The most irritating remark that I’ve heard of late has got to be, “What are we going to do? There’ll always be religion.” The comment was made by an old prep school friend – a kid I hadn’t seen for years – during a makeshift high school reunion, organized in part to welcome me to New York. The comment was made (surprise, surprise) to defend turning yet another American blind eye to the atrocities occurring in Gaza. It was a dumb statement – one that backs doing nothing with an empty phrase – but it made me particularly prickly considering that it came from Andrew. Unlike many of my other friends, Andrew has always been interested in politics and what’s happening in that world, and I had always respected him for his political smarts. Anyhow, I had been reading The Goldstone Report and had just attended the Brian Baird v. Anthony Weiner debate. And I had kept my mouth zipped so far – realizing that I couldn’t move my dear art school friends that I had been hanging with to care about the report. So I was excited to talk with Andrew, someone I believed would be sympathetic or at least intelligent about the issue.
I brought it up; he shot it down. He followed up with the remark that in the end, America really has nothing to do with what goes on in Israel-Palestine – due to religion, they’ll still fight. This was particularly frustrating to hear considering the topic of the debate, The Goldstone Report and the fact that, thanks in large part to the U.S. government, Israel has thus far sidestepped the report’s recommendations and so continues to act with utmost impunity. This was particularly aggravating to hear because Andrew actually reads the newspaper. Even the New York Times acknowledges the billions we give to Israel in military aid. It doesn’t take much to realize that this aid grants Israel the capability to, say, kill 1,419 Palestinians in twenty three days. I yelled a little and later apologized for being combative. When an art kid asked what was up, Andrew smiled and said, “She thinks I’m a Zionist.”
How I’d (almost) wished he were a Zionist! If he were, I doubt he would have made the idiotic claim that the U.S. has nothing to do with Israel-Palestine. Any pro-Israel human knows the importance of the special relationship. I’m used to hearing the pro-Israel side cite blatant untruths in defense of Israel (e.g., Anthony Weiner), and I’m used to apolitical citizens being ignoramuses on the subject. The politically aware, politically active person who claims not to care about Israel and acts dumb on the subject – that’s new to me, and it’s terrible to be around.
Before I move on to bigger fish, I’d like a little more on Andrew. He shut up on religion once I explained to him how Hamas was elected not because the Gazans are wild Islamists but because Fatah was crazy corrupt, but then he switched his abstraction to a forever war between “the Jews and the Arabs.” Stop calling them ‘the Jews and the Arabs’! Referring to the humans living in Israel-Palestine as such erases Palestinians clean out of the equation. It gives way too much credit to god-awful arguments like: “why don’t the Palestinians just leave and go somewhere else? All the Jews have is this little piece of land!” (This was the ‘solution’ that too many pit-stained men yelled at me when I was working for my university’s SJP, minding my own business and printing out Nakba posters in the basement computer lab.) It is also meant to imply that the whole Arab world is working against the Jews – that’s just not true. Read The Goldstone Report – read Baird’s essay, in which he talks about the Arab Peace Initiative, which calls for recognition and normal relations with Israel if there can be a two-state solution within the ’67 borders, and which was endorsed by the Arab League and the Islamic Conference. Guess who is yet to respond to the plan.
So Andrew won Most Irritating Remark of late, although Congressman Anthony Weiner came in at a tight second. I’ll let Weiner off the hook simply because he is a U.S. politician. So when the man utters blatant lies to support Israel (e.g. Israel runs to the Jordan River; there are no settlements nor IDF presence in the West Bank), I’ve got to believe that he’s just trying to hold down a job. He said it all with a poker face but he must know that he’s speaking untruths. He must have just been playing to his Brooklyn constituency. Weiner’s comments might have been more offensive then Andrew’s silly abstraction but it was still Andrew’s that got to me because I actually expected something from my friend. At this point, with regards to the issue, I couldn’t expect less from the U.S. Congress.
But Weiner’s lies weren’t even the worst of it. What bothered me the most was when he pitted justice against the rules of war. “Goldstone,” claimed Weiner, “said we are looking at this through the law of justice. Unfortunately – and it pains me to say it – when you’re at war it’s because the laws have broken down.” This was Weiner’s defense when questioned by the moderator about Israel’s “grossly disproportionate” use of force. Later, Weiner would continue to defend the Israeli aggression by stating that war is an “unreasonable moment.”
So much for a sixteen-hundred-year-old tradition aiming to bar this barbaric mentality of stripping justice from war. Weiner’s comment sounded particularly heinous when paired with other remarks he made throughout the night regarding the fact that “bottom line” “we” want more countries to look like Israel in the Middle East, evoking the old shared-values card. I’d hoped this argument had expired by now. Anyhow, I’m under the impression that one of the longest-standing traditions of the West is Just War theory, which, for example, states that a just war must be waged with proportionality, and must be waged with the greatest possible moderation. Now I know that Just War theory has been complicated during our age of WMD and was abused under Bush. Still, the very fact that its still invoked in the 21st century shows that the theory still stands as one of the West’s most important, oldest values. So when Weiner’s ilk speak of shared traditions between Israel and the US, I would imagine that Just War would be top on the list. However, Weiner’s point – that justice can be disregarded precisely because it is war, thus legitimizing disproportionate use of force – runs directly contra the tradition. How ironic, that a man whose argument stands on the fact that we are friends with Israel because we have shared values should, within the very same debate, hold such blatant disregard for these values.
Whatever. I’ve just moved in to an apartment next to Weiner’s district and have been getting pretty nasty looks as I tote around The Goldstone Report. I’ll pin a Palestinian flag to my backpack tomorrow.
Anna McConnell studied Philosophy and Arabic at the University of Chicago. She recently moved to Brooklyn.
