The recent killing of four West Bank settlers by Palestinian gunmen raises the ever-present issue of violence in resistance to occupation and oppression. I write in respectful response to Seham, who has expressed some understanding and perhaps sympathy for the killers, and disagreement with my analysis.
It seems to me that there are two principal issues here: morality and effectiveness. Let me first deal with the more contested issue of morality. So many of the arguments I hear in defense of this murder seem like the mirror image of Israeli claims. We have been driven to the point of desperation. What else could we do? These people aren’t really civilians; on the continuum of civilianality, they lean toward the military end and are therefore more killable than other civilians. We live under a constant threat of terrorism, where everyone in the country knows someone who died in the wars or were victims of terror, thousands of people going about their daily business until their bodies were suddenly blown apart. Until you’ve had to live like this, we are told, don’t tell us how to act.
Seham, you no doubt feel that your arguments are more cogent and theirs more hypocritical and dishonest, that you are fighting evil oppression and they are perpetrating and defending it. Indeed, I am in complete agreement with those positions. But just as I feel that Israel’s use of double standards is wrong, so is ours. If we are going to adopt an ethos that excuses killing civilians in certain circumstances, that same ethos can be used by Israel.
Perhaps because I am a lawyer I am very sensitive to the question of universally applied principles. If I accept a principle of conduct, I anticipate that there may be other applications of that principle that I might not like so much. The principle here seems to be that if a group of civilians generally acts in brutal fashion toward fellow human beings, it may be OK to kill a random sample of them to teach the collective a lesson. I absolutely reject that principle. For one thing, it certainly has been a driving force of Israeli ideology for many decades. They rationalize that Palestinian civilians overwhelmingly support terrorist attacks, so it’s perfectly reasonable to kill Palestinian civilians in an attempt to reduce that support.
Let me propose another hypothetical. For the past decade, Americans, who have the electoral power to control their government, have obliviously gone about their daily business while their government and military has wreaked havoc in Iraq and Afghanistan. In sheer numbers – well over a million dead and several million forced to flee their homes, not to mention all sorts of consequent suffering — these catastrophes have dwarfed the awful experience of the Palestinians over the last six decades. It would not be surprising if some of the many millions adversely affected by our government’s actions (and our citizenry’s near-total indifference) retaliated with another terrorist attack directed at random US civilians. In my opinion, though it would be heretical to say so in the wake of such an attack, the US would be partially responsible for fomenting such anger, but I certainly would not excuse or forgive the terrorists themselves.
My bottom line is that I don’t want to parse those circumstances that give rise to justifiable homicide of civilians. In my view, it’s never justified, period – not in Lebanon, Gaza, New York, Hiroshima, Dresden, and no, not even among the settlers of the West Bank, a good percentage of whom are surely loathsome and reprehensible. The shooting victims were not killed in the course of perpetrating an act of violence themselves. The people who killed them knew only one thing about them, that they were probably settlers. They might well have been vicious racist settlers.
But maybe not. Maybe they were recent immigrants from Russia who were offered generous subsidies by the government to settle in the West Bank. Maybe they were human rights activists who live within the green line and had just come from a meeting with Palestinian counterparts, and were attacked because of the mistaken assumptions made about their Israeli license plate. We may now know that this wasn’t the case, but the gunmen most probably had no idea who they were killing. Maybe these were four parents who left behind 16 children who are going to grow up with the same anger that you have, Seham, but more power to translate that anger into physical brutality directed at Palestinians.
Which brings me to your personal story. You have been commenting here for quite some time without revealing this memory before, and I am truly sorry that I played any role in compelling you to publicly recall this horrible experience if you were reluctant to do so. I’m sure you know it was not my intention to cause any discomfort. Please accept my sincere condolences, however belated and ineffective they may be.
Finally, this distance between us may be smaller than it first appears . We both think the settlers are willing participants in an international crime. We both think their brutal treatment of Palestinians inevitably leads to shocking acts such as this. You are angrier than I am because you are a Palestinian who has suffered a grievous wound at the hands of Israel’s insistence on its right to control your people’s lives. I don’t deny your right to anger, nor do I resent your refusal to join me in condemning the gunmen in this case. I do have much less tolerance for those who would agree with me in this instance of Palestinians killing Israelis, but ignore, excuse or even praise Israel’s violence which has been so much more costly and destructive.
