And common ground? Mr. Noonan won’t admit to any, despite my condemnation of violence against Israel and my stated belief that the world has a responsibility to act when people like Iranian President Ahmadinejad threaten to wipe Israel off the map. Common ground means compromise, and compromise means defeat. Right?
Particularly irksome is that Mr. Noonan consistently misrepresents and misreads what I write. “How does he think any land has been acquired?” Mr. Noonan asks. I suppose he missed the part where I wrote: “One of several base reasons why wars are fought: the desire to control territory.” But my overall point seems lost: History is littered with territorial wars that put us where we are today, and we are no safer or peaceful now than we were in the past.
I have to wonder: If Mr. Noonan trumpets that the land we’re standing on was acquired through war and concludes this is a good thing, does he believe that the strong deserve to keep the land they conquered? If so, then by this reasoning, Israel is right to hang on to those territories it conquered in 1967. And, of course, it was wrong to carve out Israel from territory conquered by Romans, Arabs and Ottomans.
Context, Context, Everywhere!
Which brings us back to history. Mr. Noonan charges that I neglect historical context, especially that of Israel. But even if you to combine what I wrote with the additional facts he provides as “context,” e.g. the Balfour Declaration, the 1948 Arab-Israel war, my point about the historical tit-for-tat exchange of violence remains intact. Recall: “In 1948, the United Nations carved the state of Israel out of Palestine, after an already long history of violent confrontations between Arabs and the Jews who began immigrating to Palestine in the 1880s. And somehow, it’s a surprise that this created problems, particularly in a region that has a history of being carved up by colonial powers”
Colonial powers? The British and the Balfour Declaration. Long history of violent confrontations? That would be the “Arab rioting against the Jews in the 1920s,” Mr. Noonan mentions, and the 1948 war — not to forget that Jews also fought violently against Arabs. (They also resisted the British “occupiers.” A group called Irgun came to illustrate nicely the debate of “terrorist” vs. “freedom fighter.” As for 1880, surely Mr. Noonan doesn’t think our readers are so stupid they need to be reminded that Jews have been in the region for a long time? And he surely recognizes that the 1880s’ immigration is significant because it occurred under the newly unfurled banner of Zionism. It seems that Mr. Noonan is merely being disingenuous and offering the illusion of criticism by repeating my arguments against me.
In any case, context is the very enemy of Mr. Noonan’s “Israel can do no wrong” position. Context makes everything more complicated as we are forced to consider a tangled chain of events from both the present and past. Context includes not only aggression against Israel, but Israeli abuse of Palestinians, documented not only by international groups, but by Israeli Human Rights organizations such as B’Tselem (www.btselem.org). Unless it fits into Mr. Noonan’s pre-conceived conclusions, however, it is to be ignored. That doesn’t change the conclusion from history, namely, that neither Arabs nor Jews have achieved their aims through the use of violence. They fought in the past, they’re fighting now, and nothing has changed. That’s the problem.
Moral Clarity and the Fog of War
Ultimately, the kind of moral clarity Mr. Noonan asks for is not the kind that actually makes moral judgments, such as my firm belief that killing innocent people is wrong regardless of who does the killing. Instead, he seems to want moral clarity that gives carte blanche to use any means necessary to achieve a particular end — that is, to absolve Israel’s responsibility for its actions while holding Hamas, Hezbollah, et al, responsible for theirs.
But the choice isn‚t between „grey‰ and „right and wrong.‰ It’s between degrees of rightness and degrees of wrongness where sometimes right and wrong are clear-cut, and sometimes they‚re difficult to tease apart. Occasionally, good people (and good countries) make mistakes. What makes them truly good is a willingness to admit to them and, more importantly, correct them. In this case, Israel, who deserves as much security as a nation as any other, nonetheless chose immoral tactics to secure itself and has left hundreds of civilians dead, a country destroyed, and an oil spill that could be the worst environmental disaster in the Eastern Mediterranean‚s history. No points either for Hezbollah, whose rocket launches are terrorizing Israelis, or for the Palestinian suicide bombers, or for the spiteful, vile threats against Israel‚s existence by the likes of Iran. It‚s ALL grim.
In the end, I suspect that, despite our tactical disagreement, Mr. Noonan and I really share a similar end-goal: a safe, secure Israel in a peaceful Middle East. Hopefully we‚ll see it in our lifetimes.