But of course grievances are the issue. As long as people have legitimate grievances against Israel, the anti-Semites have an endless supply of gasoline to fuel their hatred. “See,” they say, “the Jews really are as bad as we say they are.” Taking away those grievances means that extremists have nothing to use to galvanize moderate people to their cause, and they eventually become isolated. If Israel didn’t repress Palestinians, if it didn’t kill civilians in its retaliations, if it didn’t hold onto other people’s land and people around Israel could just tend to the business of living their lives, Israel could claim a legitimate moral high ground when it‚s threatened. And the world could stand with it. But in all its existence, Israel has relied on excessive violence. On strictly pragmatic grounds, it has failed to gain any security by doing so.
The same holds true for the Palestinians, Hezbollah and their ilk. They haven’t been bright sparks in this, either. Yasser Arafat detonated many opportunities for peace. The election of Hamas was, frankly, deserving of a monument to idiocy. And none of them have been any more successful or noble with their violent tactics than Israel.
The lesson from history is very much that Israel is caught in a cycle of violence, with each cycle driving the next. It is the fantasy of moral innocence on both sides of the conflict that perpetrates it, because it means no one wants to deal with the underlying causes. They don’t want compromise. They only want to impose their way by force.
Taking a Very Moral Stand
Despite the belief of Ari Noonan, the editor of thefrontpageonline.com, to the contrary, refusing to take sides is to make a moral judgment. It is to stand up for the innocent victims of war. It is to mourn the destruction of people’s live though injury, death, and trauma. It is to lament the fact that, after thousands of years of bloody history, humanity has still not achieved any sort of social and spiritual enlightenment. Both Palestinians/Arabs and Israelis have shown themselves lacking in morals in their war against each other. When I wrote “And don’t talk to me about terrorists using human shields,” I wasn’t denying that Hezbollah is doing so. This was Mr. Noonan’s gross misreading of what I wrote. I was merely pointing out that killing the “shield” to get to the terrorist is sacrificing an innocent person for a particular objective, asking, isn’t that what Hezbollah and Hamas do? Kill innocent people in order to achieve their goals?
In the end, you can’t claim the moral high ground when you’re standing on quicksand. And that’s what the Middle East is: Tragic, bloody, relentless quicksand for everyone involved. People fighting over who gets to play in the sandbox, ignoring history while simultaneously being slaves to it. War crimes and human rights violations left, right, and center.
The old ways of war have failed to solve the problems in the Middle East. They have led Israel to execute questionable military strategies and tactics that have inflicted horrifying death and pain on the Lebanese people. It only takes an escape from the corporate U.S. media to the foreign media to understand the extent of the carnage in Lebanon.
A new way of relating to one another is needed. A new model for resolving our differences is needed. Desperately. In the end, it is more moral to feel compassion for the suffering, to strive for peace and justice, to find new solutions when old ones fail, than it is to give in to fear, anger and hate, in the process becoming the evil we struggle against.
