The Problem with Neutrality Between Palestinians and Israel

"Politicians and the media often call for a "balanced"
approach in dealing with the Palestine/Israel issue.
"This is not a battle of equals - one is the oppressor,
one is the oppressed. The following article speaks to this
paradigm: "The Problem with Neutrality Between
Palestinians and Israel".

By Kathleen Christison

A friend recently said that she had come to believe the level of
Israeli violence against Palestinians is now so great that a
balanced approach to the two sides, the middle way promoted
by so many peace groups, has become totally untenable.
Another friend, an Israeli American just returned from several
months in Israel, witnessed such a level of Israeli violence,
not only against Palestinians but even against Israeli protesters,
that she committed herself to oppose it. She decided she
could no longer "protect my own skin" by simply standing by.
"I no longer cared about protecting myself". She put her life
in danger on behalf of justice for the Palestinians.

These two friends have recognized and are strongly protesting
the sham of taking a neutral position between the two sides in
this most unbalanced of conflicts. Neutrality in any conflict in
which there is a gross imbalance of power is probably an
impossibility and certainly immoral. Treading a middle path
between one utterly powerless party and another party with
total power, effectively removes all restraints on behavior by
the powerful party. Yet this is the posture of those American
peace groups that put themselves forward as advocates for
Palestinian-Israeli reconciliation. They take no position between
the Palestinians and Israel, but only promote peace plans
such as the unofficial Geneva Accord without also taking
action or even speaking out forcefully against Israel's
occupation. The consequence is that these groups have
given Israel the time and the license to devastate the land,
begin its ethnic cleansing, and destroy any prospect for
Palestinian independence. Their refusal to take a clear
stand against Israel's oppressive policies is a statement that
"might makes right", that oppressive policies are acceptable,
and most particularly that justice for Palestinians is less
important than power for Israel.

But when in history have decent people seriously accepted
balance and neutrality as a proper response in moral conflicts
or national conflicts that pit one very powerful party against
a powerless party?

Consider this analogy: a group of well-meaning activists in
late 1850s America hope to bring an end to the horrors of
slavery without war. They propose that the two sides strive
for reconciliation, that slaves sit down at the negotiating
table with slave owners and attempt to work out their
differences through negotiation. The activists believe that
the institution of slavery is oppressive, a violation of human
rights, and that it must end, but they also recognize the
property rights of owners to their slaves, as well as the
owners' right to their lives and their livelihoods--their right
to exist and not be murdered in a slave uprising. The activists
propose a middle way between the two sides, recognizing
that both are responsible for the conflict (slaves have shown
a propensity to rebel, causing the slave owners to tighten
their oppressive grip) but believing that both slaves and
owners have a right to free, peaceful, and secure lives and
that the only way to achieve this is to avoid blaming
either side.

Do we think this is absurd? Imagine a similar scenario
involving an attempt to mediate in a balanced, blame-free
atmosphere between Catholic priests and the children they
have sexually abused. The absurdity of neutrality is equally
obvious in this situation. What is most absurd in these
scenarios and what links them is the notion of treading
a middle or supposedly neutral path between two sides
when there exists a total imbalance of power. Could
anyone seriously suggest that slaves, utterly powerless
except for the ability occasionally to rebel, should seek
some kind of equitable solution between themselves and
their overlords? Could anyone seriously suggest that abused
children, utterly powerless except for the ability to kick and
scream, should negotiate with their abusers?

Thinking back to some of the colonial conflicts of the
twentieth century, is it possible to imagine a scenario in
which peacemakers or public commentators and opinion
molders ever believed these conflicts could be resolved
by simply splitting the difference and pursuing some middle
path between the two sides? In Vietnam, Algeria, South
Africa, other colonial conflicts in Africa and Asia--conflicts
that by their very nature involved an overwhelmingly strong
power in absolute domination over a virtually powerless
civilian population--no mediator, no commentator, no
activist group ever credibly proposed that the conflict be
resolved by working from a neutral position to try "reconciling"
the two sides.

