Occupation
Matthew Yglesias captures one of the most infuriating aspects of the way we talk about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in this country — the fact that so much of our rhetoric is premised on the notion that we’re disinterested parties in the whole affair. We’re emphatically not:
But as long as Israel is by far the largest recipient of US foreign assistance funds and by an even larger margin the largest per capita recipient of US foreign assistance funds, then I don’t see how “quiet time” is a realistic option. Israel is not a poor country; our financial backing for them is not a humanitarian gesture the way that funds spent on Malawi or Guatemala might be. Our aid to Israel is a strategic commitment to an allied country in a troubled region of the world and a region where, among other things, the United States is concerned about the low esteem in which we are held by the local population.
To put it more bluntly: we give a lot of money to a government that has for forty years engaged in a brutal occupation of an entire people. Everyone who lives in the Gaza strip is, almost literally, a prisoner: they have no freedom of movement, no rights, no prospects, no economy to speak of, and no real hope for salvation. Palestinians have been humiliated, imprisoned, and killed by Israel for decades. Their land has been taken away from them, and what’s left is hemmed in by walls and barbed wire.
And their “friends” aren’t much better. The Palestinians suffered through ten years of remarkably corrupt and ineffectual governance, after the Oslo accords, and then made the mistake of voting Hamas into power: a murderous, theocratic, fundamentalist group whose pointless provocations led directly to the current attacks. That plus years of non-help from the autocratic Arab regimes that surround them, whose concern for the plight of the Palestinians rarely rises beyond empty rhetoric. And, perhaps worst of all, the fact that they’re irrevocably identified with unhinged radicals who believe that strapping explosives to their bodies and blowing up Israeli civilians is a sure recipe for martyrdom, rather than an unforgivable atrocity. If Israel hadn’t spent the last several decades nailing the part of the mustache-twirling villain, these “allies” would have fit the bill quite nicely.
So this is the lot of the Palestinian people: unalloyed misery, interrupted every so often by homicidal incursions like the one that’s been going on for the last several days. It’s despair punctuated by terror. It’s monstrous.
Which is the other thing that drives me crazy about the way some people talk about this stuff: as if the past 60 years never happened, as if there’s no historical context, as if all of these troubles don’t extend in more or less a straight line from the occupation. If you’re actually trying to solve a problem, you can’t just ignore its root cause. Can you?
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