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Commentary: Is indifference to the fate of the Palestinians growing?
The "progressive" Left assumes, without practically any debate, that the Palestinian cause is a just one, and that the Palestinians hold the "moral high ground" over Israel. Before the resumption of the "Intifada" and 9/11, it was certainly possible to make a defenseable case that the Palestinians had suffered some historic injustice and were entitled to some sort of redress.Have the Palestinians, by their own actions, squandered whatever moral capital they might have had? Two of the Internet's more prominent commentators seem to think so. James Lileks, in Monday's "Daily Bleat," has this reaction to the Tel Aviv suicide bombing: [After describing his wife's near miss with an inattentive driver,] If I turned on the TV and I saw people celebrating the car wreck that killed my daughter, I think I would go mad. I think I would claw my eyes until everything was red. I would want to call down hell on their heads. Every time I think Iâve had it I find that there are still a few jots of sympathy left - and by "sympathy" I mean that last weary civilized impulse that makes you stay the hand of your inner beserker. I donât think Iâm alone in this. It doesnât mean thereâs now a vast angry mass advocating for the immolation of those who want to scour the earth clean of Jews. No. But before I didnât care what happened to the people in the organizations that arrange these attacks. Now I donât care about what happens to the culture that permits it. Approves of it. Defends it, sanctions it, shelters it, sings it praises, names streets after the men who do it. Iâm done. I donât want to hear the word "but" in any sentence uttered by a PLO / Fatah / Al Aqsa / Hamaz / Hezbollah apologist. I donât want to hear the phrase "cycle of violence" used outside the context of a gang fight at the Tour De France. I never want to see Arafat asking for anything anywhere any more. I donât want to see people on the West Bank cheering as clumsy Scuds lumber over their heads in February, because I know theyâll head to Israeli hospitals when the germs hit them, and I know theyâll be admitted for treatment. Iâm not saying I wish them ill. But the line of people I care about now is very, very long. The apologists and supporters of the bombers can get behind the 100 wounded I never met. The 20 who died. The one who was the child of a father my age. And when itâs their turn to ask for my sympathy, Iâll probably point to the line with 3000 New Yorkers, and kindly request that they head to the back. I felt much the same way when I saw the videos of Palestinians celebrating on 9/11. Whatever sympathy I had for the Palestinian cause vanished, never to return. Steve DenBeste, the proprietor ofUSS Clueless, is even more blunt: [I]ncreasingly I'm finding myself feeling as if the world would be better off if someone went in and shot every damned one of them and piled the lot in an unmarked grave. After reading about yet another Palestinian atrocity, I find myself thinking, "Fuck it. Nuke Ramallah. Then nuke Nablus. And if that doesn't help, bulldoze Gaza. And once that's done, put all fifty surviving Palestinians on a freighter, tow it out to sea, and let them become someone else's problem." I know that's wrong. I know it could never happen, and that it will never happen, and that it should never happen, and I would never actually advocate anything like that. But what I'm finding is that every time I read about a Palestinian being killed by the Israelis, my first emotional reaction is, "Good riddance." I've reached the point where I feel nothing at all when I read about them dying. I have reached the point where I don't care at all, not even slightly, about their pain and hardship. They have ceased to be persons to me. I'm no longer even interested in hearing their side of the story. Sometimes I read about someone's death, someone I don't know, someone far away, someone from a different country and different culture, I find myself grieving a bit; I can imagine them as a real person, and I mourn the loss of something valuable and important. I don't do that for Palestinians anymore. Emotionally, I no longer think of Palestinians as "valuable and important". . . . "Death before dishonor" is one thing. But "Death, just because" is something else. It really is a question of the extent to which we should strive to protect them from themselves and their own urge to self-destruction, and how much sacrifice we should make to give them a better life which they themselves don't seem to want. . . . When you face a group which seeks genocide, does reactive genocide become more acceptable? Your humble narrator suspects that this attitude is more widely held than most people realize. The only reason that Arafat and the Palestinians are still alive and living in the "occupied" territories is a sense of restraint imposed by the innate decency of the majority of Israelis. If Israeli public opinion shifts much further in the direction Den Beste describes, that restraint could vanish. Posted by: Mike 2003-01-06 |
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