Can you be objective with blood up to your eyeballs?
Josh | 16.06.2002 15:38
(I know I wrote last week that non-news postings about Israel were boring and ruining IMC, but I got an email from my cousin and I am not sure how to reply. Looking for comments from others. Or ignore it now and read no further)
My 16 year old cousin lives on a West Bank settlement, and last Friday she sent me an email about an incident near her school. It shocked me. I haven't been in contact with her since before the intifada, but then she was moderately right-wing, certainly she would not have said things like the last line. Here are excerpts from the email, with my translations in square brackets:
"do you know what they found today next to my school??? of course you dont... a MECHABEL [terrorist]!!!! he poked [I think she means 'stabbed'] only one man and then the army killed him. i like the army. army gooooooooood. [...] anyway, they killed the mechabel and i saw the dead body on the floor with blood gushing out of his head onto his arm and his brain (i'm surprised he had one...) was on the other side of the road. it was great. i wish i could see evry day a dead arab. "
I want to tell her that not every arab is a terrorist, and that they feel that she has stolen their land, and that they are fighting for it back. I want to tell her that an attitude of 'every day a dead arab' is sick and bloodthirsty and that she should look at what she has become. I want to tell her that killing terrorists doesn't solve the problem, it puts it off, and that there are more terrorists because of the way we are dealing with the problem. Thing is, I can't, because I am sitting here in England, I haven't lived in Israel for two years, and I know she would just turn around (metaphorically) and say, You don't understand anything. You are too far away. And maybe she is right about that.
Thing is, the exact same thing could be said by a Palestinian teenager embarking on a shahid mission. He would say 'I wish I could see every day a dead Israeli'. He would say, 'I like Fatah. Fatah goooood.' If anyone came to him and said that his murder would not help anything, that he wasn't serving his people, that he was propogating a senseless cycle of violence, that he could never justify what he was doing because when you take out the politics he was simply slaughtering children, he could turn around to you and say, You just don't understand. You are too far away.
Maybe he is also right
I think that when you are so deep in a situation it is impossible to think rationally or objectively about it, because you are the subject. And I don't think you would allow anybody else from the outside to penetrate your self-made fantasies about right and wrong because they are on totally different wavelengths. That's what I think, but I am probably wrong, in which case, what do I write back to my cousin? What can I say to her?
I would really appreciate sensible thoughts. senseless streams of 'PALESTINE WILL BE FREE!!' are really not appreciated.
"do you know what they found today next to my school??? of course you dont... a MECHABEL [terrorist]!!!! he poked [I think she means 'stabbed'] only one man and then the army killed him. i like the army. army gooooooooood. [...] anyway, they killed the mechabel and i saw the dead body on the floor with blood gushing out of his head onto his arm and his brain (i'm surprised he had one...) was on the other side of the road. it was great. i wish i could see evry day a dead arab. "
I want to tell her that not every arab is a terrorist, and that they feel that she has stolen their land, and that they are fighting for it back. I want to tell her that an attitude of 'every day a dead arab' is sick and bloodthirsty and that she should look at what she has become. I want to tell her that killing terrorists doesn't solve the problem, it puts it off, and that there are more terrorists because of the way we are dealing with the problem. Thing is, I can't, because I am sitting here in England, I haven't lived in Israel for two years, and I know she would just turn around (metaphorically) and say, You don't understand anything. You are too far away. And maybe she is right about that.
Thing is, the exact same thing could be said by a Palestinian teenager embarking on a shahid mission. He would say 'I wish I could see every day a dead Israeli'. He would say, 'I like Fatah. Fatah goooood.' If anyone came to him and said that his murder would not help anything, that he wasn't serving his people, that he was propogating a senseless cycle of violence, that he could never justify what he was doing because when you take out the politics he was simply slaughtering children, he could turn around to you and say, You just don't understand. You are too far away.
Maybe he is also right
I think that when you are so deep in a situation it is impossible to think rationally or objectively about it, because you are the subject. And I don't think you would allow anybody else from the outside to penetrate your self-made fantasies about right and wrong because they are on totally different wavelengths. That's what I think, but I am probably wrong, in which case, what do I write back to my cousin? What can I say to her?
I would really appreciate sensible thoughts. senseless streams of 'PALESTINE WILL BE FREE!!' are really not appreciated.
Josh
e-mail:
osh_josh_bgosh@nospam.hotmail.com
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There is a quite simple solution to all this
16.06.2002 17:17
Download: There is a quite simple solution to all this - mp3
This approach is quite the opposite of being hysterical and is impartial.
The mind of your little cousin has been tragically poisoned, by no fault of her own, nor is she by any means alone. However, the successive governments of the Israeli State surely do bear a large proportion of responsability for the predicament she is now in. Their systematic defiance of many precepts of International Law has been as phenomenal as long-lasting, even unique in the whole world - nobody ever said this behaviour would not have bad consequences.
My urgent advice to your underage cousin would be, and this is very serious, to strongly encourage her parents to get her out of the war-zone (i.e. middle-east) as quickly as possible. There is nothing to hinder this, in stark contrast to the situation of palestinians, whose former Banthustans now more closely resemble gigantic concentration-camps - just that they are less organised-looking, and the Final-Solution (Transfer) still hungrily awaits it's execution orders.
If and when this starts to happen, foreseeably anytime soon now, things are going to go pretty wild and she and a whole lot of other people are going to be wishing they had never even heard of the middle-east.
Now, if you'd like to hear an idea that Bush, I'm sure, finds much merit in, listen to this MP3-clip. (1 min. duration, from Talk-of-the-Nation radio-show, 11 Mar.02)
Shalom, BP
BlackPope