Yet this is essentially how virtually everyone--public discourse
in general, from opportunistic U.S. politicians of both major
parties, to mainstream media commentators, to most peace
activists--proposes to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
The notion of holding the middle ground, of being "neutral",
is soothing to most people because it is ostensibly fair, it is
optimistic, it is positive, obviating the need for negativity
and unpleasantness. But a balanced position in an unbalanced
situation inevitably is a miscarriage of justice. In Palestine-Israel,
\ it is a profoundly immoral stance to maintain neutrality between
powerless Palestinians (who have the ability occasionally to
murder innocent Israelis but no power to regulate or save
their own lives) and an overpowering, overbearing Israel
possessing all the military power, controlling all the land.
Neutrality here is no different from refusing to take a stand
between slaves and slave owners, or between children
and abusive priests.

The Pleasure of Neutrality

Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun magazine and founder of a
network of grassroots organizations around the country
called collectively the "Tikkun Community", is probably
the most prominent of the centrist peace advocates,
although there are other organizations that pursue a
similar approach. Lerner has enunciated a position,
which he calls the "progressive middle path", that
seeks a Palestinian-Israeli reconciliation based on
scrupulous adherence to the notion that both peoples
are responsible for the conflict, that each has acted
immorally and inhumanely, and that the only hope for
peace lies in not blaming either side and working for
peace plans that "provide for the well-being of both
sides". The national president of the Tikkun
Community recently wrote in a letter to the editor
that Tikkun's purpose is to recognize that both
peoples have legitimate needs, that both "bear
responsibility for co-creating the conflict", and that
both must be responsible for solving the outstanding
issues between them.

On the surface, all this glowing neutrality sounds
positively enlightened. Who could criticize a program
asserting that "both peoples' best chance for lasting
security lies in a new spirit of generosity, openhearted
reconciliation, and a genuine commitment to nonviolence"?
And in fact, Tikkun's strong support for the Geneva
Accord, an unofficial peace plan forged by former
Palestinian and Israel cabinet ministers and launched
with considerable fanfare last December, is a laudable
effort to put something concrete behind the call for
reconciliation. There is much that is unfair to the
Palestinians in the Geneva Accord, particularly on the
issue of the refugees' right of return, but the plan as
drafted at least provides an acceptable starting point
for negotiating the particulars of a final peace agreement
--if there were any hope of its being endorsed by either
the government of Israel or the United States.
Unfortunately, there is no such hope.

One has the urge to tell these people to get real. It is not
historically true that both sides bear equal responsibility
for creating the conflict; moreover, in the hopelessly
unbalanced situation existing today, the two sides very
clearly cannot bear equal responsibility for resolving the
conflict. The failure to understand this indicates a wilful
failure to acknowledge the actual situation on the ground.

Neutrality and "generosity" toward both sides may sound
nice, but they are breathtakingly unrealistic. Imagine urging
Ariel Sharon or any of the Israeli leadership--or indeed most
of the Israeli public these days--to exercise a spirit of
generosity and openhearted reconciliation. Imagine urging
George Bush to work for the well-being of Palestinians as well
as Israelis. As a spiritual guide for life, generosity and
openhearted reconciliation are fine, but as a political plan of
action, they are meaningless. To do nothing beyond issuing
pleasant generalities, while Israel proceeds unimpeded with
the stunning transformation of the Palestinian landscape,
the destruction of Palestinian national expectations, and the
ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, is to make a
mockery of any "spirit of generosity".

Obsessive optimism and adherence to a "middle path" can
lead to some skewed thinking. Lerner, for instance,
denounces all those who have criticized the Geneva
Accord, as well as anyone who criticizes Israel for human
rights abuses without denouncing other states for worse
abuses, as "lefties" or, in his more unguarded moments--as
when he recently attacked a long-time Middle East activist
and journalist in the Bay Area--as "idiots and anti-Semites".
Lerner blames the "lefties" for dividing the peace movement
and thereby undermining the movement's ability to push Bush
toward pressuring Sharon to adopt the Geneva Accord,
something he claims with a straight face was a real possibility.
So angry is Lerner at the failure of the Geneva Accord that
he says he would not be surprised if "some of the most militant
of the ultra-lefties today who managed to paralyze the
progressive forces because of their one-sided hostility to
Israel . . . turn out to be conscious and paid agents of the
Israeli or American political Right".

