What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Who hasn’t heard U. S. officials characterize Palestinian Arabs as terrorists who seek to kill all Jews? I’ve been hearing it for decades from my government whether it was Democratic or Republican. It’s almost like a knee-jerk response. The Israeli Government, especially the current one, has referred to the Palestinians as blood thirsty, evil people hell bent on the destruction of the Jewish State.

Has anyone asked how this all got started?

When I was very young, I was dramatically introduced to the Arab/Israeli issue in June of 1967. It was The Six-Day War. Characterized by many national news organizations as a “David and Goliath” event. I became very interested in this scrappy little nation trying to make a life for themselves after all they had been through. The U. S. was helping. I was happy to be on the right side of the equation. My country was doing the right thing.

Then things got more complex: Civil Rights protests, the King and Kenedy brothers’ assassinations, Viet Nam, The Pentagon Papers, Watergate, Agnew’s and Nixon’s resignation and pardon, just to name a few. The gild was definitely off the Lilly. But there was always Israel, fending for itself against tall odds: the Olympic and Entebbe hostages, and the 1973 Yom Kippur War. To me it was nothing short of heroic. I was proud of them and my country as well. At least we were on the right side of history when so much more was cringe worthy.

Time passed. Cable television exploded on the scene. Gone was the national anthem at midnight and dead air till the wee hours of the morning. Free TV was a thing of the past and 24/7 broadcasting became customary and usual. Just when things were settling in along came the cell phone and internet. Bruce Springsteen recorded “57 Channels (and Nothin’ On)”. Had he only known that this was just the opening gambit. Ultimately the news (whatever that may be) was on all the time everywhere.

What began to show throw from the fire hose of information broadcast all day every day was another story showing Israel as a more malevolent actor. Palestinians weren’t being treated as equal partners. Their homes were routinely taken from them and razed to make room for Israeli settlers. There were areas they could not go. Checkpoints were ubiquitous and time consuming. Many were not allowed to vote. They had become second class citizens and there was little they could do about it. It was like African Americans in the early 20^th century. Palestinians were second class citizens in a country they had lived in for multiple generations. After all else failed and some took desperate actions, they were branded as terrorists.

In college, I took some courses on the Middle East and Islam. My professor was Palestinian. “The plight of the Palestinian people is but a blip on the history of the Middle East.” When the professor took the time to comment this is how he began. It was a complex issue he said. The Israelis were there in the first and second century AD but were banished from the area by the Romans after a brutal campaign that saw much bloodshed. The Arabs never left. Israelis began to return after World War I under the control of the British. After World War II the trickle turned into a flood of immigration. Who had the right to be there he asked rhetorically? For him it was hard to say. The one thing he did say was that Palestinian frustration had become, to some, an existential crisis. That caused some to take drastic measures to make a point of their perceived plight.

The more I read about it the more I saw similarities in other epochs in history.

What’s happening to the Palestinian people is very similar to what has happened to native populations in north and south America. There were bloody last gasp revolutions across both continents. In all cases foreign diseases decimated whole populations, at times this was deliberate. The military technology was far superior to that of most native populations so opposition, ultimately, was fruitless. What’s left are vestigial remains of once vibrant cultures.

The same could be said in China at the beginning of the 20^th century. The Boxer Rebellion was a response to a multinational effort to achieve hegemonic economic control over the northern part of the vast nation. The Boxers laid siege to the foreign legation compounds in Beijing for two months until a multi-national army, again with advanced military technology arrived and put and end to the whole affair. The carnage was legion. These nations remained in the country till the beginning of WWII.

Today, some Israelis have been doing to Palestinians what Romans did to their ancestors almost two thousand years ago and make note the Israelis military technology is overwhelmingly American. What’s garishly novel though is its all playing out under the bright lights of thousands of cameras and broadcast throughout the globe. What ever happened to avoiding even the appearance of impropriety? Are we so full of ourselves that there won’t be a reckoning for our actions?