Now to the question of effectiveness. Even some of those, such as yourself, who have expressed understanding for the perpetrators’ hatred of their victims, have noted that there seems to be no good that can come of this. Many have observed that the attack appears to be a gift to the Israeli government, and some have even theorized that Israel might have been surreptitiously behind it. I think there is no evidence to support that speculation, but I understand its source, because the potential benefit to Israel is quite significant. Will this killing convince settlers that they can never be safe, and that they had better evacuate to a location where their legal right to reside is recognized by at least somebody outside Israel? Of course not. It will steel their resolve to never budge from “their” land to which they have a divine right that definitively trumps world opinion. Even greater repression of Palestinians and settlement building are far more likely outcomes than panicky flight, whether or not that was a motivation for the gunmen.
A spokesman was quoted as saying the killing demonstrates that the “armed Palestinian resistance is present in the West Bank despite the war to uproot it.” Great, so you’re still here, and they’re dead. Excellent point. The attack came on the eve of the Washington peace conference, and it’s hard to view this as a coincidence. As I argued in my original post, and Richard Silverstein argued as well, the peace conference is bound to fail anyway, and this incident was hardly necessary to push it over a cliff. In fact, many have commented that each party appears to be primarily concerned with the PR chore of blaming the other party for failure.
One of the actual reasons for failure is that the Palestinians are not adequately represented by Abbas, and that Hamas has been shut out of the negotiations. There are all sorts of persuasive reasons why Hamas should have been included, but now, the decision to exclude it – supposedly because they are murderous thugs who can’t act civilized like we do – seems a little more justified. Moreover, it will be easier for Netanyahu & co. to argue that the talks failed because they couldn’t recover from the initial trauma of the terrorist murder of four Israelis designed to derail the talks. Once again, Palestinian intransigence has destroyed whatever chance their was for peace … missed opportunities … blah, blah blah.
A few years ago, the great Israeli columnist, Ran HaCohen, persuasively argued that Ariel Sharon, when faced with periods of cessation of violence against Israeli civilians, initiated some new horror to provoke further terrorist attacks. Ask yourself why Sharon would risk Jewish life and limb, which you know he valued far higher than others’? It’s because of the public relations bonanza reaped by Israel whenever Israelis, especially civilians, are attacked. Palestinians may well feel that non-violence has not worked, that it has never been rewarded with an alleviation, much less elimination, of their hell. That’s true, but maybe things are changing.
Israel’s hold on public opinion has been sharply eroding, with its murderous wars in Lebanon and Gaza, the Goldstone report, and the Mavi Marmara massacre. Why, in the midst of Israel’s series of self-inflicted wounds, does Hamas (or whoever) remind the world that Palestinians are capable of shocking violence? People sympathize with those who are victimized by intolerable crimes; why at this point did the gunmen shift that sympathy from Palestinians to Israelis? In the absence of violence, Israel must be forced to explain, in ever more shrill and transparently dishonest ways, why a few people the world over who believe they have an ancient connection to this strip of land have superior rights to it over those who have lived there for centuries.
Let them explain why native Palestinians must accept domination and subjugation in perpetuity by this more recently arrived ethno-religious group. There are no reasonable arguments likely to appeal to those with no stake in the conflict. In fact, more and more Jews such as myself are rejecting this undeserved privilege because it is so indefensible, because we could not tolerate living as second-class citizens or worse, and we must not impose such civil liabilities upon others, especially based on accident of birth. Ahmed Moor no doubt is correct when he states that superior morality is infinitely more likely than guns to win Palestinian freedom. I haven’t seen any defense of this killing on the ground that it is likely to be strategically effective.
There is no way this incident could be viewed as a positive step forward in the liberation of the Palestinians, and it might very well be a giant step backward. On this issue alone, the decision to carry out this operation is inexcusable. This was not an act perpetrated in the heat of the moment, but a well-planned execution perpetrated in cold blood. Some people got together in a room and hashed this out. As I stated in the title of my original post, what were they thinking?
Postscript: I anticipate that some will criticize my right, as a person who lives in complete comfort and security, to “lecture” oppressed people on the acceptable methods they may utilize to win their freedom. I don’t look at it that way at all. I’m merely expressing my opinion, and do not need to earn the right to do so. Moreover, I have taken rather strong stands against the barbarity unleashed by Israelis against Palestinians, and I’m perfectly entitled to identify which responsive measures I endorse and those that I condemn.
