Leonard Nimoy’s on record with Americans for Peace Now in support of the two-state solution. His strangely passionate-for-a-Vulcan argument contains an enormous fallacy:
You might recall the episode in the original Star Trek series called, “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield.” Two men, half black, half white, are the last survivors of their peoples who have been at war with each other for thousands of years, yet the Enterprise crew could find no differences separating these two raging men.
But the antagonists were keenly aware of their differences–one man was white on the right side, the other was black on the right side. And they were prepared to battle to the death to defend the memory of their people who died from the atrocities committed by the other.
The story was a myth, of course, and by invoking it I don’t mean to belittle the very real issues that divide Israelis and Palestinians. What I do mean to suggest is that the time for recriminations is over. Assigning blame over all other priorities is self-defeating. Myth can be a snare. The two sides need our help to evade the snare and search for a way to compromise.
More than merely belittle, he distorts reality with this invocation.
If Spock the neutral Vulcan (as opposed to Nimoy the biased American Jew) was to visit the strange foreign planet of Israel/Palestine, what he’d observe is one people oppressing another people, not “two sides” in symmetrical “conflict.” He’d be highly tempted to violate the Prime Directive and join Bil’in’s villagers in a nonviolent protest.
No one spoke of “two sides” in the U.S. South during the civil rights movement, or during South African Apartheid. They were situations of oppression that needed to end.
The myth of “two sides” in a symmetrical “conflict” is perpetuated primarily by Israeli and American Jews, because if everyone’s equally to blame, the inherent racism of the colonial Zionist military/political project need never be examined, and the source of the oppression need never be indicted.
And tell us how, exactly, Mr. Nimoy, we’ll ever get to the two-state solution (or any solution) without BDS? If BDS was necessary to resolve South Africa, why isn’t it necessary here?
Where’s the dispassionate logic we love you for, Mr. Spock?
