Letter #9 to Friends and Family: Palestine after Four Days-Ghosts of Jimmy Past

By happenstance, May 31st proved to be an interesting day for me to wander around Jerusalem with sad and mystifying events unfolding in international waters off of the coast of Gaza. A long-held personal mission to investigate for myself the tortured land of Palestine underlay my all-too-brief sojourn. Forty years ago, I recall my philo-Semitic mother saying that a million people could not be thrown out of their homes without difficulties emerging. 

Thirty years after Israël’s lightning victory in 1967, a good friend repeated heatedly that Israel had herded Palestineans into what he termed history’s largest concentration, not refugee, camps. Seeing Israël, as I still do, as the region’s lone democracy and most vital society, I disagreed with a vigor quite as intense as his.

At that time, I had few Muslim friends, fewer Arab acquaintances and zero respect for countries hostile to Israël. Nevertheless, I could not turn a blind eye towards Thucydides’ analysis of the blood-drunk foreign policy of Attica’s leading democracy during the Peloponnesian War. Democracy does not axiomatically equate to peace; losing a moral rudder often anticipates bloodshed and eventual defeat.

Two State Department tours in Iraq mollified my prejudice toward Arabs. Then Israël lost me with its over-reaction to Hezbollah in 2006 by killing dozens of civilians for every Israeli dead. The subsequent siege and impoverishment of Gaza two years later turned a rump of desert into, as my friend had warned a decade before, the world’s largest concentration camp. The now-threadbare rationale of Hamas being the cause of this indiscriminate killing of innocents belied Israël’s cry of self-defense.

The snip-it of exposure I have had of Palestine falls somewhere in between my reflexive support of Israël since 1982 and the disillusionment of the past four years. From my limited vantage point, at least, I see a depressing cohesion of fear on one side of the “wall”; despair on the other; and, sullenness on both. To be sure, I confronted my share of check-points and security personnel which seemed like petty annoyances facing a tourist.

Day after day, however, security detours stretch fifteen minute Palestinean commutes into an hour or more; searches and metal detectors treat innocents like terrorists; and, prohibited entries into sacred sites signal a two-tiered society. This gutting of liberty contrasts sharply with private ‘Israeli’ roads all over the West Bank and force protection of illegal Israeli colonizers populating illegal Israeli settlements atop precious Palestinean aquifers.

Thus ‘petty annoyances’ accumulate into a culture of shame and despair plaguing Palestineans simply seeking their four freedoms in their ancestral lands. The settlements and refugee camps each reek of this joint Jewish and Palestinean stasis of diminishing dreams, unsustainable privilege, and twisted tribalism.

The over-riding impression of my visit to Palestine, however, remains one of frustration and sadness over opportunities foregone. The Palestineans are industrious, inquisitive, educated and intelligent; traits rightly associated with Israelis. On the other hand, imagine one state unified toward a common purpose . . . .

That economy of thirteen million people would put their Mediterranean, Levantine and Arab neighbors to shame on statistics like productivity, inventions, value-added, etc. . . . and with no oil to boot. These two peoples would not trust each other at first but, with explicit safeguards and incentives, they could work together.

Perhaps oppression and outrage have festered for so long that undoing their effects will prove insurmountable; I do not, can not, and will not believe it. So what to do in the light of Gaza just a couple of days ago? Try to build that peace against all odds, but in a single state harnessing the mutual distrust into institutional constraints and accountability.

How can the United States of America support this uncertain mission?

America brings a national experience and publicly witnessed precedent of progressing beyond a painful, racist past. The manifest liking for, and desire to emulate, Americans (if not the U.S. government) displayed by the Palestineans deepens the moral urgency confronting a U.S. Administration long on the rhetoric of reconciliation with Muslims but short on the substance of peace-making.

President Obama would do well to study thoroughly the bumbling Administration of President Jimmy Carter. The Palestinean desire to emulate America – and, in her best aspects, Israël – should come as no shock since the Palestineans relish enterprise, much like their U.S. and Israeli counterparts.