Israeli-Palestinian conflict can’t be reduced to heroes and villains

By David McElroy · November 20, 2012

Most people seem to have very strong feelings about who’s right in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, despite knowing remarkably little about the history surrounding it. Do the details of the Middle East conflicts make your eyes glaze over, because you’ve heard the same stories over and over again? The Onion had a classic article five years ago making the point that these news articles are basically interchangeable as far as Americans are concerned.

As the fighting between Israel and the Palestinians flares up yet again, so are tensions between supporters of the two sides. On Facebook, it’s been pretty heated. When I read the comments from partisans on both sides, you’d think that each side was reading only half of the news and facts from the Middle East — and the other side was reading only the other half of the news and facts.

You can almost take much of their rhetoric (from both sides) and switch it to the other side by changing the names. The cheerleaders for the two sides don’t seem to understand that it’s a complex dispute with fault on both sides, not something that can easily be reduced to a tale of heroes and villains.

I’ve been surprised in the last few days to get questions from people who really don’t know that much about the dispute, people who hear both sides screaming at each other and don’t know what to believe. As a result, I’d like to take a quick look at some of the basic facts of the conflict and show you why I don’t see either side as “good.”

I grew up believing the standard pro-Israel narrative, because that was the standard story in the media here and it’s what we heard from the U.S. government. This is because Israel was a U.S. ally during the Cold War, while the Arab states generally sided with the Soviets.

After I finally looked at what really happened and thought about it critically, I realized that the people living in Palestine in 1947-48 were wronged. The guilt-ridden people of Europe wanted to somehow make themselves feel better about what had happened to the Jews during World War II, so they supported the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.

There had been a Zionist movement since the 19th century, but nothing would have happened if those European powers hadn’t decided to support unilaterally taking land from the Palestinians who had lived there for hundreds and hundreds of years to create a “homeland” for people who had been living in Europe. So land was taken from the Palestinians and a Jewish state was created.

The Arabs in neighboring countries supported the Palestinians and opposed the Europeans who were dumped amidst them, and there were several wars, beginning when the country was first proclaimed out of thin air in 1948. The Palestinians were definitely the victim in the beginning, but they resorted to terrorism and evil conduct as they sought to gain their land back.

Israel has been brutal (and outright evil) in its treatment of those Palestinians. So even though the Palestinians were completely in the right at the start, both sides have been horrendous in the ways they’ve pursued the struggle. (I think such evil conduct in life-or-death battles between groups is par for the course among humans, but that’s another issue.)

The partisans of each side can only see what the other side has done wrong. To the pro-Israel partisans, the Palestinians are just a bunch of terrorists and the Israelis are peace-loving people of God who just want to be left alone. To the pro-Palestinian partisans, the Israelis are just a bunch of maniacal killers and any terrible things done by Palestinians are justified (or at least excused) by the fact that the European Jews stole the land in 1948.

There aren’t any good guys in this conflict. It was morally wrong to steal the land to give it to a bunch of European Jews to create a country to start with, but now that it’s there, I don’t see a sane solution, especially since the sides hate each other so much. It’s one of those conflicts in human history when the two combatants might very well fight until one has destroyed the other entirely.

I don’t want any part in it, and I certainly don’t want U.S. tax money subsidizing the two sides while they kill each other.

Supporters of Israel will frequently say — quite sincerely — that it was perfectly acceptable for the Jews of the Zionist movement to kick the Palestinians off the land, because the land had been Jewish territory that was stolen from them many years before. That’s naive at best.

It’s true that Jews had controlled that territory thousands of years ago — in what we in our culture would call biblical times — but the area had been under control of many different people groups before and after that. Even in the time of the New Testament, it was Roman territory.

So, yes, there was a Jewish kingdom there — on land that the Bible tells us they conquered from other people — but to pretend that the modern state of Israel is the same as that would be like finding descendants of the Druids and carving out half of England to give to them.

Pretty much every group in history has been both conqueror and conquered. The idea that someone can say, “This was our land thousands of years ago, so we want it back,” is quite absurd. If people feel so eager to help oppressed groups get land back that’s been taken from them, I suggest they look closer to home and ask which Native American tribe should get the house they currently own. (And that historical theft is far more recent in history.)

We can’t go back and correct all historical wrongs. When the Romans conquered what was then Jewish territory, it was certainly unjust. But how do you feel about the people who lived there before the Jews? The Jewish history books (that we Christians have in our Old Testament) tell us that the Jews completely wiped out group after group in order to take the land as their own.

Are we to conclude that genocide is morally acceptable when the Jews used it to take the territory, but the genocide attempted against the Jews by the Nazis was bad enough to justify taking territory by any means? We have to be consistent.

I don’t pretend to have a good solution to the Middle East problem. What I do know is that the involvement of the U.S. government in that conflict is making all of us less safe. If the feds hadn’t been interfering in the affairs of various Middle Eastern countries for close to a century, we wouldn’t have the enemies over there that we have. They don’t hate us for our freedom. They hate us because of what we’ve done to them.

The conflict in Palestine is going to get worse. Both sides are going to do vile and evil things. The Israelis have the better weapons, so they’re most likely to win in the short term. (Remember that Israel also has nuclear weapons. Remember that every time a president tells you that “weapons of mass destruction” is an excuse for invading a country.) In the long term, it’s hard to say what will happen.

The only thing I’m sure of is that I don’t want any part of the conflict. I don’t want my tax money going to buy bombs and tanks (for either side). U.S. taxpayers are currently pumping billions of dollars into both sides. We need to walk away and let them fight their own battles. We’ve made enough enemies. It’s time to quit making things even worse.

And it’s time to quit pretending that one side or the other is blameless. There’s plenty of blame to go around.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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