Israel Versus Palestine: Part… Who Could Count
Seeing as I am an American, my opinion on maters concerning Israel and Palestine are obviously limited and informed by my personal experiences in the United States, and my concerns with the crisis that is unfolding tends to focus on aspects of American involvement (and the avoidance thereof). Though, as a citizen of a nation that is definitely recognized by the international community as a legitimate country (if not one of the premier legitimate countries), I feel pretty secure in the first point I want to make regarding Israeli and Palestinian sovereignty. While the Israelis claim that Palestine isn’t a real country and Palestinians claim that Israel is a made up country, they’re both internationally recognized by the United Nations as sovereign states, and they were BOTH made up and given to the people who live there by the United Nations, more or less out of pity. So I don’t think either side has any ground to be making arguments about the sovereignty of the other.
I’ll get my most unpopular opinion out of the way early: my view on these two countries is that it’s in the best interest for the people who live there and the international community for neither of them to exist. Clearly the one-state solution isn’t working, neither side can agree to terms for a two-state solution, so that leaves a zero-state solution. The U.N. should draw new borders that divvy up the land between Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, then give the people who lived in Egypt and Palestine the option to become citizens of one of those surrounding nations or to take a free plane ticket and U-haul gift card and find somewhere else. I’m sort of joking. Sort of.
Specifically, to hell with Zionism (and whatever the Palestinian equivalent would be, though I don’t really think there is much of a Palestinian equivalent): just because your group of people has historically been persecuted doesn’t mean that you have a God-given right to control a city that has equal significance to multiple other major world religions. To Israel and the Jews specifically, news flash: there have been plenty of persecuted people groups throughout history, and while Hitler’s “final solution” was certainly among the most egregious genocides, that doesn’t give Jews de facto entitlement to Jerusalem. And not to go too far down the rabbit hole of who the Third Reich hated most, but while the Jews were the largest group persecuted by the Nazis, only about half of the people killed in concentration camps were Jewish, roughly six million. Of the eleven million people killed, the other five million was composed of political enemies, people with disabilities, homosexuals, gypsies, and others. Those groups aren’t clamoring for free countries, in fact, their stories are all too often forgotten. The point is, I don’t think anyone has a right to that land, whether based on some alleged ancestral claims, “divine right,” or as a consolation prize for various atrocities suffered by your people throughout history.
Also with regards to Zionism and the basic idea behind it, my general belief is that adhering strongly to labels and organizing your life around one aspect of your identity is just going to make it easier for people to stereotype and persecute you in the future, and that it also leads to groupthink and exclusivity issues. There’s a difference between people making conscious decisions to preserve their culture and choosing to separate themselves from everyone else, whether geographically or metaphorically. Whether you’re saying “all the jews should live in the same place,” “all the gays should wear rainbow colors (or pink triangles),” or “all the black people should ride in the same train car ‘separately but equally,’” separating yourself from the rest of the world is a recipe for disaster, whether it’s enforced by some institution or voluntary on the part of those being labeled. Forcing people into boxes based on their identities just doesn’t work out well.
Speaking of forcing people into boxes, let’s talk more specifically about what’s going on in Palestine and Israel right now. I won’t pretend to be an expert on the sufferings of the Palestinian people, but I think it’s safe to say that they don’t exactly enjoy the benefits of a functioning government that treats them as first class citizens. My understanding is that Hamas, which is undoubtedly a hostile terrorist organization, saw an opportunity in the mid-late 2000s to take control of the Gaza Strip and seized it. Since then, the Palestinian people have been living in a small, densely populated area that they aren’t allowed to leave (literally stuffed into a box), which is severely and intentionally underfunded and neglected by Israel, thanks to the racist, nationalist policies of Benjamin Netanyahoo, who doesn’t want them to have their own country nor be a part of his country.
Some point out that it’s not fair to blame all of Israel for the policies of one corrupt leader, but I would posit that it is certainly fair to note that a majority of the Israeli electorate continue to support Netanyahoo, and therefore must take some responsibility for the actions he takes.
