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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I’m seeing a lot of simplistic and dishonest explanations right now for the current rioting in France. Those on the populist far right claim it’s all about Muslim immigrants to France disrupting the culture. Their message is that this sort of thing is going to happen in the U.S. unless “we defend the border.” On the far left, socialists and their fellow travelers claim the riots are all about wealthy people in France not paying enough taxes, resulting in cuts to government services. The truth is far more complicated, but it’s rooted in the decline of population growth in Europe. There simply aren’t enough young workers paying into the tax system anymore, so cuts in social services were inevitable. There is genuine cultural tension as more and more people immigrate from other countries, but government cuts to education and other services are even more important to what’s happening. The situation is complicated, so don’t let dishonest people with U.S. political agendas tell you that it happens to support whatever they were already promoting for partisan reasons.

Here’s another reason to appreciate the cats in your life: New research involving 93 countries found that places with more cats per person also tended to have happier people. The researchers say the finding fits with previous evidence that living with pets can reduce loneliness and stress while providing companionship, emotional attachment and social support. The study doesn’t prove that cats cause greater happiness, but it certainly adds to the evidence that sharing your home — and your life — with a cat might be good for you.

The company that owns Facebook and Instagram is heavily promoting its new AI-based software assistant called Muse, but people who are using it as it was designed are incredibly foolish. An early adopter of the software discovered that a few days ago when he advertised an item for sale on Facebook Marketplace — and he inadvertently gave Muse full authority to act on his behalf. The software agreed to a lowball offer made by another Facebook user and then gave that man the home address of the man for whom he was an agent. The software told the buyer that the seller was home and waiting for him. When the buyer showed up and waited angrily, the would-be buyer left an angry review for the man. And this angry man had the seller’s home address. It was only well after that that the software reported what it had done and admitted it had made a mistake. I won’t be putting that much power into the hands of any software. I think anyone who agrees to such terms is a fool. And the software’s user agreement says you’re responsible for purchases the software makes in your name. Nope.

Meet my new girlfriend. Her name is Meg. And she’s my little sweetheart. A couple of months ago, a neighbor across the street told me about a new stray in the neighborhood that she and I were both soon feeding. The cat had been very skittish about contact and she had a lot of scabs and parasites in her fur, but a trip to the vet last week revealed that she was otherwise in good health. The vet estimates her to be 1 to 2 years old. I named her for Meg Murry, the 13-year-old protagonist of Madeleine L’Engle’s wonderful book, “A Wrinkle in Time.” (Please read the book. Don’t watch the horrible movie.) Since we lost Lucy almost a year ago, it seems appropriate that we finally have a new little girl to join the household. She’s already captured my heart, but Alex, Oliver and Sam aren’t there quite yet.

There’s nothing socially acceptable that’s as dangerous as drinking alcohol. Most people grow up being told to “drink responsibly” — and all of us see people abusing this drug in one way or another — but the truth is that drinking alcohol is always a terrible risk. The alcohol in these drinks is toxic and the human liver has to work hard to filter the toxins out. What most people don’t realize is that alcohol is classified as a known carcinogen by the World Health Organization — because of the well-established connection between imbibing and various cancers. Many people have taken refuge behind the idea that light or moderate drinking might be safe, but a new study shows that drinking even one drink a day increases the risks of 10 types of cancer. When I was a teen-ager, I looked around and saw the negative effects that this behavior had on a lot of people and decided not to start drinking, so I’ve never even tried this poison. The evidence keeps piling up that I was lucky to have come to that conclusion early.

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