| Friday, June 13, 2003 |
15:50 - Getting it into words
http://www.amcgltd.com/archives/002713.html#002713
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What with all the refocusing of the world's attention on Israel ever since 9/11-- distracted, it seems, only temporarily by Afghanistan and Iraq-- a lot of people are finding themselves trying to come up with the ideal words with which to express how they feel about Israel, whether on the "pro" side or otherwise.
For many years it's been terribly easy to ignore the macabre docu-drama of Israel & the Palestinians-- as the news reports still describe it, even the less biased ones, it's just lumped together into the rubber-glove hazmat zone of "The Middle East". They seem to be conspicuously avoiding even using the name of Israel. "A fresh wave of violence erupted today in the Middle East," says the top-of-the-hour news, as though you can never quite tell where these things are going to happen next-- whether tomorrow's bus explosion will occur in Cairo or next week's missile strike on terrorist leaders will take place in Kirkuk or next month's pizzeria bombing will happen in Yemen.
Such terminology, to me, smacks of the alarmingly common tendency among Westerners to just put it all on a shelf somewhere and forget about it. "It's all just one big mess," I hear over and over. "Both sides are totally obsessed with death and violence. We should just build a big wall around it and lob in a nuke. Kill 'em all-- Israelis and Palestinians alike." Don't get me wrong-- there was a time when I might have said the same thing. But to hear it now, it rocks me back on my heels. It's a deeply, deeply troubling thing for me to hear-- an almost wilfully vicious refusal to take sides, to declare one side "good" and the other side "evil". When the planes hit the towers that morning, it was a gore point in the cognitive streams of all the world, but particularly of Americans; some of us saw the images on TV of the Palestinians dancing giddily in the streets, and we said, "All right, all sympathy I had for them-- and it was considerable-- has now officially evaporated." And the hole they've been digging under the doghouse they're in with me has only gotten deeper since then.
But others took that opportunity to cynically recuse themselves from the whole argument. "It's all just a big intractable mess. They're all equally bad." As though by saying so, the speaker bought anonymity, and a low profile, and a ticket out of identification with the hated evil West. Don't identify with Americans or with Israel, see, and you'll get a pass when the next Islamic atrocity comes. Oh, sure, I know most people don't actually think in these terms. Not out loud, anyway. But I have to wonder: isn't that exactly what thought process got Auschwitz built? A refusal to call evil by its name, and a denial of the existence of moral poles, even in this world of catastrophe and atrocity and achievement and human kindness?
So a lot of us have been trying to decide how best to express which side of the issue we're on. Some, like Charles Johnson of LGF, prefer to chip away at the edifice of the Israeli/Palestinian moral landscape, piece by piece, until a rough-hewn but towering sculpture remains, the expression on its face ugly but unmistakable and unignorable. Others, however, have sought to create the perfect encapsulation of the situation in a few succinct paragraphs. Few have shown a more effective combination of effectiveness and succinctness as Lileks-- but that, of course, is his unique gift. Others have to go into more detail.
Like this guy: Scott of AMCGLTD.com.
I say these things to Americans in the hope they will understand. Understand that even today when Israelis say they're fighting for their existence they aren't kidding. Understand that the Palestinians are not the helpless victims they so often claim to be. Understand that it's not radical Jewish terrorists who blow themselves up in the name of Jaweh. Understand that someone saying they're not against Jews, they're against Zionists is like someone saying they're not against Americans, they're against the United States.
I say these things to Israelis in the hope they, too, will understand. Understand that we realize one culture in the Middle East helped found ours, while the other wants to destroy it. Understand that we know we only got a taste of what it's like to live in your shoes. Understand that because of this the most powerful country the world has ever seen is working with all its might to ensure your nightmares, now ours, remain nothing more than dark wisps left behind on children's pillows.
I say these things to Israel's enemies even though I know they will never understand. Never understand that by destroying two buildings they succeeded only in transforming an ambiguous friend into a staunch ally. Never understand that by singing the praises of human detonators they merely dig a deeper hole in which to bury their own culture. Never understand their religion is no longer a force to be reckoned with, ceased being one six centuries ago, and their traditions are what got them in this mess in the first place.
I say these things to everyone so they may all understand. I am just one man among an ocean of men, a sea of women, living in a country of our own making with our own blood and treasure. I look across half the world and find in a region as old as time itself only one small nation that looks like mine. Unique in that region, its government is of its people, by its people, and for its people, and I am willing to do whatever I can to ensure it does not perish from this earth. True, I am just one man, standing up for what I believe in.
But I do not stand alone.
"These things" to which he refers need to be read, particularly by those who seek to hide from the problem and avoid the risk of (gasp!) offending anybody by throwing up their hands and referring dismissively and cynically to carnage on schoolbuses or ice cream parlors, and calculated tactical strikes on key terror leaders and the bulldozing of their homes, as all part of some symmetrical cycle-of-violence somewhere out on the part of the map that says This Way Be Dragons-- as, simply, "violence in the Middle East".
It's more than that; I know it is. There's a time to take sides, and that time was several months ago at the latest. If taking the side that I'm choosing makes me a target for ridicule and bile, well, so be it-- my life is comfortable enough that I can stand a few slings and arrows. It'll be good for me. It'll remind me that on that September day, when those plumes of smoke told the TV audience that War Was Coming, I decided that I wasn't going to hide or run away from it or pretend it didn't concern me. I wasn't going to respond to the spectre of America revving up its war machine by looking for a way to weasel out of being involved. I decided at that point that, ideologically at the very least, I wanted to be a part of the war, because I believed-- suddenly, and very strongly-- in the side I was on.
There are those for whom the world has become a video game, or a long cynical TV drama, the kind that Makes You Think About Who The Good Guys Really Are. Such people are wont to find solace and validation in the juicily ironic image of a bloodstained American flag with swastikas instead of stars, because hey-- it's all insightful and stuff! It's got levels of meaning! It has to be truer than something as simplistic and stark as the plain old flag draped over Saddam's face. Only someone of this mindset can say "Hmm-- the Jews want us to remove The Protocols of the Elders of Zion from Indymedia; surely that means it's something worth reading! What are they trying to hide?" while being unable to name Israel's current prime minister.
But as boring and cliché as it's become, I like the good ol' real world. It's amazing how many things snap into focus as soon as one commits to a moral stand. Suddenly history and the future truck at once into frame like that famous shot in Vertigo. I find myself saying things like, This is my planet, dammit-- and I refuse to let its bright future, full of freedom and reason and democracy and innovation and miracle upon human miracle, be stolen from it without a fight.
I run the risk, of course, of sounding like some kind of apocalyptic doomsayer, or worse, a florid swords-and-sorcery fantasy novel. But that's only because these issues we face today, I think, are too big to ignore. They're every bit as big as the world-changing clashes that we normally have to escape into fantasy to find. But they're here and they're real. And if dorky-sounding words are the best contribution I can make toward their ultimate successful resolution, then let the dorkage begin.
And just after I posted this, I went art-approving, and came across a couple of well-thought-out sentiments like "Ugh. All the stupid humans are letting thousands of forests and animals die every day because they're all too into a stupid war that never should've happened that killed innocent people who deserved to live", and "I'm just so tired of human stupidity. Pretty son I'll be driven off the deep end, give myself animatronic ears and tail and a new digestive sysytem, and live with wolves." Yeah, great idea. Let's kill each other for supremacy in the pack and a greater share of the raw meat; that's a lot more evolved.
Ah, to be young again.
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