By Bruce S. Ticker
PHILADELPHIA — “Only one side ethnically cleanses…When does defending Israel cross the line into racism? The moment anybody defends Israel, of course.”
So writes Steven Salaita, author of Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine. Salaita and other advocates for the Palestinians would convince me that peace between Israel and the Palestinians is impossible – if they represent the prevailing view. Palestinians can only achieve what they want and deserve by warring with Israel.
I tend to tell others this conflict is about two peoples who are not going anywhere. They can compromise or persist in killing one another.
The latter choice is clearly the preference of some in the pro-Arab crowd. They argue for what the Palestinians should achieve through distortions and focusing on the past. The Palestinians cannot get everything they deserve through negotiations.
I was exposed to their attitudes at length during the last few weeks when they fervently defended Temple University professor Marc Lamont Hill’s Nov. 28 speech at the United Nations where he proclaimed the need for a “free Palestine from the river to the sea.” Advocates for Israel – including members of Temple’s board of trustees – called for the university to fire him, if possible. The board condemned Hill’s remarks, but would not vote to dismiss him.
The controversy dominated The Philadelphia Inquirer’s editorial pages with op-eds and letters, including one written by yours truly. Mine contended that Jewish students could no longer trust Lamont to be fair because of his statement’s threatening implications.
Lamont did not bother to explain what constitutes a “free Palestine” or identify the river and the sea in question. Or how the Palestinians would achieve a “free Palestine.”
I permitted the Inquirer to print my email address, and four readers responded with a range of defenses for Hill and the Palestinian cause. Plus, I received hostile comments from a few Facebook users. I will be plugging in their comments as they wrote them, complete with upper-case lettering, cursing, misspellings and confusing language. They are identified by their initials to protect their privacy.
E.S. says he met Palestinians who are “dignified people who lament that their land was taken…Are they supposed to just look the other way?” G.P. – who says he has a B.A. in history – adds that “Ben-Gurion’s troops HEINOUSLY AND DESPICABLY DROVE the Palestinians out of territory that would comprise the State of Israel, not securing them a place to go! THAT IS the root cause of the violence.”
Writes C.M. “…put your self in the shoes of a Palestinian…anyone would be pissed and angry for getting F’d for that.”
Facebook writer C.D. dismissed the Camp David negotiations of 2000 by admonishing me to “stop believing the fairy tale about how Israel offered a just solution, and the Palestinians are to blame for refusing it.” B.B. proclaims on Facebook: “YOU are the apologist for apartheid!…what gives Israel, regardless of who is in power, the right to illegally seize ancestoreial lands of Palestinian peoples?”
Steven Salaita’s voices attitudes that are hardly implicit, such as…”Colonizers like to present unilateral decisions as cooperative. And it’s always racist…Gaza is the result of ethnic cleansing, a brutal experiment in warehousing human surplus…Palestinians lack agency until it’s time to justify another Israeli massacre…Only one side colonizes. Only one side demolishes homes, crops, schools, and hospitals. Only one side ethnically cleanses.”
Most readers can readily refute many of these assertions sans confusing language, cursing and upper-case lettering and exclamation points. We merely need to trace this conflict through accepted history – the Arabs’ frequent refusal to participate in evenhanded diplomacy, a background of violence that was initiated by the Arabs and root causes that can be traced far longer before 1947.
I asked G.P. – the one with the B.A. in history – to refer me to documentation (books, articles, etc.) that “the Israeli military shamefully refused to let the Palestinians live side-by-side with the Israelis in the new State of Israel.”
With his grasp of history, G.P. wrote back: “I read an Inquirer article at the time that the U.S. embassy moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, an article that made reference to the dishonorable and despicable expulsion of Palestinians from the land designated to be Israel! (This was last spring, when the Embassy move was effected.) Reading this article helped me recognize the underlying cause of turmoil in the Middle East.”
That’s one article, which he failed to identify. He might have been referring to a guest column claiming – without attribution – that Israel expelled 80 percent of Palestinians who left Israel in 1948 when Arab countries invaded.
From all I have read, it appears that most Palestinians fled when caught in the crossfire or left voluntarily when Arab leaders urged them to leave while their armies would overwhelm Israel and drive the Jews into the sea. Some Israelis were reportedly responsible for a small minority of Arabs who fled, which was the exception to the rule.
Two decades ago, I decided to keep track of the conflict by reading books and articles and follow news coverage every day. I was tired of being confronted by harsh critics of Israel when I could not discuss the issue intelligently. These people have not gone anywhere.
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Ticker is a freelance writer based in Philadelphia. He may be contacted via bruce.ticker@sdjewishworld.com