Notice that Desmond Tutu is saying that the west is salving its Holocaust guilt by enabling Israel in anything it chooses to do. This is wonderful and helpful, and echoes what Mike Desch has said in his landmark paper on the myth of abandonment, and what I have written about American Jews feeling that the Israel lobby is our just compensation for the U.S. doing nothing to save the Jews in Europe.
Tutu is speaking directly of the Beit Hanoun air strikes by Israel that killed 19 Palestinian civilians.
He is investigating it for the U.N. And this brings up a wonderful moment on last night's BBC News Hour. First they did a report on Tutu's investigation, and his apprehension that without some more open Israeli accounting of its missile firings on houses, Beit Hanoun must be regarded as a war crime. And again we saw the images of limp children's bodies which are aired 24/7 across the Arab world, fueling hatred. Then the next report was an interview with DefSec Robert Gates (Desch's former boss at the Bush school), in which Gates addressed the civilian casualties of American actions in Pakistan and Afghanistan and repeated what he had said in Afghanistan:
mistake, when there is an error, to apologize quickly, to compensate
the victims quickly and then carry out the investigation…"
The juxtaposition of Israeli and U.S. policies could not have been more grotesque and stunning. Again I say this is the essential problem in I/P: that massacres, grievances, enormities have gone unacknowledged for more than 60 years because the political price that presumably would be paid by acknowledging them is seen by the Israelis as too high. So they postpone any emotional reckoning at all till the political details are worked out, on territorial issues; and in the eyes of the Arab world, they become more and more heartless and monstrous.
Jews are better than this. We know how important acknowledgment of the Holocaust was to moving forward as spiritual/political actors in the 20th century. Just look at the Holocaust Memorial. Yet the Nakba is unacknowledged, except out of the side of the mouth. Again I say that we Americans can lead Israel toward some higher ground. But we have to get the Israel lobby off our backs to do so.
