Your pessimistic article “Trapped” prompts me to relate this anecdote from my own experiences in Jerusalem:
One lovely night, after dinner and the close of most businesses except small cafes, I sat with friends at a small cafe on the edge of a square in the Old City of Jerusalem. I forget its name, but a scent of flowers was in the quiet air. Dusk was ending and night settling upon us, and we lazily watched a young Palestinian man as he approached the opposite side of the square on foot from a dark side street. Suddenly, he yelled-yelped loudly and with pained surprise and outrage. On the roof directly above him stood a Yeshiva bocher, not yet quite done peeing on the youth below him and clearly enjoying immensely his crudely sadistic power to humiliate. Another night in the Old City; another humdrum act of unspeakable and arbitrary cruelty.
The year was 1986, just before the start of the First Intifada, the nonviolent one, after 20 years of daily humiliations, outrages, and far worse. Nearly 20 years later still, sickened to their souls by the violence of the Second Intifada, Palestinians joined forces to renew their commitment to nonviolent resistance– the 2005 call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions. The world is responding, even here in the U.S., now. As we must. We must honor the Palestinian call for nonviolent solidarity and activism.
They are stronger than you think. They have no choice, and they know it. Their choice is not between nonviolent resistance or violent resistance. It’s between nonviolent resistance or genocide. You know this, too, even in your current despair. Our friends the Palestinians seem to have made the commitment to nonviolence for the long haul, come what may. If we want to help them, we must maintain the clarity and vigor of the vision of a just future that we share with and for them, and for us all. If we value justice, we have no choice. When the day comes that Israel realizes that it is standing against the whole world, it will realize that it has no choice, and it will finally understand that it must bow to that reality. If Israel maintains the current course of staggering arrogance, its day of reckoning may be sooner than we might predict.
As I see it, our mission is to expose Israel as the pariah state that it has become and to unite global condemnation of its uncivilized conduct, because that is the best and most compassionate path to bringing its injustices to an end. Do we have a choice?
thank you barbara harvey. everyone should read your words.
Their choice is not between nonviolent resistance or violent resistance. It’s between nonviolent resistance or genocide. You know this, too, even in your current despair.
yes, i know this.
“It’s between nonviolent resistance or genocide.”
Nonviolent resistance = slow-motion genocide. The only choice is between speed of the genocide, and an attack on Iran will speed things right along regardless.
We need better ideas, like expanding BDS, supporting state currencies, buying local, and calling out dual loyalty wherever we see it.
Well, let me speak for the pessimists. The day when the world stands against Israel is very far off and the opportunities for a kind of genocide – ie fragmentation into zones with Israel-controlled borders, gradual clearance of the enclaves, expulsion and dispersal for a thousand years – are not at all foreclosed. Around the world there are a few stirrings of objection to Israeli behaviour, some indeed here in the UK. But there are at best only tiny cracks in the massive American support for Israel and America is still the sole superpower, where considerable pleasure is taken in standing outside any soggy Euro consensus whenever one might emerge. That James Thurber quote ‘The night is dark and getting darker, the road is long and getting longer’ seems to me to apply. I cannot believe that the Zionists will conquer for ever but the game is not changing as yet.
Phil is still talking “tribe”. Over at J-Street, they call it a “tent”. It is: ghetto by choice.
Pessimism, may I speak to it?
Ms Harvey, you say “When the day comes that Israel realizes that it is standing against the whole world…”
Don’t many Israelis already take this for granted and even embrace the idea of standing tall no matter what others do or think? Isn’t this a part of the history of Judaism that kept it going through the years of persecution when there was literally no help to be had from any direction? Flight and relocation were common, but now we have visions of God and Masada and a last stand on sacred soil all swirling together with some pretty potent weaponry. Doesn’t every Palestinian know that Israel is holding Dirty Harry’s pistol just itching to say “make my day”? An American from NYC, just moved to a settlement, sees himself a hero standing upon the shoulders of 2500 years of history; pure madness in the individual.
Consider the paranoid individual convinced that all are against him and ready to lash out unpredictably because no action by another can be framed as anything other than a threat. There are drugs for such individuals but no drug for a country of them. 1940’s German and Japanese leadership felt justified until the bitter end when the whole world had long since been against them and they literally had hardly a bullet left with which to hold out; pure madness in the state.
The lesson is that paranoia/entitlement as a national trait only ends in catastrophe brought on by the trait in itself. This is happening with Israel, so far in slow motion.
The United States offers fawning support which only feeds the beast. The only thing that could end this fawning is revulsion in the U.S. at the cost to this country for supporting an irrational act by Israel that is clearly seen to be such. When carte blanche is given, some such act is inevitable. Would you say to a paranoid, “do what you think is best and I’ll back you up all the way”? Then he goes on to kill your sister. Your attitude is changed.
An attack on Iran by Israel is exactly the kind of insanity we should expect. Obama has not shown himself the kind of man to stand up absolutely for anything. I honestly can’t see him doing anything but piling into a war Israel starts.
The U.S. began as a daring assertion of the rights of the people. It appears to be ending that experiment with the triumph of lawlessness: it starts wars on its own, and will reach the nadir by handing the power to bring it to war over to another country with which it doesn’t even have a treaty.
Something will happen. Our attitude will change.