Alice in Gazaland

Yesterday an Israeli tank and helicopter gunship fired on a group of protestors in the Rafah refugee camp. There were about a thousand people in the crowd, marching on a sealed-off housing project called Tel Sultan to protest the occupying government’s recent rash of house demolitions. Ten people died, three children among them. Dozens were wounded. The army professed deep dismay, and said that all those tank rounds had been a terrible mistake, warning shots gone awry, as had, presumably, the supporting missiles fired from the gunship. An investigation is, of course, underway.

The United States decided to grow a minor, vestigial backbone, and abstained from the UN vote to censure Israel for these latest murders. Not vote against it, mind you, because the resolution failed to mention anything about the need for those wily, defenseless Palestinians to stop provoking the armored might of the American-sponsored Israeli military. Abstention as a moral stand. How sad.

It seems to me that the entire dialog about the Palestinian crisis is being conducted through the rabbithole, in some strange and highly stylized Alice-in-Wonderlandic dimension, where the basic facts about the situation no longer apply. But the facts are there, though necessarily buried under years of bloody history and a mass of caveats. There’s no doubt that the Palestinian suicide bombers who have killed so many Israeli civilians, women and children included, are as morally culpable for their atrocities as the Israeli army is for theirs; or that the corrupt reign of Yasser Arafat during the years of relative peace in the region was an unmitigated disaster, and a real tragedy for the Palestinian people; or that the Arab dictatorships who profess to be friends of the Palestinians use their cause as a rallying cry to both stoke their peoples’ anger and keep it directed outward, at Israel and the United States, rather than inward, at their own governments, where it belongs. All that’s true.

But here’s the ur-truth, the one that started it all: the Palestinians are an occupied and displaced people, driven out of their homeland by a British decree, a 1948 United Nations resolution, and several subsequent, ruinous wars; and then hounded into smaller and smaller enclaves by the concerted efforts of the Israeli government. Today, the offspring’s offspring of the original refugees are growing up in squalid camps in surrounding countries, or are crammed into shrinking parcels of their own land, without friends, hope, or recourse. Their plight is worse than desperate.

This is what it’s all about, really. When our leaders, and the punderati, express amazement that the Palestinians are so reluctant to accept a peace agreement that would effectively “give” them a chunk of their own real-estate, carved into minor Bantustans by a warren of Israeli settlements and their attendant military retinues; when we casually poopoo the notion that refugees expelled from their homes over fifty years ago should be allowed to return to them — it’s as if 1948, and the steady succession of UN resolutions ordering Israel to get the hell out of occupied Palestinian territory, never happened.

Instead, this is what Bush is throwing his support behind: a largely amoral and savagely belligerent former general who designed the settlement strategy that has been steadily chipping away at what little the Palestinians have left for the past thirty years; a policy of systematic repression and denial of basic human rights, lately posing as a fight against “terrorism”; and a concerted effort to eradicate the hopes of millions of displaced human beings. Sadly, Kerry’s no better. He’s enthusiastically supported Bush’s support of Sharon and all his outrages. In fact, the only time our leaders complain at all about this, it’s in the context of not pissing off the Arabs any more than we already have. In this view, the lives of Palestinians are, explicitly and remorselessly, pawns in a high-stakes geopolitical game, with all the rights and privileges that apply to pawns thereto.

The radical fringe of the Palestinian resistance (a fringe that seems, at times, distressingly large) still calls for a destruction of the state of Israel in its entirety. That’s ridiculous, of course, and irrational, and counter-productive, and immoral. Level-headed, moderate Palestinians simply want peace, and a land of their own, separate from and independent of Israeli and its military. That dream is dying, and has been for many decades, throwing itself about in increasingly frenzied death-throes, like a bad actor.

The Palestinian people have endured years of mistreatment at the hands of pretty much everyone: Israel, Britain, Jordan, Egypt, the United States … even their own Palestinian Authority. But they march, anyway, and struggle and suffer and die for the basic human rights that their oppressors — and their oppressors supporters — take for granted.

Update: In reading over this just now, I note with dismay that it is precisely the kind of frenzied, emotional screed that has done so little to help the Palestinian cause over the years, and so much to hurt it. Thankfully, there are cooler minds out there, on both sides of the conflict, working on actual solutions. Here, for instance.

I think I’ll leave this up here, though. None of what I’ve written is untrue; though it is, perhaps, unhelpful.