Our Crossroads

Opinion – January 23, 2006 I spoke with a man this morning, at the doctor’s office, while we both were killing time during the inevitable wait. With the CNN interviews of the lottery winning Con-Agra workers being aired in the background on the waiting lounge TV, I asked him a question that’s been plaguing me for some time. We had been just chitchatting about this or that, when I asked him flat out if he felt that our unwaivering support of Israel was leading us to problems. He was quiet for a moment – perhaps somewhat taken aback by my direct question. The pause had hit about thirty seconds and I thought I might not get an answer. But he gave me a direct one. “Yes. But we’ve always done that.” I was hit by what he said and wanted to continue the discussion to hear more about how he felt and what he thought. As I was about to speak I was called into the see the doctor, and the man was not in the waiting lounge when I got out.Growing up in the U.S., and not having any particular stake in Israel or the mid-east, I really didn’t know much about why the mid-east conflict existed. I knew that there was a conflict. I knew death was in the picture. I had a vague understanding that there had been “wars.” And I had always heard the Palestinians were terrorists. And that was about the sum of my knowledge. And I was pretty OK with that.Then came 9/11. We were living in San Diego at the time, and the kids were small – our daughter was only 8 and our son was only 5. Because of the time difference between New York and California, I was only just leaving for the office when it happened. As was the rest of the nation, we were stunned. The kids thought it was a TV program, not real, and much later when they understood that it was real they had many, many questions. I had few answers.I remember, after seeing the images of the striking planes and falling towers over and over maybe two hundred times, waiting for the analysis. You know, the part where talking heads come on the TV and talk substantively about what happened, why it happened, how it was that we had gotten to a position where we were so hated that such action against our civilian people could happen, and so on. The Analysis. I remember waiting for it for days. It never came. We should have been overwhelmed by it. And it just never came. Well, that was a turning point for me. Just before the following weekend, I went to the library. I checked out thee thick books on the middle-east conflict, one that was from an Israeli point of view, one from a Palestinian point of view, and one written by the US Army regarding Israel. I started, the weekend past, and by the time the weekend was through I had read all of them. I just couldn’t stop. I never really understood that Israel was created by a UN partition of Palestine in 1947. I never understood that this was land division that was opposed by the Palestinians themselves, who were the majority indigenous population there. I never understood that the Palestinians had offered to share their land with the newly emigrating Jewish population, under a one country democratic system and that the proposal was rejected and a UN partition imposed upon them. I had not known that the choice lands had gone over to not the Palestinian indigenous majority, but rather to the newly immigrated Jewish minority. I had not know that ever before Israel formally became a state in 1948, that it has begun armed incursions of villages on the Palestinian side of the line to start changing the boundries of the partition. I never really understood that the Palestinians had to leave their homes and orchards and properties to go live on “the other side.” I never knew that this so angered the Arab population in surrounding states that a nascent and easily quelled attack on Israel took place in 1948. I never knew that in 1967, Israel took over the rest of the Palestinian side of the partition line and “occupied it.” I never knew that during this occupation, which continues to this day, the Israeli’s had imposed education, travel, and occupation restrictions and curfews upon the Palestinians in the occupied territories. I had known that since then there has been a continuous and unbroken fight between the Palestinians and Israeli’s that has never ended since 1967. But I never knew the cause. And I never knew that 80 of our entire worldwide foreign aid budget went to Israel and that we, as a nation, have supported this brutality, resulting in so much violence and counter-violence, since then. I really never knew that the US give billions annually Israel in military and economic aide, and that our weapons and bulldozers were helping all that was taking place. Now I ask a simple question. Let’s say the UN told us that they had decided to give half of our land over to a recently immigrated Mexican population because they had historic ties to the US land. Let’s say that we politely declined but said that the Mexican immigrants were welcome here as citizens under democratic rule. Let’s say the UN rejected our proposal and simply imposed a partition. (Come on, this is a hypothetical, so just go along for a minute more.) And let’s say we were not the superpower that we are, hell, let’s say that we weren’t even a formal country -- just a people who had lived there for centuries and centuries. Now assume that after half of us were forced off the half being given over a discrete country to the immigrating Mexicans, a country where we were not even welcome to live. And let’s say that after the Mexicans received third party military aide for the next twenty or so years, they came in one day and took over our side of the partition line. Now assume that we had no standing army, and no real ability to get conventional weapons such as tanks and planes to build one. And let’s say that the Mexicans started even telling us on our side of the partition line when and where to work and go to school and how to travel and when. Let’s say they started building permanent settlements even though on paper they said they were only temporarily “occupying” your land. What would we do? Would we fight tooth and nail, every way we could? Wouldn’t some of us blow a fuse and start acting violently, even irrationally? Not excusable, but perhaps understandable?I am not pro-Palestinian nor am I anti-anybody. If I am anything, I am pro-peace and I am pro-America. Now, what is my point? It is simply this. We cannot keep supporting such a fundamental unjustness, at any and all cost to us, and look anyone straight in the eye and say that we are about freedom, justice and all that we say that we stand for. The right thing is for us, at a minimum, to enforce the partition and get Israel out of occupied Palestine. How? Any number of ways, including by reducing or terminating our military and financial support of Israel until the occupation ends and our financial support of Palestine until all state sponsored violence ceases. The question is not what the right thing to do is in ending this deadly conflict, which keeps sucking us deeper and deeper as a nation when we have plenty of our own business to take of right here at home, but whether or not we still have the guts, moral sense, or self-interest to do it. Sandy SethHouston, Texas

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