Tuesday, August 06, 2002

Yoda: Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.   My brother has lived in Israel since the early 1970’s.  He is an orthodox rabbi, who has lived most of his life in settlements on the West bank.  Recently he moved back to Jerusalem.  Tonight I had dinner with two of my nephews, including one who had never been to the U.S. before.   Naturally, we talked about the war in Israel.  Avraham was at the site of a suicide bombing in Jerusalem in December, but was physically unhurt.  He is 18.  He wants to stay in the U.S. for a while, perhaps permanently.    He says that nothing is normal in Israel.  There are bombs everywhere.  All the buses, cafes, every place is unsafe.  He says that being away, he can see Israel is a war zone.  When he is in the middle of it, it just feels like a terrible, normal life.  Bombings happen.  The families of those killed suffer their grief, while the rest of the people go on.   Several things struck me about our conversation.  First, was the lack of hope for something better.  Neither brother knew what would happen in the next few years, but both agreed that the situation today was not tolerable, and could not continue.  Yet no one could see beyond a military solution—the answer seemed to be simply more force.   Secondly, both brothers had a complete distrust of Arabs.  Their characterization of the whole Arab population as terrorist, with no one you can trust, seems to me a root issue in the war.  Avraham said that there was an Arab who worked at his neighborhood store who was very skinny.  Everyone knew him.  One day he came to work looking much heavier, as if he had grown fat and stocky.  They knew he was a bomber, and someone whipped out a gun and shot him in the head.  Sure enough, they did find a bomb.  I asked what would make someone do something like this.  No one had an answer, except in the most stereotyped fashion—Islam promises heaven and paradise after you die, so no one is afraid to die.   I said I thought most Arabs just wanted to live a normal life, with a job, a family, a home—but this is not believed in Israel today.   But what bothered my nephew, even more than the war around him, was the fact that he felt stereotyped, or “boxed” in Israel.  When someone meets you on the street, they immediately judge if you are religious or not—and if you are, whether you are religious enough.  Are you dressed correctly?  Or they make some other judgment about you.  Are you an American settler?  There are lots of them.  Are you avoiding the army?  In the U.S, where he has been working for the past several months, he feels free.  People don’t judge him on sight.  He can be himself.   To me it is ironic that the very stereotyping he is trying to escape is what is being done, on a larger scale, to the Palestinians.   Avraham said that when he was younger, before the first Intafada, the Arab children were afraid of the Jews.  Then everything was safer.  Now, he says, they have lost that fear—first with rocks, and now with guns.   The Jews and Palestinians are locked together in an impossible struggle, where neither side can see the humanity of the other.  Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering, as Yoda said in Star Wars.  In this situation, only outside intervention can change this dynamic.   If there was justification for intervention in Rwanda, in Kosovo and Bosnia, in East Timor, there is justification for intervention in Israel and Palestine.  America has to impose a peace plan, because it will not happen any other way. 10:40:27 PM   comment []

© Copyright 2002 Toby Sackton. Last update: 12/26/2002; 9:29:41 PM.