The other day, the grandson of dear friends was gunned down, murdered in a drive by shooting in Albuquerque. He was a vibrant nineteen year old reaching out to a life to be led. Yesterday, another dear friend mentioned the continuing grief of the death of her twenty-something son by a hit and run driver in Santa Fe a year and a half ago. It seemed like it just happened, but that’s how it is when we suffer the unnatural death of a loved one. Even as that made me think of my own son’s death over forty years ago, it is present now. But consider those effects multiplied by tens of thousands and so much more…
Partisans Count Suffering and Death Differently.
Recently, I began reading The Shortest History of Israel and Palestine: From Zionism to Intifada and the Struggle for Peace (2011), by Michael Scott-Baumann. I had had a general but significantly incomplete knowledge of the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, mostly from 1948 forward. As it turns out, a great deal of pre-1948 history is important to the current conflict, particularly as it relates to the history of international colonialism and its consequences for the Middle East.
Given the growing urgency of the situation, I felt a stronger need to know more. The fact that Jews and Arabs had lived both together and apart, in cooperation and conflict long before the ‘British Mandate’ that gradually tipped the power relations with growing Jewish immigration and funding after World War II, offers a more objective perspective than any current claims about righteousness or evil.
I will not go into that history here, except to say that anyone who thinks they know which side is “to blame” for the current or previous cycles of war in Israel-Palestine should read that book, where they will find countless examples that may clear their head of any simplistic notions of who has more ‘rights’ than whom. Frankly, everyone involved, including the British, French, Americans, and more is at fault at one or more times and places.
Each side is a victim and a perpetrator in the cycle of violence. Each side blames the other for the violence, atrocities, and crimes against humanity by the other. Both dehumanize the other and deserve blame for that. But we must not forget the international enablers of hatred and violence, which were, or are, in their interests at one particular time or other. Nor must we forget the extreme imbalances in the imposition of suffering and death, which have been consistently disproportionate. Yet, suffering and death are suffering and death, whatever way you count them. To devalue the lives of many victims as against the value of one is to dehumanize and demonize the others.
When a group dehumanizes another group, making the infliction of pain and suffering, even explicit torture and murder, justified by defining the others as a gang of sub-human monsters, the torture, terrorism, and killing becomes so much easier—self-righteousness surges with the brutality it supports.
Which is more important: the historical and contemporary fact that the ratio of deaths among the occupiers, with their far more powerful technologies of war, is a small fraction of the death toll of the occupied, or the totality of death as the violence spreads further? Such disproportions are common where colonial relations of occupier and occupied are involved. Are the horrors of the in-your-face brutality of the October7 massacre and kidnapping of Israelis and friends any more horrible than the horrors of over forty thousand Palestinian civilians tortured and murdered by bullets close by and American bombs from above? What do such questions really signify?
The disproportionate numbers are extreme, but each victim’s suffering is approximately equal in the reality of her/his experience, at least for those who were killed quickly—extended torture is another matter. Are there even any rational answers to these questions?
Grief and Hope
Monday evening I watched and listened as some victims of war spoke of their suffering and hope. Christiane Amanpour’s show on PBS consistently captures the perspectives of some of the most evil and angelic people on the planet. I guess I was most impressed a while back, when Christiane told the Russian ambassador to his face that he was lying when he denied one of the Putin-driven massacres of Ukrainian civilians in that tyrant’s war of extermination. Amanpour captures the essence of the perspectives of those she interviews. The seasoned war correspondent asks pointed questions without reservations.
First, Meirav Leshem Gonen, the mother of one of the Israeli hostages, expressed her grief at the continued captivity of her twenty-six year old daughter—just one of so many victims of the seemingly endless conflict. She expressed her desperation and desire for her daughter’s return, alive. It was incontrovertibly heart-wrenching.
Then Amanpour interviewed two young women, May Pundak, an Israeli, and Palestinian Rana Salman, both peace activists who had met some time back and become friends in their mutual cause. Speaking from Tel Aviv, May Pundak, the Israeli activist, had organized a group called A Land for All. Amanpour explained, “May is an Israeli human rights lawyer, co-Director of A LAND FOR ALL, a movement that dreams of a confederacy-like kind of solution that she calls Two-State Solution 2.0.”
Rana is co-director of a group called “Combatants for Peace,” working from her home in Jerusalem, with former Israeli soldiers and Palestinian fighters who seek nonviolent solutions. She talks a lot on the phone with May. They are both realists and find hope in their actions to meet the necessity of finding peace. As one put it, “There is one homeland, Palestine,” and it is the homeland of both Jews and Arabs. As Greta Thunberg says, “hope is an action.” For these remarkable women, hope springs from the actions that make their movement grow.
In the Asymmetry in War and Colonialism, Imaginary Security is Not Peace.
Once the Zionist dream of a Jewish state, a homeland nation, became a project of the Western colonialist nations, the asymmetry of Jewish/Arab relations in Palestine was established and grew from there into a nation of occupier and occupied peoples. Whatever equalities of rights that may have previously existed dissolved. In a theocratic nation, even a partly secular one, only people of the dominant religion/ethnicity have full rights. Many Palestinians were expelled from the beginning. And others were forced into ‘occupied territories.’ Many have described Gaza as an ‘outdoor prison.’ The complexities of that historical process of expulsion and suppression are beyond simple explanation as various attempts to find resolutions to the inherent asymmetry of intergroup relations have failed in large part by ignoring the asymmetry of human rights and social position.
On could go back and try to sort out all the complexities that led to the current apartheid state, with one group dominating the other, one group full citizens and the other without civic or human rights. As a retired Israeli peace negotiator put it a while back, ‘there will be no security without peace.”
When acclaimed American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates went to Israel/Palestine he was stunned by the character of inequality of human rights and likened it to the Jim Crow era in the United States. He describes that difficult experience with considerable discomfort in his new book, The Message, as well as in several media appearances that coincided with the book’s launch. His insights into the Israel-Palestine situation are matched by those of his own introspection.
Peace is only possible when the process of dehumanization is reduced to a minimum—I can’t imagine it ever being entirely eliminated from human relations. In any conflict of domination and subordination, resistance is natural and suppression of resistance is common. Both involve dehumanization, which escalates into the worst forms of abuse and violence, and just gets worse with time and unresolved hatred.
That is where it stands today. I put my hopes with May Pundak and Rana Salman, whose friendship arose from human empathy and compassion in a world of hatred, matched only by their bravery and perseverance.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 