Williamson:
Israel’s critics hold it responsible for
the fate of those whom Hamas is using as human shields.
There
is not much that is simple about the Arab–Israeli conflict, but there is one
thing that is certain: The question of how many Palestinian women and children
are going to die in Gaza is not going to be decided by the Israelis — it is
going to be decided by Hamas.
The
Jews mean to live, Hamas means to exterminate them, and there will be war until
Hamas and its allies either weary of it or win it and the last Israeli Jew is
dead or exiled. It is Hamas, not the Israelis, that stashes rockets and
soldiers in schools and hospitals, but it is the Israelis the world expects to
take account of that situation. Every creature on this Earth, from ant to
gazelle, is entitled to — expected to
— defend its life to the last: The Israeli Jews, practically alone among the
world’s living things, are expected to make allowances for the well-being of
those who are trying to exterminate them. No one lectures the antelope on
restraint when the jackals come, but the Jews in the Jewish state are in the
world’s judgment not entitled to what is granted every fish and insect as a
matter of course.
That is
one bit of strangeness, but there are a great many strange little assumptions
that worm their way into our language, and our thought, when it comes to the
Arab–Israeli conflict. Once a week or so, somebody will publicize a chart
purporting to show the shrinkage of “Arab land” in what is now Israel and the
Palestinian territories — as though Arabs did not hail from Arabia, as though
they popped up out of the ground around Jerusalem like crocus blossoms. As
though those Arab lands hadn’t been Turkish lands, Roman lands, Macedonian
lands, Jewish lands.
As
though this situation just dropped out of the sky.
Israel,
as a Jewish state, is a relatively new country, having been established in
1948. But the idea of Palestine as a particular polity, much less an Arab
polity, is a relatively new one, too, only 28 years older. Until the day before
yesterday, the word “Palestinian” referred to Jews living in their ancestral
homeland. During Roman rule, Palestine was considered a part of Syria: The
prefect of Judea, Pontius Pilate, was subordinate to the legate of Syria,
Palestine being a not especially notable outpost. (It is perhaps for this
reason that no physical evidence of Pilate’s existence was unearthed until 1961.)
That situation obtained for centuries; as late as the 19th century, the idea of
an Arab Palestine distinct from Syria was a novel one, and one expressed in
Ottoman administrative practice rather than in anything resembling a state as
the term is understood. The notion of a Palestinian Arab nation dates to only a
few decades before the establishment of the modern state of Israel.
The notion dates to 1920; the Palestinian
Arab state as a reality never
existed. The incompatible concepts of statehood obtaining in the West and in
the Arab world until quite recently are in some ways the root of the dispute,
as indeed they were with the early Americans’ relationships with the Indian
tribes and various colonial powers’ experience in Africa. But somehow, in the
modern mind, the idea that Israel sits upon what is, was, and shall always be
“Arab land” is fixed.
The
story of humankind is that peoples move around and bump into each other, and
the results are often unpleasant. Somebody wins, somebody loses, and, after
some period of time, whatever temporary situation endures comes to be
considered normal. No one complains that the Celts occupied Ireland and
subsumed the identities preceding them. The British came to control Palestine
through war, true — and Saladin, what was he? An olive trader?
Israel’s
critics often charge its defenders with intentionally conflating anti-Zionism
and anti-Semitism. One wonders, though, what kind of analysis holds that the
Israelis are uniquely responsible for the fate of those whom Hamas is using as
human shields, while Hamas cannot be held to the same standard. The answer is:
an analysis predicated on the unspoken belief that the Jewish people in the
Jewish state are under a unique obligation to lay down and die.
But
they do not appear ready to lay down and die. And so one thing is certain: The
question of how many Palestinian women and children are going to die in Gaza is
not going to be decided by the Israelis — it is going to be decided by Hamas.
