I sometimes quote people from memory (it's a literary tradition) and sometimes I get them wrong. My old friend Dan Fleshler is irritated that I casually quote from a panel we had together a year or so back at an Upper West Side synagogue. I just did yesterday, offhandedly:
A year ago I had a debate with Dan
Fleshler, where at one point he equated the power of the Palestinian
terrorist with the power of the Israeli border guard. Something like
that.
Fleshler says I'm not being journalistic, and he's right. I have a tape of the event and just listened to the exchange. Fleshler–a longtime and noble opponent of the occupation– talks about how progressives ought to talk about the general issue of the occupation. He said:
This situation coarsens and brutalizes both peoples. It’s
difficult when one side has so much power and the other side doesn’t to realize
that both of them are in fact victimized, but that’s exactly what is happening.
There is more than one generation of Jews now as well as Palestinians who were born
after the Six Day War, they’ve inherited the situation, they didn’t want it–What
are they going to do with it? And they’ve inherited a situation in which an occupation
exists that neither of them can change for whatever reason, for a variety of
reasons. And the average person on the street has to deal with and contend with
that situation. And when the average 19 year old Israeli kid has to man a
checkpoint, that coarsens and brutalizes him, and he’s as much of a victim as
anybody else. So I’d like to just have that realization in all the rhetoric
that happens about this issue. And if that’s there, if there’s a sense that Jews
have the problem too and it’s the same problem as the Palestinians, we can
start working toward a common solution.
I apologize to Fleshler for paraphrasing, but I think his answer is consistent with my interpretation. I think he's giving too little agency to the Israeli soldier; there are actually things he can do. Too little agency to American Jews, implicitly. And actually equating the victimization level of Palestinian and Israeli. I don't see it. As for the real lives of soldiers, yes, their lives are hurt for three years in Israel, if they're serving the occupation, then they spend another year unwinding in India or Argentina, a wanderjaar, and then they get to have their dreams, without checkpoints. Palestinian hopes are far more limited.
