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A lament for 'them and us'
Many Canadian Jews expressing solidarity with Israel have forgotten
the lessons of Scripture, says physician GABOR MATÉ
GABOR MATÉ, The Globe and Mail, Wednesday, November 1, 2000
A delegation of 100 Canadian Jewish leaders arrived in Jerusalem this
week, bearing a "message of solidarity with Israel." Among other
activities, they are to visit with families of Israeli soldiers
captured or killed during recent hostilities with Palestinians.
This "solidarity visit" is yet another of the regrettably one-sided
tribal "them and us" responses that have characterized attitudes
around the current Jewish-Palestinian conflict. The delegates have
announced no plans to meet any of the Arab families whose children
have been killed or maimed or jailed. Yet the ratio of dead and
wounded and "captured" runs highly against Palestinians inside Israel
proper and on the West Bank and in Gaza, as may be expected when one
of the world's best-equipped military forces faces an army of
stone-throwers.
I am reminded of being in synagogue some years ago on Yom Kippur --
the holiest of Jewish Holy Days, when we are enjoined to examine our
conscience, to take stock of how we may have hurt others and betrayed
our own true selves. During services, a speaker denounced "Arab tree
terrorism." He was referring to acts of arson by Palestinians in the
Canada Forest, stands of trees planted near Jerusalem through Canadian
donations.
I listened in anguished silence. I knew that the "Canada Forest" had
been established at the site of Palestinian villages levelled to the
earth, their inhabitants expelled. I had just visited the occupied
territories and had seen Palestinian olive groves bulldozed into the
ground as acts of collective punishment by the Israeli army, the
labour of generations turned into desert overnight. Whose tree
terrorism?
The Canadian Jewish leaders may wish to pay a visit to the West Bank
village of Kifl Hares, where at least 200 olive trees were cut down by
the army only last week.
Blinded by their own suffering, human beings have great resistance to
seeing the agony of others. Given the horrors endured by Jews within
living memory, it is understandable why the Zionist dream has been
such a balm for wounded souls -- a nation rising from the ashes of the
Nazi genocide, re-established in the ancient Jewish homeland. The
problem, which many still have difficulty facing, is that this dream
could never have been realized without visiting a nightmare on the
Palestinians.
A Jewish state could be created in Palestine only by denying the
rights and national existence of the Arab people who already inhabited
the land and who could not be displaced without force. Zionist leaders
were clear about this early on. Some of them warned against it as a
coming catastrophe, others saw it as an unavoidable if painful
necessity.
That history cannot now be undone, but we need to recognize the
consequences and to be fair-minded in interpreting them. It is
fashionable to denounce Palestinians for encouraging their children to
confront the Israeli army. Yet, as one Israeli commentator has pointed
out, the Jewish 14-year-old who destroyed a Syrian tank in 1948 is
still venerated as a hero. The Palestinians are not "them," but "us,"
people whose actions arise not from some fundamentalist Islamic creed
of hate, but out of dispossesion and despair.
For all the talk of peace since Oslo, Israel has stiffened its
economic and military control over the territories. On the West Bank
and in Gaza, the Jewish settlements are expanding, their populations
rapidly growing, their fields lush. Because Palestinians are not
permitted to dig deep wells on their own soil, water flows
preferentially to the lands cultivated by settlers -- swimming pools
in the Jewish settlements, not enough water in some Palestinian
hospitals to wash the linen. Armed settlers from New York roam freely
in the heart of Hebron, while native Arabs face curfews and daily
humiliations. If we saw "them" as "us," we would empathize with the
Palestinians and understand their rage.
Palestinians, too, must see and accept Jewish reality. But there is no
symmetry here, no parity of killings and loss and torment or even of
the mutual atrocities from which both parties have suffered. One side
has had all the power all along, has imposed its conditions on the
other, and continues to wield overwhelming force -- "excessive use of
lethal force," reports Amnesty International, "in circumstances in
which neither the lives of security forces nor others were in imminent
danger." That side has a greater responsibility not to persist in
seeing itself as victimized.
People urging "solidarity with Israel" need to ask themselves what
that phrase means. The greatest Jewish tradition is the prophetic one
that holds truth and justice above rulers, governments or the policies
of states. There are Israelis with courage and clarity of vision even
amidst the current troubles -- soldiers, for example, who have gone to
jail rather than shoot at stone-throwers in occupied villages and
towns. One betrays their hard work for peace if one accepts
uncritically whatever their government or army chooses to do.
Policies based on despotism are, as the prophets taught, ultimately
self-destructive and will bring nothing but catastrophe for the Jewish
state. Trust in military might is futile, warned Isaiah -- "in
abundance of chariots, in vast numbers of riders." The Jewish leaders
now visiting Israel are pouring oil on the flames by encouraging the
politics of "them and us," even if unwittingly. Solidarity should
begin with truth, with compassion, with seeing the other as ourselves:
the only guarantees for lasting peace and the only possible true
victory for both Jew and Arab.
Gabor Maté, a native of Budapest, is a Vancouver physician. He is a
former Zionist youth leader with the Habonim movement.