Lerner also has a puzzling tendency--puzzling for someone
clinging to the middle--to refer to the Palestinians as "the
Other". Although he uses the term in a friendly context--
of having respect for "the Other" for instance--the terminology
actually gives away the true nature of his neutrality. No
matter how conciliatory, Lerner clearly deep down thinks of
himself and Israel as residing on "this" side of that imaginary
middle path between "us" and "them", and therefore his first
interest is Israel. It cannot be particularly appealing for the
majority of Palestinians who seek genuine reconciliation to
be held at arm's length in this way. It is also very
distasteful for non-Jewish, non-Palestinian Americans who
do not feel a loyalty to Israel to hear any other American
refer to Israel as part of "us" while the Palestinians are
characterized so openly as alien.

The immorality of the center is that this middle path has
helped create a deathly silence about the destruction of
lives and property that goes on every day in the occupied
territories. Because they refuse to see realities on the
ground, centrists cannot even imagine the scale of the
oppression that Palestinians face at Israel's hands. They
cannot imagine the grotesque miscarriage of justice
represented by taking a middle position between the oppressor
and the oppressed. The checkpoints, the roadblocks, the
sniper shootings, the aerial bombardments, the assassinations,
the settlements and Israeli-only bypass roads, the land
confiscations, the bulldozing of olive groves, the demolition of
homes and entire residential neighborhoods, the foul labyrinth
of walls and fences that have imprisoned entire Palestinian
villages, halted all movement, separated farmers from farmland,
children from schools, the sick from hospitals, brothers from
brothers: all of these separate aspects of Israel's oppressive
system, and the magnitude of their totality, have escaped the
rosy view of those who only follow a middle way. Their silence
and averted gaze grease the wheels of oppression and are in no
way balanced by the occasional suicide bombing.

Their silence clears the way for ever greater Israeli violence,
making it easier for Israel to swallow more of Palestine while
the world looks elsewhere. Certainly the centrists are not alone
responsible for enabling continued Israeli oppression; they are
themselves fighting a valiant uphill struggle against vocal
mainstream pro-Israeli sentiment on the near right and the
far right, among Jewish organizations, Christian fundamentalists,
the media, and politicians of both major parties. But the peace
movement represents a substantial minority voice that could
have a major place in public discourse if only it would speak out
against oppression. Its determination merely to be a voice of
sweetness and light, rarely criticizing, always accentuating the
positive, severely diminishes its own impact and allows Israel to
be wanton while the rest of the world is silent.

"Balance" on the Right

Public discourse in general, and many in the vocal pro-Israel
community in particular, are tuning in to the public relations
benefits of appearing balanced and open to the Palestinians.
The rightwing pro-Israel advocacy group The Israel Project,
led by Republican consultants Frank Luntz and Jennifer Lazlo
Mizrahi, has recently been holding seminars to train activists
in how to get the Israeli message across most effectively
and is emphasizing the importance of being optimistic and
not demonizing the Palestinians. It's hard to distinguish
this kind of false, deliberately deceptive appearance of
"balance" from the balance advocated by the centrists of
the peace movement, and in terms of how the situation on
the ground plays out, there is no difference. As it works out in
actuality, neutrality is an endorsement, at least implicit and
often explicit, of all Israel's policies; it results in a virtually total
obliviousness to how those policies affect Palestinians, their daily
lives, and their national prospects. Centrist peace activists have
helped make this possible.

In this atmosphere, George Bush continues to spout his
inanities about two states living side by side in peace, while
Israel seizes the land on which the Palestinian state would
sit and ethnically cleanses its inhabitants. The silence induced
by the peace movement's stance in the middle helps make this
chicanery possible. The international community goes along, as
evidenced by the recent decision by the Quartet, representing
the UN, the EU, and Russia along with the U.S., to endorse
Sharon's unilateral "disengagement" plan for Gaza--something
Israeli activist Uri Avnery has dubbed a "scandalous" step,
constituting a confirmation by the international community that
the Palestinians have no right to take part in determining their
own fate. The Quartet endorsement came with indecent haste
just after Israel wound down a weeks-long rampage through
the city of Rafah, Gaza, during which it demolished entire
residential neighborhoods, left thousands of Palestinians homeless,
and fired missiles into crowds of peaceful demonstrators.

