Israel is a country where a fatal traffic accident makes it to the front page of national news. Which also makes it a nation where extended war is not an option unless, of course, you choose to forget. It's a country that has made its unofficial capital of Tel Aviv a world-class city, a thrilling 24/7 metropolis with great food, nightlife and not an ounce of discussion about the politics that stew around it. It's a country where a mass of its Jewish citizens were born to parents or grandparents whose native language was Arabic, exist in a region where Arabic is the dominant language, and yet, for some painfully ignorant reason, refuse to make Arabic as much as Hebrew a required part of literacy.
Israel is a country that has been brilliant at something that characterizes the bulk of us in the modern world, whether we love Israel, despise it, or have few thoughts about it. Namely our sophisticated talents in denial. So far as Israeli gifts in this area, if they were to live just a bit more with eyes wide open, necessity might mother a hell of a lot more constructive invention in how they make themselves part of their neighborhood.
But then that's way too easy for me to say. I don't share their neighbors, who whether diplomats or academics, are even more gifted than us Jews in the sublime art of willful ignorance. And so in Lebanon you get scholars and pundits and Arab visitors who, whether secretly terrified or awed by Hezbollah, have spent the last 15 years praising folks whose supply of weaponry, refusal to follow local laws, and violent rhetoric is only surpassed by a fundamentalist mythos that is most fundamental in its antagonism to what might make that beautiful country genuinely thrive as the jewel of the Mediterranean.
Equally gifted at denial are their “brothers” in Palestine, the so-called Palestinian street feeding on the gleeful encouragement of their non-Palestinian "supporters" (in Europe and America as much as anywhere) who push them towards "justice," inspiring them never to "give up," defeat never viewed in terms of sinking into violence but framed as ever forgetting some mythic past they never personally lived in an equally mythic Palestine.
Where victory means swimming in their "catastrophe." Where the cause is served up as being unprecedented not just in this century, but through all modern history. Half a century after becoming refugees during a war, such supporters yield a Palestinian population that continue to live as refugees, emotionally anchored to war. All because of Israel. All because the Jewish State refuses to let them return to orange groves that are no more. And in actuality, may never have existed for the bulk of them. But if only history is turned. If only.
Such deeply enunciated but reed-thin logic richly serves the touristic politics and righteousness of such supporters but acts as miserly gruel for the day to day lives (not to mention, the long-term survival) of the Palestinians, namely the belief that somehow, without murderous amounts of violence, history can be turned back and the Jewish state will be no more.
The other day a friend shared a breathless chain email sent around by some breathless left wing organization. It suggested this recent violence had Israeli roots, the goal to destroy Beirut. Why? Because of Israeli economic terror of Lebanon's more vibrant tourist industry. In other words, Israel wanted a monopoly on visitor count, so had ignited this whole thing. Had it not been on my computer, I'd have literally burned that god damn e-mail, then said a prayer that such mold-ridden idiocy die quickly within the confines of the shit-for-brains from where it was hatched. But in truth, the e-mail’s obscenely stupid logic was only ounces frothier with murk than the paper from American academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt that suggested America’s last 30 years of foreign policy was dictated by the whims of Israel.
The weekend after these expert's 12,000-plus word repetitious and sloppily argued paper showed up in the London Review of Books, Palestinian diplomats were seen in Washington eagerly handing out copies, indulging the warped belief that perhaps this Harvard University branded truth had arrived to finally set them free. As if!
And yet there's another warped aspect to this all. Because for over 50 years, Israelis were fed their own similarly noxious Kool-Aid, tasty poison that emanated from their "supporters." Where Mearsheimer and Walt lamely obsess about the impact of the so-called American Jewish establishment on U.S. foreign policy, they would have found genuine evidence of that same Jewish "establishment's" psychic manipulation of Israel.
Serving as the summer camp for subliminal grief and terror never thoroughly processed among post-Holocaust American Jews, Israel has been acting as shadow warriors to allay our own existential fears that are confusingly difficult to articulate and seem impossible to live with. And so, like those studious and brave Lebanese voices who spent years proudly boasting (whether to British academia, NPR, or among themselves) of Hezbollah's role as "resistance," our "leaders" spent years and money with rhetoric of our own to nurture our own fundamentalist mythos.
A narrative that would yield a state who believed it could be a second America. Surviving by turning the pain of confronting extermination of us as a people into a state whose principle claim to world fame is military. Surviving by ignoring the complex tapestry of cultures that composes the actual sociological weave of the "Jewish state." Surviving by growing overly reliant on air power, whether for military superiority or for their youth who, seeking somewhere to find respite from real and psychic violence of serving their young adult lives as soldiers in a front line state, try to escape their Israeliness by extended trips to India or Thailand.
Today, Israel's high tech economic sector may be booming, but its poverty rate is 28 percent. Today the Jewish State has its own Nazi skinheads desecrating Jewish graves, and guess what. They aren't Arabs. They're part of the population Israel welcomed to take the place of the Palestinian laborers Israel wanted no part of. More substantial in viciousness are bands of West Bank Jewish extremists, who while small in number are conveniently ignored by many of those who profess to love the Jewish state, and whose skin heads are covered by yarmulkes, praying in between terrorizing Palestinian farmers.
Today Haifa, which was once Israel's most beautiful city, is under bombardment. Today Lebanon has a physical infrastructure that is crumbling to Israeli bombs, and yet the much greater danger is the potential implosion of its social infrastructure, a rinky-dink composition held together by denying the cancers in its midst. Today the Palestinians in Gaza have absolutely no sustainable economy. But that's okay, because they're... just. And as proof of such "justness," they have lots and lots and lots of martyrs to sustain martyrdom for perpetuity... and beyond. Today the Iranians of all strata have a theocratic ruling structure around whom they can rally on only one point, that a country whose economy is based on oil riches doesn't simply need nuclear energy but "needs" nuclear arms, and before they get them, it's not just fine but righteous to aggressively light endless brush fires in foreign areas already desperate for rain. And for those of us outside the region, well, we have actors on either side for whom we can root. Ho, ho, ho, horray.
If there is a God, then God is either murderous or murderously sorry for what we do. Or don't.
Jonathan Field
July 21, 2006
Comments