Gaza is rubble, but Palestinians somehow always find clean white shrouds for their dead. Children are dying there, their parents too, and the young, and those who surprisingly managed to grow old. To feel deeply for Palestinians, all we need is a brain and a heart. But to feel the loneliness of Israel, we need some courage.
Imagine a person who watches the film Avatar and is on the side of humans, who appear to be not only Americans of the future but also Donald Trump’s base. There is something of the West Asian problem in the film. Humans use their superior technology to enslave an indigenous species on another planet. They need to colonize other worlds to survive because Earth is finished. They have to choose between being the oppressor or going extinct. This is not a moral basis to harm natives; yet, practically, there is no other way, which the story does not convey because a story is a corrupt thing. In any case, which sane person, especially in the East, would sympathize with the Caucasian colonizer? This also explains the loneliness of Israel.
It is the loneliness of the strong, of people who have won for now. It is also a modern loneliness because for centuries the strong just finished off the weak, and that was it. But the same cultural advancement that gave Israel its dazzling science and tech, and the weapons that subjugated Palestinians, also consecrated a view that the purpose of the strong is to take care of the unlucky, not finish them off. Yet, Israel believes it has only two choices—be the oppressor or vanish from the face of Earth. There is historical precedence, including one on 7 October. Yet no one else accepts that. The world has the luxury to disagree, spouting esoteric ideals.
Very late in the 19th century, Israel was thought up by a British Jewish elite. The proposal of Jews, persecuted everywhere, reclaiming their sacred land which was now occupied by Arabs, seems ludicrous today. But it was the golden age of the elites, and it was also the golden age of White supremacy. Such ideas could be thought up because of an interesting quality of Europeans of the time—not all of them saw other people as people.
In the book My Promised Land by Ari Shavit, whose great grandfather Herbet Bentwich was one of the founders of what would become Israel, he expresses his wonderment at his ancestor’s eyesight. “There are more than half a million Arabs, bedouins, and Druze in Palestine in 1897… How can the hawk-eyed Bentwich not see… that the Land is taken? That there is another people now occupying the land of his ancestors?” The Arabs were so poor, “they are hardly noticeable to a Victorian gentleman.”
Israel’s moral defence is that people of today cannot imagine some aspects of human life many decades ago. How worthless land was, and that millions were stateless, and that the Arabs in Palestine did not have a sense of identity as Palestinians. “There is no particular reason for the Arabs to cling to these few kilometers,” writes Shavit. He quotes the 19th century Jewish writer Israel Zangwill: “To fold their tents and silently steal away is their proverbial habit: let them exemplify it now…We must gently persuade them to trek.”
This was how most of us came to occupy places we claim is our ‘home’—when our ancestors inspired tribals to “fold their tents” and leave, or were made to vanish in more brutal ways. But the Jews returned too late to their ancient land; by then, history had somehow grown eyes. In the beginning, Arabs and Jews co-existed, despite sporadic instances of violence. In time, the violence got more frequent and nastier, and the Jewish elite realized that they would need their own country with no Arabs in it. They massacred some and drove most of them away.
Israel’s founding Jews, the economic elite of Europe, left everything and went to an arid land, but they could raise a prosperous state because once you have wealth, you can be rich again. Wealth is a muscle memory.
Arab kingdoms did not recognize Israel’s right to exist at the time of its creation. They refused the offer of a two-state solution, the creation of Palestine and Israel. A day after the formation of Israel on 14 May 1948, it was invaded by the forces of Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. Israel prevailed. What a nation, much of the world gushed.
Shavit invokes an argument made by the ‘French physiologist’ Claude Bernard to explain the psyche of modern Israel. One of our most famous misconceptions is that life survives by adapting to environment. “Adjustment to the surrounding environment is death… the phenomena of life is that of preserving an internal environment contrary to an outside environment.”
And we come to the very core of not only Israel but all strong people. But the world can’t stand the strong. In return for compassion, the world wants you to kneel and crawl and cry. And Israel is bad at it. In its formative years, it asked its own Jews to shut up about the Holocaust and stop whining. Israel is built on strength and optimism. It is also built on paranoia, but then it is not paranoia if you are right.
Israel fears it can be obliterated any day. A strong and prosperous Palestine is too dangerous for it; Israel needs a buffer zone. Yes, we can write a beautiful sad poem about real people who live in the buffer zone; it would be an easy poem. The poem that is hard to write is the poem that can convey what Golda Meir once said, “Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values.”
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