Monday, February 7, 2011

Marginalia


When we look at the situation in Israel and the occupied territories, it defies common sense and common decency to believe that the occupier is not guilty of one of the gravest crimes known to modern man: genocide.  The fact that the Palestinians refuse to bow before their masters, even under conditions that would have broken many others, should not be seen as anything other than human dignity in its highest form: the woman who spits in the face of her rapist; Christ giving to Ceasar what belonged to him with forgiveness: meaning unchanged by the horror of his pending death.  No woman who spits into the face of a rapist fears death.  In this you find our standards of human rights, which almost every national constitution and legal custom has codified for all peoples wherever they may be.  Any woman, religious or secular, has the right to kill her rapist, time being the only legal restraint. 

This enlightened idea is what motivated the Swedish and Norwegian governments to send aid and moral support to the Sioux Indians who were under siege at Pine Ridge Reservation in 1973.  It’s the same idea that motivated Australia and other countries to support the people of Aceh when Indonesia embarked on a repressive campaign of violence. (Naturally, their motives were more cynical.)

No one today—though many did at the time—would accuse a Polish Jew in the 1940’s of engaging in terrorism if his target was Nazi soldiers and equipment.  Everyone has the right to defend himself.  The Germans at the time were convinced that Poland should be like it was when Russia and Prussia and Austria ruled its territory; not Poland in short.  Poles disagreed.  In retrospect, we all know the Poles were right.  Yet we see one experiment which shares so many elements of another and we scientists of public opinion still refuse to see the similarities. 

I take God’s view (I don’t care if there is a God or not, I use Him/Her metaphorically (raised a Catholic, by the way)) and to God the obvious is obvious.  You have to leave to see.  You have to hover above the planet to see how a lowly textile factory in Haiti relates to the swimming pool in LA.  On the ground, it’s almost impossible to get through the details, to find a way out of the labyrinth (Satan is Daedalus) without a bird’s eye view.  A bird’s eye view with a human brain is God’s view.

Today in America Europe and Israel people are either Zionists or not.  There can be no equivocation.  I’m not.

2 comments:

  1. Read "From Time Immemorial: the Origin of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine" by Joan Peters

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