We can’t ignore the large role of Hamas, though. It’s obviously not okay for them to be provoking Israel, even if they know most of their attempts will fail, because the attempts that don’t fail are going to result in rockets falling on civilians who may not have been responsible for Natenyahoo’s rise to power, or upon children who had no say at all. And Hamas also doesn’t have very much to lose: they don’t give a shit about the Palestinians who will die as a result of the Israeli response to their attacks. They’re well insulated by civilians who have nothing to do with Hamas, and they do use them as human shields. Unfortunately for Israel and Netanyahoo, human shields work, and you look like an asshole when you decide to murder a bunch of children because there might be one or two baddies hiding in a basement under their school. When you’re a real country, you have to do better than that. Israel is choosing not to.
So while both sides seem eager to escalate and keep firing shots at one another, it’s worth pointing out that Hamas is pouring red gas cans full of fuel on the fire while Israel is spraying it from a tanker truck. We also can’t forget that the Palestinian citizens don’t even have water balloons filled with gas, they’re almost entirely devoid of agency. You could argue that the Israeli people also don’t get any gasoline-filled water balloons, but they did get to choose who would drive their tanker truck, and they picked a nationalist, racist asshole, so, you know, cool. Still, it’s very difficult to overstate the power imbalance between a nation whose defense budget has been propped up by the American taxpayers for decades (we’re currently giving Israel three billion dollars PER YEAR) and a rag tag terrorist group in a tiny patch of land inhabited by a bunch of civilians who didn’t have a say about who’s in charge. Imagine a fight between Conor McGregor and Madison Cawthorne: Cawthorne is gonna talk mad shit but you know he’s getting his ass whooped easily. It’s not a fair fight. McGregor = Israel, Cawthorne = Palestine. Ha.
So, Israel is starting to look a lot like a fucking bully. Sure, the terrorists who happen to be in Palestine shot a shit ton of bush league missiles at you. How dare they. BUT, the Iron Dome missile defense system (which was paid for mostly by the American taxpayers) does a pretty damn good job of swatting all those missiles away like annoying flies. Sure, every now and again one will get through. That’s about the extent of what you’re allowed to respond to in retaliatory “defense of yourself” and still have your actions be considered proportional by the worldwide community. And if your response isn’t seen as proportional, then the conversation moves to whether you’re committing war crimes, and I don’t think that’s a conversation that a perpetual victim-state wants to be having. But it seems like maybe they do want to have it, because not only are they aggressively trying to take out “Hamas operatives,” they’re using that as an excuse to indiscriminately mow down Palestinian children, apartments, and buildings that house reporters from the Associated Press and Middle Eastern news networks. Donald Trump talked about the press being an enemy of the people, and Netanyahoo clearly drank that Kool-Aid, seeing as he’s now shooting fucking missiles at reporters. Oh yeah, in the name of “both sides,” it’s worth pointing out that the United States did not buy Palestine an Iron Dome.
I started with a pretty American approach to this, so I’ll conclude with my more un-American thoughts:
Even if we don’t have soldiers on the ground (and under no circumstances should we), we contribute to this problem by giving Israel a shit ton of money every year for defense and that needs to be cut off immediately. The American taxpayers don’t want to pay for our own unending wars, much less someone else’s.
History has shown us over and over again that the more time America spends in the sandbox, the worse things get for everyone involved. It’s not America’s job to police the globe, and it would take a massive amount of hubris (lookin’ at you, Kushner) on our part to think we’re going to solve this problem. This is not our business, not our problem, not our prerogative, not our fight. Again, we need to get the hell out of the Middle East and stay out.
Israel is just about as much of a terrorist organization these days as Hamas, what with the whole blowing-up-journalists-and-children thing. Plus apartheid, that’s not ideal. I see no real reason for our alliance with Israel at this point. If they want to act like savages, we don’t need to be friends.
Zionism is stupid, regressive, and unsustainable.
Either the U.N. can step in with a zero-state solution, or there will be no real solution at all and we can just get used to hearing Israel/Palestine drama for the rest of our lives.