Arabs don’t have, the right to marry a non-citizen and be able to have your spouse immigrate to live as a unified family that Palestinian Arabs don’t have, the right to equal standards of education housing and health care that Palestinian Arabs don’t have because 80%+ of legislators are *openly* committed to ensuring an unfair distribution of resources since they declare this is first and foremost the state of their ethnicity and not a state of all its citizens, etc, etc, etc.), is an Apartheid state. And that’s without even getting into the 20 years of illegal military rule that *only* Arab civilians lived under at the start of the state during which almost all of their land was illegally stolen at gunpoint by the state (and keeping in mind the fact that these people even managed to survive in the state was an act of sheer luck following 1948′s brutal pre-planned ethnic cleansing in operation Dalit among others) and their domestic economy permanently destroyed turning most of them into nothing more than cheap laborers in the service of Israeli employers with almost no hope for bettering their lives (hence today’s extreme poverty among Israel’s Palestinian citizens as born out by Israel’s own economic statistics which politicians occasionally trot out to say “oh, how awful, we’re committed to doing something about this” and then very deliberately and methodically ensure that nothing is ever done because the system is designed to ensure that discrimination continues in favor of only the majority race). Perhaps if you spent less time listening to the people doing the discriminating and more time listening to the people who suffer from the discrimination, you’d have more understanding.
And that is just for Palestinian citizens of Israel. Your false dichotomy of splitting them from the millions of Palestinians either under occupation or living as refugees is further proof of Israel’s Apartheid. All those people – having either been born in Palestine or only held out against their wishes from living there by illegal force of Israeli arms – are citizens of Palestine from the river to the sea every bit as much as any Arab or Jew inside Israel today is. And that’s a land Israeli Jews and *all* Palestinian Arabs are destined to share, so Israelis had better learn to figure out how they’re going to let go of their race-based system of control just as South Africa’s Apartheid Afrikaners had to figure it out. Because the settlement enterprise and these murderous wars on the poor and afflicted that Israel specializes in (just as the Apartheid South Africans did, no wonder they and Israel were such good allies in the day) are only making that reality and the destruction of the 2 state option more certain than ever.
Posted by Jamal | January 1, 2009, 9:21 am