Israeli Disregard of Palestinian Lives (Book Notes: Scars of War)
In Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy, Shlomo Ben-Ami writes:
[I]n the early years the founding fathers of the Zionist movement tended to be blind to the native Arab population and scornful of its physical environment, the land the Jews had come to possess. To Israel Zangwill, Palestine was ‘a land without a people for a people without a land’, a ‘virgin country’, as Moshe Smilansky put it.
David Ben-Gurion described Palestine on the eve of the Zionist colonisation as ‘primitive, neglected and derelict’. A member of a later generation, Abba Eban, echoed the descriptions of the founding fathers when he wrote, in terms that were reminiscent of Mark Twain’s contemptuous impressions of the Holy Land in 1867 (The Innocents Abroad), about a ‘squalid, unpromising, almost repellent land’.
Shlomo Ben-Ami is no antisemitic, anti-Israeli demagogue. He’s a former Israeli foreign minister who is unabashedly pro-Israel and pro-Zionist. Being a Zionist shouldn’t mean that a person is blind to the faults and flaws in both the movement and those who are members of it, though. Here, Ben-Ami points out a very serious flaw which appears to have existed for a long time: treating the Arabs who live in the region as not truly belonging there, as not having any interest in remaining, and as not leading lives which need to be respected.
There are parallels, I think, with how European colonists viewed the American continent when they arrived: a land open and free, no one around to claim possession of the region, and sorely under-utilized by the few primitives who were stumbled across. With such attitudes, it’s little wonder that the Arabs viewed Zionism as little more than a form of European colonization. What else would you call it when people decide to settle in a “virgin country” that is “without a people” and which can be made to thrive with hard work from refugees?
It seems to me that there won’t really be peace between Israelis and Palestinians until both can see the other as fully human and, moreover, as deserving the same respect, dignity, and consideration as is expected for oneself. Persisting in seeing the other as unworthy or inferior — something which many Palestinians do to Israelis as well — is a sure way to prevent any accommodation, compromise, or settlement which everyone can at least try to live with.
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Comments
But did these Zionists ever refer to Palestinian people themselves in a disparaging manner? It seems to me that referring to a land as desolate or neglected is not necessarily the same thing.
Of course we Americans do this ourselves. It is fairly easy to get stats on American lives lost in Iraq, but not necessarily of Iraqis. In fact, the entire debate about Iraq seems to be whether the invasion was justified in view of the American casualties, not so much whether it is justified in terms of the number of Iraqi lives lost. It didn’t require a religion for us to exhibit this attitude, just plain ethnocentrism–or, given our culture of individualism, a sort of unthinking egocentrism. On the other hand, there is no question that religious differences are at the heart of the difficulties in Palestine. The situation is such that even if Zionists/Jews had been angels, these difficulties would exist.
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Sure, if you define “unabashedly pro-Israel and pro-Zionist ” as being to the right of Noam Chomsky or his lapdog Norman Finkelstein.
The problem, and it’s so very fundamental—is that, in the Orwellian Bizarro-world in which all discussion of Israel takes place, “Even-handed” tends to mean, showing some balance between Hard-Left and somewhat more moderate Left. “Pro-Israel, pro-Zionist” means anyone who ever says anything about Israel which is either neutral or mildly positive.
Ben-ami—and leftists—may indeed think if himself as strongly supportive of Israel—but his views are consistently grey; he seems to be one of those Jews who cannot conceive of anything Israel does as not being IMMORAL, simply because it is not PERFECTLY moral. Other nations, it goes without saying, are never required to meet such absurd standards.
“[Ben-Ami]’s as critical of David Ben-Gurion (for his paranoid and messianic vision of territorial conquest) as he is of Yassir Arafat (for his self-serving political maneuvers and tactical blunders…”
So Ben-ami is equally critical of Ben-Gurion, a democratic leader who was militarily victorious and possibly overzealous—and Arafat, basically the Founding Father of modern terrorism, directly responsible for the murders of countless civilians over several decades. Well, that’s surely an unabashedly pro-Israel point of view! Like equating Nixon with Bin Laden. What a patriot!
If you are going to suggest that Ben-Ami is not pro-Israel, at least have the decency to provide some support rather than a series of vague innuendos and meaningless posturing.