Not only did the centrists help make all this possible, but one of
the centrist peace organizations, Brit Tzedek, has endorsed the
Sharon plan for Gaza, with some skepticism to be sure, but
welcoming it as a definite indication that Sharon does intend
to get out of Gaza--never mind that a withdrawal is doubtful
at best, never mind that, even if he does get out, 1.3 million
Gazans would remain in what some have called a holding pen,
walled in and enclosed under Israeli control, always at Israel's
mercy, without freedom to move, to govern themselves, or
even to disagree with their imposed fate. Brit Tzedek believes
somehow that it was the Geneva Accord that forced Sharon
to come up with a plan and that the plan represents "a major
shift away from the extremist right and therefore toward the
moderate left".

(One would guess that Brit Tzedek's moderate left is
Tikkun's progressive middle.) Believing that Sharon acted out
of anything but purest opportunism, expecting to gain political
points and appear to the gullible like a peacemaker by pledging
to withdraw troops and settlers from a small sliver of land that
he never particularly wanted to keep in any case, is truly a
triumph of hope over realism.

The list of those easily fooled by such deceptions is long. In June,
407 congressmen and 95 senators passed resolutions lauding
Sharon's disengagement plan and seconding Bush's unilateral
endorsement of Israel's intent to annex occupied territory
and deny Palestinian refugees any right of return. House Minority
Leader Nancy Pelosi excused the overwhelmingly one-sided
House resolution by noting that she and many other congressmen
were concerned about the plight of Palestinians but were
satisfied that the resolution urges negotiations between the
parties and recognizes the absolute necessity that there be a
Palestinian state. \

Precisely seven Representatives voted
against this odious pretense.

The media too have largely been fooled, or fooled themselves,
into thinking that the Sharon plan means something. The
usually savvy Christian Science Monitor fell into the trap of
misplaced optimism with a recent editorial welcoming Sharon's
Gaza plan as something that is "already boosting prospects for
peace in the Middle East". What usually fuels this incongruous
optimism, not only in the Monitor but elsewhere in the media
and among the doggedly upbeat centrists, are polls that
show a large majority of Israelis favoring a Gaza withdrawal and
even dismantlement of many West Bank settlements, additional
polls that show far more American Jews supporting the Geneva
Accord than opposing it, and the widespread belief, spurious but
tenacious among peace hopefuls, that not only the Israeli left,
but the right as well, recognize that Israel will lose its character
as a Jewish state if it does not soon shed control over some
Palestinian territories.

In fact, the right is not hesitant about getting rid of the
Palestinians by whatever means necessary and therefore is
not worried about being able to maintain Israel's Jewish character.
As for the polls, they have shown forthcoming attitudes for some
years, but none of this good thinking has induced either the pollees
or their governments in Israel and the U.S. to institute changes on
the ground. Thus, while the peace movement does nothing, basking
in the comforting knowledge that majorities everywhere "want peace",
Israel is swallowing more land and killing more Palestinians without
interference.

Much of the optimism prevailing nowadays arises from the fact
that there has not been a suicide bombing in Israel for over
three months. Rather than take this as a reason for hope,
Ha'aretz correspondent Danny Rubinstein, more of a realist
than the peace movement centrists, recently observed that,
far from inducing an interest among Israelis in moving toward
peace, this possibly temporary respite from fear has brought
a determined complacency and lack of interest in what is
happening to Palestinians. "Israeli public opinion has become
deaf to Palestinian suffering", he says, because a clear
equation has been created in the Israeli mind: as long
as "they" suffer, we Israelis are not being blown up. The
centrists of the peace movement tend to think this way
themselves, and in a kind of vicious circle, the silence
induced by their insistence on balance and neutrality plays
a part in facilitating the Palestinian suffering.

And finally, there is Rafah, where Israel destroyed much of
a city while the world, seeking neutrality, sat by.

