Comments on Building Peace: Antisemitism and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

It's easy to talk about "sitting in a law...

2009-07-19T21:48:07.440+03:00

It's easy to talk about "sitting in a lawn chair next to a Jewish Israeli" when you have comfortable life in which you have never experienced the day to day suffering and humiliation that characterizes the current lifestyle of the occupied peoples of Palestine. Your family has not been uprooted from their home and land...your people haven't had to stand by and watch the slaughter of 600 of their own innocent women and children in the recent Israeli offensive into Gaza. I do not think anti-Semitism is warranted; rather I think there is a characteristic difference between the inner struggle with resentment and hatred each person involved in a conflict must face and overcome, and the rampant anti-Semitism that history has been fraught with. Palestinian people are struggling with feelings that characterize an oppressed people and are searching for a narrative to explain their suffering and stake their hopes for a better future. Their feelings must be viewed as distinct from, or should we say more complex, than mere anti-Semitism; in this case, the Palestinians are oppressed and have experienced violence to their souls, and at times their physical bodies. Your role as a resolver of conflict is to help them overcome their limit situations (in the spirit of Freire), embrace the other (in the spirit of Miroslav Volf), and create solutions. In doing so, you must acknowledge the ongoing violence against their people and the inevitable human feelings that will accompany this. From there, you can help them to overcome. But labeling it as "anti-Semitism" oversimplifies the feelings they are experiencing both to them as well as to observers who can potentially help change the circumstances (i.e. continued U.S. funding of blank checks to Israel) that perpetuate the conflict.

I could probably benefit from cultivating more sym...

2009-07-18T23:23:22.392+03:00

I could probably benefit from cultivating more sympathy toward the Palestinian people and their perspectives. I must say, though, that I don't exactly see the Palestinians as one of the two main sides in the "Arab-Israeli" conflict. While Palestinians are certainly Arab, they are used as pawns by more powerful Arab nations to foment hatred and violence toward Israel. At the same time, these powerful Arab nations hardly lift a finger to combat poverty in the "occupied territories." There is a reason why no one ever talks about the state of the Palestinians between 1948 and 1967: Gaza was under Egyptian control then, and the West Bank under Jordanian control, yet the situation of the people was little better than today. I am not trying to advance the sort of conspiracy theory for which the region is so famous, but I am tempted to believe that powerful Arab forces actually wish to perpetuate the misery of the Palestinians - it gives them their most potent public-relations weapon. If a Palestinian state is established, that will limit the pretext for wiping Israel off the map. Did not Netanyahu basically offer an Israel with 1967 boundaries to Arafat in 1998, only to have Arafat walk away from the negotiating table? I believe in the necessity of a Palestinian state, but I don't believe that the core issue for many Arabs is the existence of Israel itself.

I think it's great the energy you're putti...

2009-07-18T21:17:38.174+03:00

I think it's great the energy you're putting into that region and I agree, from my limited perspective, it appears to be a long road. While reading your post I couldn't help thinking about the divides in our own country and our own lack of education and the mainstreaming of propaganda. I remember our election six short months ago and the not insignificant number of educated Air Force officers who sincerely told me they thought Senator Obama was a Muslim. Certainly these are two completely different issues but the common threads of ignorance and hatred in our own country concern me greatly. For what it's worth.