Okay, maybe it doesn’t rhyme. But it is what it is. The magazine that brought you Begin “rhymes with Fagin” is at it again. Remember the guy who wrote the article “Do Israelis Want Peace?” Well, now he’s writing about the evil, evil Israelis forcing the Palestinians to hate them. Terror war? Barely a mention. Suicide bombings and attacks on Israelis? Turned into this:
In the spirit of resistance, the boy was named for an uncle who was killed in 1991 while fighting Israelis near Gaza alongside his friend Anis, for whom Ramzi’s brother is named. “I don’t know – I guess they had a Hamas feeling, like they wanted to battle,” says their father with an admiring smile. “I named my sons after my brother and my neighbor – ” “So that people don’t forget them,” Ramzi says from the couch. “And always remember them.”
Oh, there’s so much more.
The separation barrier – the seldom-used formal name for the Wall – turns out to be a label lush with meaning. Israelis credit the serpentine, 400-mile (640 km)system of fences, barricades and checkpoints with reducing terrorist attacks to almost nil since construction began in earnest seven years ago. But the Wall has done more than keep out suicide bombers. No less important, it has created a separation of the mind. Israelis say they simply think much less about Palestinians. And a generation of Palestinians is coming of age without even knowing what Israelis look like, much less the land both sides claim as their own. The absence of familiarity, names, basic knowing – the absence of the foundations of empathy – does not bode well for the chances of the two peoples one day living as neighbors in peace.
Say, you think maybe another reason there’s such a low chance of living in peace is because the Palestinians have yet to acknowledge that Israel isn’t going anywhere? That they constantly teach their children about the mythical nation of Palestine, where there were only a couple of Jews and they had no real history or attachment to the land? The kind of teaching that puts up “studies” that prove the Western Wall has no Jewish history? The kind of leadership that includes a man who wrote a thesis that can best be described as Holocaust denial? The kind of leadership that utterly refuses to recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people? Nope. It’s all about Israelis no longer employing Palestinians as gardeners at their hospitals. Why is that, exactly? Oh, yeah. The Palestinian employees kept murdering their employers.
The separation was not caused by the Israelis. This is something that the media narrative never gets around to noting, just like when they quote this:
At that point in Israel’s 43 years of occupation of Palestinian territory, its army maintained a permanent checkpoint in Ein Arik, a village strung along a deep cleft in the steeply terraced hills just west of Ramallah.
They never, ever, ever provide a reference to exactly why there are army checkpoints in Ein Arik. The Arab nations surrounding Israel were about to attempt yet again to destroy the Jewish state? The Six-Day War? The Three No’s of Khartoum? All irrelevant. Because the poor, poor, pitiful Palestinians can no longer work in Jerusalem.
They brought it on themselves. As to this, which is the thrust of the article:
The absence of familiarity, names, basic knowing – the absence of the foundations of empathy – does not bode well for the chances of the two peoples one day living as neighbors in peace.
Really? Because Israelis and Egyptians don’t know each other. Israelis and Lebanese don’t know each other. Israelis and Syrians don’t know each other. They live as neighbors. Without Hezbollah, Israel would be at peace with Lebanon. Israel and Egypt signed a peace treaty and live in a cold peace. The Syrians may not be at peace, but neither are they in active war, as in, a shooting war, now, shelling Israel from the Golan Heights whenever they pleased in the past. So the main point of the article is bullshit, the narrative is bullshit, and the facts are bullshit.
Way to go, Karl Vick. That’s oh-for-two.
Oh, if I were as shoddy a writer as Vick, I would point out that since his last name is Vick, and Michael Vick’s last name is Vick, Karl Vick must also beat dogs to death. (Well, he kinda beats dead horses that he creates himself, but that’s beside the point). Then again, for all I know, he does beat his dogs. I’ve now done about as much research on Vick as he did for his cover story on how Israelis don’t want peace.
When there was no separation barrier, when Palestinians could fairly freely enter Israel, many of them showed their appreciation for getting to know their Israeli neighbors by trying to murder them. When I lived in Israel, from 1972-75, travel between Israel proper and the territories was very easy and apparently all those years of getting to know Israel did not bring the Palestinians around to feeling of neighborliness.
But Vick ignores this because he follows the Bensky Bifurcated System of Middle Eastern Political Analysis which like the Bensky Corollary to Absolutely Everything (which Meryl persists in calling the Exception Clause, q.v.) explains a lot of what might otherwise, to less sophisticated minds, be seen as anti-Israel bias:
1. When it comes to analyzing Arab behavior you go back as far as you possibly can. Karen Armstrong, for example, has written that to understand the Arabs you have to consider the Crusades. (My guess is that if I started blowing up underground stations in London because the English expelled their Jews in 1290 she wouldn’t be so understanding, but that’s the Exception Clause in operation.)
2. When it comes to analyzing Israeli behavior, history began this morning. Thus it’s irrelevant as to why Israel built the barrier in the first place and how Israel came into possession of the territories in the first place of course is clearly out of bounds.
*shrug* They passed over Tayyip Erdowan to pick Mark Zuckerberg for Man Of The Year, so they’re doing something right, eh? (Okay, so he’s a lapsed Jew, but Jewish enough that I’m sure you’ll see protests from the usual embassy-burning mustache-cursing shoe-throwers.)
-ls
Ah, but to understand the Crusades you have to regard them as a reaction to four and a nalf centuries of unprovoked imperialist aggression by the Muslims against the Christians. The Muslims are imperialist occupiers of once Christian (and Zoroastrian) land. Go home imperialists! Stop the occupation!