Neutrality in Rafah

The great appeal of being positive and on the middle
path is that it gives one the soothing feeling that something
is being done. One is able to avoid confronting the
discomfiting realization that not only is nothing positive
happening, but things get worse by the day. Neutrality
allows one to ignore stories like the following, told to Ha'aretz
correspondent Gideon Levy in the aftermath of Israel's
destruction of Rafah in May. Manal Awad is a young architect
who lives in Rafah but was working in Gaza City on the day
Israeli tanks demolished her family's home. "I'll never forget
that day", she told Levy. "My sister called and told me there
was a tank next to the house . . . but in our worst dreams
we never imagined that our home would be destroyed. . . .
It was the first time in my life that I ever heard my
mother cry like that.

. . . In 1948, the family fled from our village near Ramle
to a cave. In 1972, Sharon demolished our house in the
Shabura camp, when I was a baby. Now this is the
third house. My mother is a strong woman, but now she's
broken. It's the end for her. She always dreamed about
the first house that they fled from, but she was attached
to the house in the camp. Now it's all meaningless. Her life
was for nothing. . . . I lost all my memories there. A house
isn't just walls. . . . Photographs of our loved ones and our
joys and our sorrows--all destroyed. . . . Nothing is left. The
house is destroyed. Life is destroyed. . . . It was a simple
refugees' house, but on the inside it was beautiful to me".

The reaction throughout the United States to Israel's
horrifying brutality in Gaza throughout May and into June
demonstrated a concerted, almost obsessive effort by
Israeli supporters of all political stripes, including most
centrists, to excuse, cover up, divert attention--in effect,
to encourage ignorance of what actually occurred. But
ignorance is not an excuse, just as the Germans' claim
that they did not know about the slaughter of Jews during
the Holocaust was not an excuse. Mindlessly promoting
peace plans in the vacuum of destruction and devastation
left in Israel's wake, without decrying Israel's actions and
U.S. complicity in them, is not enough, just as promoting
a peace plan in the midst of the Rwanda massacre,
without taking action to end the massacre, would not
have been enough.

Yet the devastation in Gaza seems to have left most
Americans unfazed. New York Times columnist Thomas
Friedman got through the entire Israeli rampage without
so much as a mention: the killing spree; the helicopter
and tank fire on peaceful protesters; the sniper fire on
children gathering laundry and buying candy; the massive
demolition of homes in Rafah like the one described above;
the thousands left homeless; the lines of refugees
fleeing bulldozers and carrying away furniture and bedding
on donkey carts; the massive destruction of personal
property, greenhouses, even petting zoos; the lives ruined.

This is characteristic of Friedman. He also never
bothered to take much note of Israel's murderous siege
of Jenin two years ago. Unlike Jenin, there were pictures
this time, literally hundreds of them available the world
over, on the Internet and even occasionally on the front
pages of mainstream newspapers, including Friedman's own
--pictures of bleeding children, dead children, adults in
morgues, crying women picking through piles of rubble for
their possessions. But Friedman ignores such things.
Friedman would probably not characterize himself as a
follower of Michael Lerner's middle path, but he is basically
a centrist and fancies himself a fair critic of Israel, particularly
of its settlements policy. But let Israel commit an unadulterated
war crime, something that might truly tax his conscience, and
he has nothing to say, as if it never happened.

One should probably not be too hard on Friedman. Few
other public people seemed outraged by or even to notice
the devastation in Gaza either. At its height, George Bush
appeared before Israel's lobby, AIPAC, and, to rousing
cheers, endorsed Israel's "right to defend itself"; when the
destruction reached discomfiting levels even for this
White House, all the administration could muster was a few
sotto voce words of reproach and a limp abstention on a
critical UN Security Council resolution, a sign of mild
displeasure with Israel but hardly anything approaching
condemnation. (Two years ago, after Israelis had bulldozed
a large portion of Jenin, Bush thought the action qualified
Ariel Sharon as a "man of peace".) John Kerry could not find
it in his political heart to say anything about Gaza. No congressman
said anything. Few peace groups could find outrage anywhere in
their peace-loving hearts either. Tikkun did not cry out, or Brit
Tzedek, or United for Peace and Justice.

