Back in 2000, fresh from my first ever trip to Cuba and desperate to reconnect with the happiness and wonder I found there, I took a salsa class. We were required to switch partners every so often and at one point I found myself dancing with a cute and chatty Mexican-Canadian.
And where was I from, he asked.
“I’m Palestinian” I ventured. You never know what kind of reaction you’re going to get with that, but he seemed like a nice guy, and warm, intelligent eyes. They coaxed an unsettling truth about me that’s the conversational equivalent of a screeching needle stabbing a party anthem to a halt.
To his credit, his response was quick, uncensored, and completely truthful. “It’s very tiring to keep hearing about the Middle East for all these years.”
I couldn’t agree more. It’s tiring. And emotionally draining, and just when your system adapts to the background noise of pain and misery and wretchedness, along comes a (literally) violent jolt that blows to smithereens all your efforts to box the conflict into a manageable spot at the back of your brain, next to humiliating memories from your teenage years and screw-ups from assorted first days on the job.
345 dead (and counting), 1400 thousand injured, and just in time for Christmas in Puerto Rico with mom, dad, and lil’sis.
Last time it was August 2006, smack-dab in the middle of a wonderful Euro-trip to catch up with Spanish cousins and a dear friend who’d married and moved to London. The score: 3000 dead Lebanese, countless injured, and I don’t know how many botched summer vacations and stranded relatives.
Sometimes I wish Israel would pick a less festive season, say, February, to put its war stratagems to the test, but then I wonder if this might not be the whole point all along.
It isn’t fair. I’m entitled to planning a vacation without worrying that I may be jinxing a few hundred Arabs into suffering an Israeli attack. You, dear readers, are also entitled to the upbeat posts, author profiles, and Cuba photos you came here for.
But here’s the rub. Caring is the price of decency. I care, therefore I deserve to exist, if you will.
What about Hamas’s rockets? What about the Israeli dead? (four, as of Tuesday morning) What about Hamas’s commitment to the destruction of Israel???
I get it. There’s only so much caring to go around in this world, and why should you waste any of it on these dusty, dirt-covered (when they’re not hiding behind unbecoming veils, that is), misogynistic Arabs?
Because usually, when we see a large amount of dead/injured people on one side of a conflict and hardly any dead/injured (in this case… one) on the other side, our gut instinct is to see the situation as lopsided and to connect the side with the high deaths/injuries with our sympathy.
But this is not happening here because we’ve been preconditioned to see the masses of Arabs not as individuals, but as hate-mongering machines, bent on the destruction of Israel. But saying that Palestinians - who democratically elected Hamas, a political party with a military wing, to negotiate on their behalf and are being punished for it - are committed to Israel’s destruction is like saying that white red state Republicans are committed to bringing back slavery.
“But Hamas don’t want peace! Retaliation is Israel’s only choice!”
If all you read are American newspapers, then you can’t be blamed for thinking so. The New York Times’s opinion makers, the Friedmans, Krugmans, Cohens and Dowds are silent today, and the lone “opinion” piece on the subject has this for a headline “Israel Reminds Foes it Has Teeth“.
Ridiculous and utterly heartless headline aside, (I’m pretty sure that Palestinians, who have been dying on a fairly regular basis over the last 60 years are aware of Israel’s ‘teeth’), the content was interesting: the jist is that Israel, after suffering unanticipated PR disaster and military mishaps at the hands of a well-organized, moderately armed Hezballah, has decided to pick a weaker target in order to prove it’s still running the ‘hood.
It’s like a schoolyard bully getting an unexpected kick in the shins from the scrawny kid and then turning around and smacking the malnourished one from the poor family to make himself feel better.
I know you’re tired. So am I. I’m especially tired of the cynicism. I cheered along with everyone else when Barack H. Obama was elected and turned down my cyn-o-meter to low, not wanting to become like my parents, completely dissociated from western politics because they’d been bitten one too many times with promises of change and the reality of business as usual. But here we are, on the verge of another year, another president, and yet everything remains the same for Palestinians.
I didn’t want to write this post. I want to go back to making fun of ex-hedge fund managers who are losing their third and fourth homes and who have to fly first class for the first time in years because they can’t afford the Learjet anymore. I want to get back to my book, and my travel articles, and I would have loved to spend that last day in Puerto Rico laughing carelessly with my mom and dad instead of huddling in front of the TV, watching Ehud Barak talk about changing the “rules of the game” as the running headlines at the bottom of the screen reported mounting casualties.
My sister has been singing the praises of that Oprah wunderhit, The Power of Now, over the weekend, so when I saw it at the airport yesterday, I flipped through the opening pages. There was something in there about people in the olden days not being ready for spiritual enlightenment. That Jesus, Buddha and Mohammad only had pieces of truths to offer but it wasn’t time yet to accept the full truth and to accept the burdens of enlightenment and true spirituality. The author then wonders if we’re any readier for enlightenment today than those people were back then.
I don’t know. What I do know though, is that “I’m tired” can’t be an excuse not to care, or to try and find out about why these things are happening. It’s never been easier to get information (maybe too much information, but at least it’s there).
I promise to get back to fun posts tomorrow, but until then, here’s hoping you’ll take some time to read up on this so you can put into perspective the events that will shape the political discourse to come over the next months, possibly years.
Links:
Greg Mitchell on the US Media’s complicity even as Israeli Media questions the attacks on Gaza (Huffington Post)
The True Story Behind this War(Johann Hari, the London Independent)
Robert Fisk (award-winning Middle East correspondent for the London Independent)
“Trying to ‘teach Hamas a lesson’ is Fundamentally Wrong” - Tom Segev, Ha’aretz (an Israeli Daily newspaper)
Israeli Strikes on Gaza: What are the Motives? (The Guardian)
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