Date: Mon, 8 Apr 2002 23:17:21 +0100
Subject: BHA: Palestinian TINA ?!


PALESTINIANS LEFT WITH NO ALTERNATIVE

by Michael Neumann*

Palestinian tactics are often attacked or defended on dubious grounds.
Whether these tactics are terrorist is irrelevant; some terrorism is
defensible, some not.  The same applies to whether the acts are
murders.  Whether others are bigger terrorists or murderers is also
irrelevant; two wrongs don't make a right.  Whether Israelis have
committed crimes is not directly relevant either; that they have
committed crimes is not sufficient to justify killing people, civilians,
who have not committed them.

The problem, as anyone will tell you, is that Palestinians deliberately
kill civilians.  You would think, then, that we would never do such a
thing.  Maybe not.  Those who conducted strategic bombing raids against
Nazi Germany, or for that matter those who set speed limits on our
highways, did not.  These actions, it seems, were fine.  Bombs would
definitely stray into civilian areas; lower speed limits would
definitely mean fewer children killed and maimed in accidents.  We knew
this with certainty, but we didn't *intend* these consequences.
Apparently this makes us far better than the Palestinians.  The
scholastically fine distinction between deliberately killing civilians
and knowingly killing civilians has become, it seems, a moral chasm.

Sometimes, though, we treat the deliberate killing of civilians with
reverence, or at least feel a special moral pride in our refusal to
condemn it.  The best examples are from American history.  We have not
forgotten that American Indians deliberately killed civilians, including
children, and sometimes as a policy.  But no one demands an apology from
contemporary American Indian leaders; quite the reverse.  Nor is this
simply a matter of the silly business of apologies or other
manifestations of political correctness.  (If political correctness is
involved, it comes from focusing on the warfare of 1850-1890, when the
whites were the worst killers, not on the earlier periods when things
were more even.)  Why then, do we keep silent about these presumably
awful crimes?  Why don't we rub them in the faces of our children, so
that they will never forget that such presumed evils presumably tainted
our land?

It is necessary to put the question more sharply to exclude weasely
answers.  The Indians sometimes murdered innocent civilians, including
children.  These acts were right, wrong, or morally indifferent.  Which
were they?

I can't see that they were morally indifferent, can you?  Were they
wrong?  If so, they must have been awfully wrong, because they involved
murdering children.  Is that what we want to say?

I suggest not.  I suggest the acts were terrible, cruel, and ultimately
justified.   My reasons are familiar to everyone.  The Indians' very
existence as a people was threatened.  More than threatened; their
society was doomed without resistance.  They had no alternative.
Moreover, every single white person, down to the children, was an enemy,
a being which, allowed to live, would contribute to the destruction of
the Indians' collective existence.

The Indians had no chance of defeating the whites by conventional
military means.  So their only resort was to hit soft targets and do the
maximum damage.  That wasn't just the right thing to do from their point
of view.  It was the right thing to do, period, because the whites had
no business whatever coming thousands of miles to destroy the Indian
people.

The comparisons with the situation of the Palestinians are beyond
obvious.  To start, what I have written sneaks in some misconceptions.
There were no people called "the Indians".  They were diverse, as
cultures and as individuals, some peaceful, some warlike, some
responsible for the massacres, some not.  It was, of course, the whites
who lumped them together and demonized them (just as this sentence does
to the whites).  The Israelis kind of do that when they destroy the
houses of old women and blockade cities to the point of starvation and
medical catastrophe.   And when anyone supports the Israelis, they are
responsible for this sort of collective 'punishment', even if they don't
- as they often do - indulge in the same coarse generalizations.

As for the other points of resemblance, not only Israeli, but much
non-Israeli Jewish propaganda does its best to conceal them.  But
concealment is impossible.  Guess what?  The Palestinians didn't travel
thousands of miles to dispossess the Jews.  It was the other way
around.  Often the Jews had very pressing reasons to leave Europe.  So
did the whites who settled in North America.  And both groups of
settlers couldn't quite take in what they saw:  that gee, there were
other people already there, and the land was theirs.  When possible,
both engaged in sleazy land deals to get their foothold; when not, force
was used.  But always there was no question:  the whole land would be
theirs, and the state to be constructed would be their state.

Both groups of settlers somehow contrived, despite these goals, to
believe that they wanted nothing but to live in peace with their
'neighbors'- neighbors, of course, because they had already taken some
of their land.  And sure, they did want peace, just as Hitler wanted
peace:  on his terms.  The most casual survey of Israeli politics
indicates that mainstream, official, respectable Jewish opinion asserts
an absolute right to Israel's present boundaries, and at the very least
would never abandon the continually expanding settlements.  What is
considered extreme Jewish opinion, which asserts rights over the entire
area occupied by Palestine, is not the Israeli extreme.  The far right
in Israel claims a territory that stretches as far as Kuwait and
southern Turkey.  This matters, because, given Israel's fragmented
politics, the extreme right wields a power out of proportion to its
numbers.  The conclusion must be that Israel, as a collective entity,
wants peace with all the sincerity of, say, General Custer.

Like the Indians, the Palestinians have nowhere to go.  All the Arab
states either hate them, or hate having them there.  And, like Indians,
Arabs and Palestinians are not all alike:  do we scratch our heads and
wonder why, when the Cherokee were kicked off their land, they didn't
just join the Apache or Navaho?  Like the Indians, the Palestinians have
not the slightest chance of injuring, let alone defeating Israel through
conventional military tactics.  Like the whites, every single Israeli
Jew, down to and including the children, are instruments wielded against
the Palestinian people.

Of course the two situations aren't quite analogous.  Things are clearer
in the case of Israel, where virtually every able-bodied adult civilian
is at least an army reservist, and every Jewish child will grow up to be
one.  And the American settlers never spent years proclaiming how happy
they would be with the land they had before embarking on a campaign to
take the rest of it.  One might add that the current situation of the
Palestinians is more like that of the Indians in 1880-1890 than earlier,
because the Palestinians have lost much more than half of their original
land.

The Palestinians don't set out to massacre children, that is, they don't
target daycare centers.  (Nor do they scalp children, but according to
the BBC, that's what Israel's clients did in Sabra and Shatila.) They
merely hit soft targets, and this sometimes involves the death of
children.  But, like anyone, they will kill children to prevent the
destruction of their society.  If peoples have any right of
self-preservation, this is justified.  Just as Americans love to do, the
Palestinians are "sending a message":  you really don't want to keep
screwing with us.  We will do anything to stop you.  And if the only
effective way of stopping their mortal enemies involved targeting
daycare centers, that would be justified too.  No people would do
anything less to see they did not vanish from the face of the earth.

* Professor of Philosophy -  Trent University, Canada
The author can be reached at NEUMANN-AT-MiddleEast.Org




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