Everyone has been numbed by long years of accumulated
perceptions. The thought, for instance, that Israel is
after all only "defending itself", as it has had to do
year after year against supposedly hate-filled Arabs,
this time against a network of tunnels through which
Palestinian "terrorists" smuggle "arms", helps overcome
the unpleasantness of having to look at terrible pictures
of innocent people under assault. The fact that an
Israeli settler family, including four children, were
murdered by Palestinian attackers and that "terrorists"
(who would be called resistance fighters or guerrillas in
any other context) killed 13 Israeli soldiers who were on
their way to invade Rafah relieves most Americans of any
obligation to examine proportionality, to wonder whether
shooting Palestinian children and leaving thousands of
hapless civilians without homes is a proper response.
The realities that no more than one or two tunnels were
found during this rampage, that the vast majority of
Palestinian dead and homeless are innocent civilians, that
the Palestinians who killed the settler family and the Israeli
soldiers had long since been killed themselves, and that
whatever arms are smuggled happen to be quite insignificant,
have all gone unnoticed.

The fact that Israel named its demolition derby
"Operation Rainbow" also creates a diversion, putting a
happy gloss on an atrocity; the fact that this is a grossly
hypocritical bit of spin, somewhat akin to dubbing the
Nazis' assault on the Warsaw Ghetto "Operation Sunshine",
can be pushed aside. The naïve but eagerly nourished
thought that Ariel Sharon is fighting the good fight to
withdraw Israeli troops and settlers from Gaza, struggling
against recalcitrant rightwing ministers, adds to the relief
of those who desperately want to believe the best about
Israel and find excuses for its actions. Yet another psychological
aid is the perception we have all imbibed from our earliest years
that Israel is "good"--all innocence, always the victim--and that
one must never judge Israeli actions harshly because it is
essentially incapable of doing bad things. All of these
perceptions have created a mindset about Israel throughout
the United States that produces a knee-jerk, almost electric
horror at any strong criticism of Israel. The first reaction of
journalists, politicians, friends of Israel, centrist peace groups,
most Israelis themselves--anyone who does not want to
acknowledge the reality of Israel's atrocities--is to turn away
from uncomfortable realities, to refuse see, refuse to hear.

Many Israelis are not so dishonest. Ha'aretz correspondents
Amira Hass and Gideon Levy have been in Gaza witnessing
and graphically reporting what is occurring. Jeff Halper,
the Israeli anthropologist and activist whose organization
rebuilds demolished Palestinian homes, was among the first
to alert the world to the scale of Israel's brutality in Gaza.
Peace activist Uri Avnery calls Israel's rampage a "rape",
animated by an "evil spirit" abroad in Israel and carried out
to gratify "primitive emotions". Longtime leftist politician
and peace activist Shulamit Aloni has also spoken out
against the "arrogant and light-hearted way in which we
kill and murder Palestinians . . . and then pretend that we
are the victims". Directly comparing Israelis to Germans in
the 1940s, she charges that most Israelis, wallowing in a
"patriotic hysteria" that induces them to keep quiet, don't
want to know what is going on and refuse to read Hass's and
Levy's reports from the occupied territories.

One seldom hears this kind of tough talk from Americans,
even more rarely from centrist peace activists. In fact,
these activists have become adept at undermining this
kind of testimony from Israelis on the scene: Levy has a
Palestinian girlfriend, it is noted pointedly (obviously meant
to be a damning revelation, apparently undermining his
objectivity; having a Jewish girlfriend would undoubtedly
not be an impediment to objectivity); the criticism of Hass
is that she is obsessed and not well balanced (despite her
credentials as the daughter of Holocaust survivors and
despite--or perhaps because of--her actual knowledge,
gained not merely from reading but from witnessing what
Palestinians endure under Israeli occupation); Halper is
seen to be too critical of Israelis and too sympathetic
toward Palestinians (lack of balance, the unforgivable sin);
Avnery allegedly has a shady past (although no one seems
to have the details) or he is just getting old; Aloni is a
has-been (long experience of the Israeli political scene is of
no value). And anyway, these Israelis are all what some
would call radical "lefties".

