Amein,
Thank you for your answer.
I think where we may disagree is not in what you do say -- essentially, that we as people who have not been through what the Palestinians have been through cannot fully appreciate what they are feeling -- but in what you don't say.
I agree that we cannot fully appreciate what they are feeling. I also can't fully appreciate what a victim of childhood beatings is feeling, or what a battered wife is feeling, or what someone who has gone through a starvation epidemic in Africa or Asia is feeling. I don't know what (or if) a German feels about the penalties assessed against and land taken from that country after several generations of war-mongering. I don't know what a "native American" feels about the fact that land they once exclusively occupied has been transformed into the America of today.
But I do know this. It is wrong for that victim of child abuse or wife beating or starvation or the perceived injustice of past nation-carving to walk into my local pizza parlor and blow up my children and friends as a way to channel the victim's rage or as a way to "correct" the perceived wrong of the past. No rage justifies that.
I think one reason why the Palestinian's plight has received such an unwelcome reception in the U.S. is because Americans (not all, but many and probably most) tend to believe that the behavior of the suicide/homicide bombers is wrong on a morally absolute scale. Wrongs are done all the time. We all suffer them to one degree or another. Many times reasonable people would disagree about whether wrongs have even occurred. For example, I have heard my Jewish friends (I am not Jewish, and have not studied the entire history, though I am aware of the basic outlines of the dispute) contend that the land was once theirs and they were driven off in a violent fashion, centuries before the 1917 and 1948 events in which they (in their view) "reclaimed" part of it. Would their rage, built up over centuries and stoked by the flames of pogroms and the Holocaust's awful attempted genocide, justify them walking into mosques (or perhaps German pizza parlors or wedding receptions) with bombs strapped to their bodies, attempting to cause the most massive Palestinian (or German) civilian casualties possible? Why, if the Palestinian's rage might possibly justify similar conduct, cannot the Israelis do the same? More Jews were murdered in the Holocaust (and their land taken) than the number of Palestinians that have ever existed -- is that enough to justify such conduct?
And where does that lead both sides, and the world?
I know you did not say in your post that the Palestinians' conduct is right. You came closer to saying it is wrong than saying it is right. But where the problem comes in is that, by posing the question as one that might possibly be explained (justified?) by Palestinian rage, you set up a moral construct which justifies the channeling of rage against civilians generally by whoever has a big enough axe to grind.
I don't accept that moral construct. I think there are things that, on a moral scale, are absolutely wrong, that can never be justified. Walking onto a bus of schoolchildren and detonating an explosive device and scattering their bones and flesh across the landscape is one of those things that, in my view, can never be justified. It is wrong if it happens in my suburb, it is wrong if it happens in Amman or Bethlehem, and it is wrong if it happens in Jerusalem. As long as the Palestinians and their supporters continue to contend that their rage justifies or even explains this sort of atrocity, their cause will not be advanced by me.
That is my honest answer to the question I posed. I am interested in your response. |
