Mainstream piece lays settler teen abduction at feet of ‘illegal’ and ‘indefensible’ occupation

Max Fisher, formerly of the Washington Post and the Atlantic, doesn’t use the word apartheid in this piece about the West Bank for his new shop, Vox, a startup led by Ezra Klein; but he doesn’t use the words “two-state solution” either. He says bluntly that the occupation is the source of unending oppression, and it produced the abduction of the settler teens that took place on Thursday.

what of the national Israeli policies that created the occupation — this most damaging aspect of the conflict — and then inserted three teenagers onto its front lines?

The headline and deck are great:  

“The end of ‘both sides’ 

“Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is indefensible”

You can say that’s old news, but it’s good that this intelligence is entering the inner courts of the establishment. The piece itself is distinguished by its sensitivity to the Palestinian point of view; Fisher even reckons that there is no logical response to unending occupation but violence. Here he goes, walking in the shoes of the Palestinians:

But to many Palestinians the scale of the reaction [to the teen abduction], and its severe impact on thousands of civilians, looks an awful lot like collective punishment, the practice of punishing an entire population for the crimes a few individuals, which is barred by the Geneva Conventions that regulate international conflict. Many of the 100,000 Palestinians who commute to jobs in Israel have been prevented from crossing the border to get to work, much less see family on the other side of the line, and in Gaza most gas stations have had to shut down for lack of fuel imports…

Here he tiptoes up to the line of acceptable speech on oppression breeding violence:

And while it would be wrong to blame the Israeli victims for their own kidnappings, one would still think that Israelis might want to question the role of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. As children, the kidnap victims surely cannot and should not be held personally culpable, but they could be considered an extension of the occupation, which has been far from a peaceful endeavor. And what of the national Israeli policies that created the occupation — this most damaging aspect of the conflict — and then inserted three teenagers onto its front lines?

He is careful to speak of a cycle of violence and both sides being to blame. He’d lose his license if he didn’t. But he knows who is primarily to blame.

There has always been, and there remains, plenty of culpability to go around in this conflict, plenty of individuals and groups that squandered peace and perpetuated suffering many times over. Everyone is complicit and no one is pure. The crisis over the kidnapped students shows all this. But it is also highlights what has become perhaps the most essential truth of the Israel-Palestine conflict: for all the complexity of how it came to be and why it’s continued, for all the shared responsibility for this week’s crisis and everything that led up to it, the conflict predominantly matters for the human suffering it causes. And today the vast majority of that suffering comes from Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories.

Today, the suffering has become so disproportionately administered by the occupation and so disproportionately felt by Palestinians that, in a conflict famous for its complexity and its gray areas, this is an issue that looks less gray all the time: the occupation is wrong, it is the problem, and Israel is responsible…

And he doesn’t let up.

But while it’s accurate to say that “both sides” participate in this awful cycle, that “both sides” indulge their worst habits in ways that perpetuate the conflict, there is an essential truth that is not about “both sides”: it is utterly disproportionate. Only the Palestinians are under military occupation. While the conflict hurts everyone here, any one Palestinian is far more likely to be hurt than any one Israeli, and is apt to be hurt more deeply.

More evidence that the discourse is shifting. Soon politicians will be able to say this.