CPTnet
26 December 2006

HEBRON REFLECTION: The Double Standard, part I

[Note: The following is an edited excerpt from a longer report that CPTer
Jerry Levin sent to his supporters. Another excerpt from the same report
will appear tomorrow. People wishing to see the original may contact Levin
at guest.993507 [at] MennoLink [dot] org.]

Let's be clear about this: I am opposed to the use of violence to resolve
political, cultural, social, ideological, or theological disputes. Or any
dispute for that matter. I can never agree with militant Palestinian
leaders who rationalize the use of terror as a legitimate form of armed
struggle against oppression and occupation. I neither deny nor condone the
tragic carnage and suffering of Jewish families whose members Palestinian
militants have killed in terror raids. How could I? I am the grandson of
an Orthodox rabbi, a refugee from the Eastern European pogroms at the end of
the 19th century and one of the first American rabbis to embrace Zionism.

Nevertheless, I comprehend Palestinian militants' unwillingness to abandon
the kind of insurrectionary guerilla warfare that international law
recognizes as legitimate by occupied peoples. I comprehend it because of
the more extensive campaign of terror waged against defenseless, harassed,
humiliated, and provoked Palestinians every day by Israel's occupying army
and armed squatter-settlers. There's a semantic double standard applied
here that those situated outside the borders of Israel and Palestine don't
experience. But I do here in Hebron

The double standard is simply this: Any act of violent resistant to the
occupation by a Palestinian is "terror," but the terror employed by the
Israeli army is only the State of Israel engaging in its legitimate "right
to defend" itself.

Palestinians, of course, do not have a right to defend themselves even
though it is their land that is being occupied. It is their land being
relentlessly, diminished by the wall and the expanding perimeters of the
hundreds of settlements inside the West Bank as well as the Gulag that is
Gaza.

I'm old enough to remember Nazi propaganda that tried to characterize the
underground resistance movements in countries Germany occupied as the
aggressors and its own brutal terror crackdowns as the Third Reich's right
to defend itself, even though Germany itself was not under occupation.
Defending a land grab is not the same as defending one's home turf.
Palestinians are not occupying Israel. The Israeli military is not
withstanding an invasion of Arab colonialist hordes. Thousands of violent
Israeli squatter-settlers are not languishing in Palestinian prisons without
charge. Palestinian occupiers are not demolishing the homes of Israeli
citizens nor shutting off entry to Israeli cities towns and villages.

Nazi leaders were hung for killing noncombatants in defense of their
predatory regime's right to defend itself. Yet, Israel's leaders are
applauded when acting similarly with the West Bank and Gaza. They have done
so, of course, on a much smaller scale. The effect, however, is the same.
As Israeli leaders like to piously pronounce, "When you save one life, you
save the world." Well, conversely, when you kill one life in a terror
attack masqueraded as exercising one's right to defend oneself, then one is
killing the world over and over again.