I have reality issues, as readers of this site know. I read out-of-print books and get up in the morning and write down my dreams. I seem to gravitate toward marginalized communities. It’s good for me, therefore, to run into people who are more grounded– and get the news from them.
Last night I saw a friend who reads history all the time and studies international politics from afar. He’s a businessman, very well off, non-Jewish. He follows our issue the same way he follows health care reform. He said the following:
He’s now frankly anti-Zionist, based on the fact that it hasn’t worked out well. He is in the Tony Judt camp: he does not believe that ethnic/religious states ought to exist, of any sort. When the Kurds say they want a state, screw them. This is not the way the world is heading. The era of the nation-state has lasted 200 years and is coming to an end. Can’t happen too soon. This goes for the Palestinians too. He doesn’t think they should have a state. The likelihood is that it would be an Islamist state anyway. I/P should be one state. The Israelis have lost their claim to a Jewish state through their actions, and the force of history.
Alas, the whole region is immature politically. The neocons are right about the Arab states. The United States came to political maturity through a horrifying civil war, and Israel and Palestine will have to have their own variant of this process. In that struggle, secular Palestinians and Israelis will combine to take their country back from the religious crazies. The obstacle to this combination is that the Palestinian standard of living is low, and you need more educated Palestinians. Ironically, Netanyahu’s "economic freedom" ideas for the West Bank may advance this process.
"Just because I’m an anti-Zionist doesn’t mean I’m pro-Palestinian. Just because they’ve been trampled doesn’t mean I approve of their actions. I don’t. Suicide bombing? The United States achieved what it did in the Civil Rights struggle because the great mass of black Americans were willing to forgive the country the tremendous suffering they’d experienced in exchange for recognition and greater freedom. It could have been violent. It wasn’t. That reflected the leadership of Martin Luther King and others."
My friend then proceeded to ask the old question, Where is the Palestinian Gandhi? Palestinians will command the world’s sympathy when they walk up to that wall and are willing to be shot to protest it, he said.
I responded that Palestinians do do that, in Bi’lin. They are shot and you don’t know about it. Because the world has turned a deaf ear. Nonviolence doesn’t work if no one is watching. Moreover, Palestinian conditions are worse than they were in the Jim Crow south, and 10,000 Palestinians are in jail, their leadership has been decapitated by Israel.
I told him I’d send him a link about Bi’lin, but I could see that my arguments had not convinced him. My friend’s comments resonated precisely with those of a Palestinian friend I met last week in NY who said, We screwed ourselves with suicide bombing, our image is awful in the world, everyone thinks we’re terrorists, no one knows about Bi’lin.
I left my friend’s home thinking this is the great challenge to those who care about Palestinian freedom: to help change the paradigm. To get out the word about Bi’lin. To try and get coverage for the new coexistence between Palestinians and Israelis in protesting the occupation. And to make Palestinians feel less lonely in the west, so that they will drop violent tactics and grow the nonviolent movement in ever-more-sophisticated ways.
