Ran HaCohen
“Where is the Palestinian Gandhi?” is a quite popular question, especially abroad. You won’t often hear it asked (with the inevitable self-righteous shrug) here in Israel: after all, the Israeli culture itself worships violence, with the semantic field of “war” being the richest in the modern Hebrew language, with militarism as the state religion, and with popular wisdom expressed in rules of thumb such as “where force won’t do, try more......
"There are thousands of Palestinian Gandhis out there, then: whole villages that demonstrate daily and peacefully against the robbery of their land and livelihood. Alas, their voices are unheard – because of the Israeli undercover soldiers who throw stones from within these peaceful demonstrations, and because of commentators and movie stars who then wonder, “Where is the Palestinian Gandhi?”"
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Step forward Palestinian Gandhis, the bulldozers await you.
ReplyDeleteMany, many Palestinian Gandhi have been thrown in jails over the last 60 Years. Probably assassinated, too.
ReplyDeleteI stopped reading Eric Alterman when he started posing this as a Very Serious Deep Question about I/P. Alterman is a classic PEP, able to see, and write movingly about, injustice and suffering everywhere, even in Palestine, but still wedded weepily to the Zionist Dream, unable to see it as the nightmare it is.
ReplyDeleteNobody ever asked this question about the South Africans, or the civil rights movement in the U.S., nor do they ever ask it about the Burmese or the Haitians or the or the Zapatistas or anyone else. Only Palestinians are expected to be saint-like (and even Gandhi was no saint). Of course, because it's an impossible standard, and that's how Israel and its buddies like it, setting an unreasonable standard that nobody could live up to. It "absolves" them.
What I'd really like people to start asking is, where is the Israeli Schindler?