The true objection to these Israelis is that they speak an
uncomfortable truth; they actually know what is going on,
they actually know that Israel is committing atrocities,
and they are not afraid of saying that the Jewish state
pursues immoral policies and commits immoral actions.
They cannot be contradicted on the facts. And so the
peace groups must devise excuses for not hearing them
and not speaking out. The supposed need for balance
and neutrality is an excuse. Israelis like this are the most
dangerous spokesmen as far as peace activists are
concerned, for they challenge the conscience, and they
undermine the very centrist basis on which the peace
groups rest.

Perhaps a little step to the left, off the middle path, by
the country's peace groups would have induced Bush
to call off Sharon's dogs in Rafah. Or perhaps not. But
it would obviously have been worth the effort. The
possibility that many innocent Palestinian lives could have
been saved if the "progressive middle" had taken a
stand is certainly not nearly as fantastic as Lerner's notion
that Bush would have been galvanized to pressure Sharon
if only the progressive left had not been quite so leftist.

Centrism as a Salve

One centrist activist recently observed that it is
critical always to remain positive. After being made
aware of a particularly egregious Israeli action, he
said he had to sit back and catch his breath because
this new knowledge challenged his centrism. He was
concerned that he might end up defending the Palestinians
if he did not take some time to restore his positive attitude.

This is astounding. A positive attitude is fine, but
if it blinds us to anything negative, it is very bad
indeed. Ignoring the negative did not end apartheid
in South Africa. Being positive did not expel the French
colons from Algeria. Sweetness and light did not get us
out of Vietnam. Centrism and a refusal to criticize will not
unseat George Bush.

Injustice has seldom if ever been ended by refusing to
notice and speak out against it. Israel's absorption and
Judaization of the occupied territories are increasingly
rendering a two-state solution meaningless and, as the
possibility of an equitable resolution moves farther out
of reach, the notion of approaching the conflict via the
middle becomes more and more a sham. The time has
come to emphasize the negative.

Those on the ground know better than the centrist
activists and know the reality. Contrast the activist's attitude
above with that of a young Palestinian Lutheran minister in
Bethlehem who speaks of hope in a quite different way.

Discussing the profound difficulties of ministering in any
meaningful way to a congregation under occupation,
Reverend Mitri Raheb writes in Bethlehem Besieged that
with its talk of peace on earth, Christmas has become
particularly difficult for him. The usual emphasis at
Christmas is on what he calls a "cheap peace", which is in
fact merely "a bit of wishful thinking [engaged in] when
one is not ready to do much". For Palestinians, "peace talk"
often turns out to be simply a formula for managing the
conflict rather than resolving it--a situation in which "
the world continues to talk peace while Israel continues
to build the wall". With the beginning of the peace process,
Raheb says, Palestinians had real hope, but in the last few
years hope has evaporated. "Our vision of peace became
unrealistic, justice was impossible, coexistence nothing but
a myth. . . . A hopeful vision cannot be mere words,
statements, or resolutions. In fact, people gave up hope
because there was a clear discrepancy between what they
were seeing and what they were hearing. They were hearing
the false prophets say, 'Peace, peace,' but on the ground
there was no peace. . . . Waiting, being passive, and
feeling optimistic about the future--these are false hope".

The world's obliviousness to Israel's wanton destruction of
property and lives and livelihoods at Rafah, and in general
to the obscene oppression that is the occupation, is
stupefying. Yet, although minorities of courageous Israelis
and American Jews speak out in opposition, most self-defined
centrists in the U.S., both within and outside the peace
movement, still do not dare confront Israeli governments in
any meaningful way. Centrists have clung too long to a
misguided reluctance to deviate from what the Palestinian
Mitri Raheb cynically calls the false hope of "balance", passivity,
and forced optimism. By their timidity, the centrists vastly
strengthen those in the U.S. and Israel whose true goal is to
rid Palestine of Palestinians.

Kathleen Christison, a former CIA political analyst, has
been a freelance writer since resigning from the CIA in
1979, dealing primarily with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Her book
Perceptions of Palestine: Their Influence
on U.S. Middle East Policy was published in 2001.
A second book, The Wound of Dispossession:
Telling the Palestinian Story, was published in
2002.

They can be reached at:
christison@counterpunch.org