Trying to discourage, neutralize, reduce and/or simply chronicle and illuminate the aggressive and oppressive violence by the so-called good guys infecting the Middle East (and elsewhere) can be an uneasy and easily demonized calling. And demonizing is and what has been happening for decades to those of us who have become involved in that struggle in one way or another. For instance, when my wife, Sis, and I returned from our Lebanon adventure in 1985 the honeymoon for us with respect to the approval of the political "establishment" in the U. S. came to an abrupt and unexpected end.
It happened when we became painfully aware that our understanding of the "futility of violence" context of our rough experience was being sneakily twisted by those who knew better. They were doing that in order to encourage and foment simplistic jingoistic stereotypical hate and fear mongering views that were exactly the opposite of what we actually thought and felt. For instance because of wide spread western condescending biases and mythmaking masquerading as truth it was presumed by those who did not really know us that we would agree that what happened to us and the others kidnapped after me was an example of two canards that over the decades have been successfully implanted by Israel-right-or-wrong zealots and their fellow travelers in the U. S. and elsewhere in the world. The first is that all Arabs are terrorists; Israelis are not; and the second is that the situation is hopeless because everyone knows that they (meaning Arabs) have been fanatically killing Jews for no good reason for thousands of years.
The fundamental inferences that hearers of the above were and are expected to derive are that throughout history - and certainly now - Arabs have been the aggressors against Jews who have been obliged during all those eons to be continuously on the defensive in a time immemorial contest about hate and prejudice which automatically entitles the current State of Israel (the so-called good guys) to colonize and establish an exclusivist nation on land on which Arabs (the so-called bad guys) have been living for centuries. Reacting to the shock of hearing those vicious views that were being craftily ascribed to us (until we got wind of them), we began to speak and write out sooner than we had planned; so the resting up from our ordeal was short lived.
Of course, in trying to correct the record – our record - we quickly ran into what I described in an essay that I wrote for the Washington Report On Middle East Affairs in January 1990 as neo- McCarthyism, a slanderous and libelous condition which equates those who criticize the brutality and territorial aims of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza with being anti-Semitic if one is not Jewish or of being self-hating if one is. Naturally, because of my ethical and spiritual evolution, at one time or another I've been charged with being both. And because of my hostage experience I also have been accused of suffering from the Stockholm syndrome. (Of course, despite my understanding and appreciation for some of my captors' political grievances, I thought so little of the means they used to make their political point that I escaped the first good chance I got…with a lot of help it turns out from the most unlikely of venues – Syria.)
At the time I wrote the essay I thought that Israel-right-or-wrong neo-McCarthyism would not last and that there would be a turn-around in Palestinian fortunes and the fortunes of the hundreds of thousands of Jews in Israel and elsewhere in the world who had been (and still are) trying to help Palestine be rid of Israel's colonizing yoke. I have long since stopped harboring such optimistic illusions, because the situation since then has continued to decline radically for the Palestinians. It has continued to deteriorate in part because a neo-McCarthyism-like political correctness has escalated to the point in the United States that it is now anti- Semitic not to accept - as have both the Republican and Democrat establishments - President Bush's semantic metamorphosing of all the settlements in the West Bank (except four very small ones in the north) as well as all those within the dynamically expanding annexed borders of East Jerusalem as sacrosanct Jewish "population centers." In a real life exemplification of Orwellian double think, the true nature of the decades long squatter movement in the West Bank and East Jerusalem has been verbally eclipsed to the point that it is anti-Semitic if one does not feel obliged to agree that Jewish homesteading has reached such a degree of development and logical permanence that practically speaking there can be no turning back. As a result it continues to be quintessentially anti-Semitic not to accept the political reality of the series of nails that a string of Israeli governments have since 1967 (with official and unofficial U. S. acquiescence and financial largesse) been unilaterally pounding in the coffin of Palestinian aspirations. Ironically the Palestinians' so-called guilt, the Palestinians' so-called crime is to want the same kind of rights that we here in the United States at least in theory have been considering self evident for more than two hundred years.
Also ironically, within Israel's heavily militarized ruling establishment the use of the term anti-Semitic has reached such cynical heights, when it comes to squelching Jewish anti-militant Zionism dissent that it has begun to lose some specificity and focus. For instance the use of the expression attained a kind of loony ludicrousness when late last year, according to Haaretz, two Jewish members of the Knesset accused the leader of a rival Jewish political party and also the party of being anti-Semitic. The charges might be laughable except that they had little to do with Palestine this time but instead were concerned with domestic issues having to do with the concessions every would be Israeli Prime Minister must make with religious and secular political parties in order to obtain support for his or her prospective policies.
Meanwhile back in the United States Sis and I are still astonished by the number of well meaning fellow citizens we encounter who don't realize that there is no unanimity among Jews either inside Israel or out with respect to the occupation. However, those who do favor the results of colonization and support its expansion are well aware of those divisions; so they often sullenly monitor the PowerPoint presentations the two of us team up to make to interested audiences around the U. S. knowing that we can be expected to call attention to those differences. Purporting, nevertheless, to speak for "the Jewish community" their hope is to heckle, refute and undermine our arguments and facts by attempting to play the inevitable what about the promised land, holocaust, or suicide bombers? cards. Then they usually become angry and/or surly when I show our audiences photos of several of those indefatigable nonviolent activists from a variety of Israeli and international Jewish organizations hard and persistently at work trying to achieve the same just nonviolent ends as their nonviolent Christian and Muslim colleagues.
Sadly despite Prime Minister Sharon's retreat from Gaza (masquerading as disengagement) scheduled to take place this summer, the colonizing, the settlement building and the aggressive unilateral annexation of sections of the West Bank has not slackened a whit since the fitful ceasefire was agreed to a few weeks ago. Day in and day out - out of view of a diffident international press - settlers protected by Israeli military and police indifference are sallying forth from their fortress towns to harass Palestinian villagers and their families, to interfere with their attempts to make a modest living from farming or shepherding, to poison their wells and cut their water lines, and to confiscate more and more of their dwindling productive fields and orchards. And it is a rare day that some Palestinian man, woman, or child is not killed, wounded, or beaten.
As a result, the unvarnished truth about the ceasefires reached in early 2005 is that they have been another example of the terribly sad truth that the struggle on behalf of Palestinian freedom, independence, security, and opportunity - opportunity not to prosper but simply to survive - is being lost. And while the United States and most other nations are applying pressure on Syria to end its long running occupation of Lebanon now or at least sooner rather than later (as well it should), never is heard from those same paragons of sovereignty (especially the United States) a similar discouraging word about Israel's even longer running and confiscatory occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
Where is the justice in that?