376. Israeli Settlements: A Pure and Simple Wrong, Richly Covered

In a world of maddening moral complexity we should be happy when we run into a case as simple as the Israeli settlements on the West Bank territory.  

Making other people's land yours is wrong.  The West Bank is the Palestinian's land (check "Demographic History of Palestine," Wikipedia), what's left after the Israelis took the rest of it.  The Israelis are taking some of it.  That's an aggression, wrong, with a greater wrong and aggression in the offing, taking all of it, or all  within the boundaries of the ancient states of Israel and Judah.

You know you've got a simple problem when you can solve it by getting the answer to a simple question.  In this case it's a question we can imagine putting to the Israelis when they permitted the very first settlement: Do you want to take the Palestinian's land —  that is, all the land within the boundaries of the ancient nations of Israel and Judah?  As long as the settlements are permitted the answer has to be Yes.  Since every Israeli prime minister since Yitzhak Rabin has permitted new settlements the answer from the record is Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, and Yes.

And the reason for the Yes's?  The prime ministers are politicians and have an instinct for majority opinion, buried or on the surface, and here the majority opinion is that God gave that land to them.  The majority, made up of a good many liberals, believes or goes along with what the sophisticated-looking woman in Tel Aviv said to the TV reporter after Secretary Kerry's speech to the UN:  "We will arrive and build and we will continue to be obedient to this tremendous promise that God has given us, the land of Israel" (Reuters video insert in Jonathan Martin, NYT, 12-28-16).

That's the Big Fact  and that's what Netanyahu had to keep hidden with his scolding and outrage and cries of betrayal and protests of innocence in his response to Kerry's speech at the UN.  Because with the Big Fact out in the open everybody would see the wrong of Israel's action, taking  people's land from them.  Naked aggression.  It meets every definition.

The settlers themselves were well ahead of him, and were maybe his model, when they put the label "facts on the ground" on their settlements.   Little facts, little facts, little facts, little facts (because they were easier to defend or ignore), then in the distance, boom, the Big Fact.  Removing it at that point would be so inhumane.

Anyway, the motive given is about as poor a motive as I can think of, to do wrong because God wants you to.  Your God, not the other side's God, not the God of most of the rest of the world.  The simplicity of it came back to me again and again as Netanyahu piled on his complications, his concentration on peripheral things, his tugs on the searchlight to get it away from Israel's goal.  I put him on a courtroom stand.  "Is it the case that you want to take that land?"  If he says No, up comes Exhibit A, settlements, what he has just called "not the issue."  I ask if there is any other goal that can explain them.  The jury is undistractable.  They know what the issue is.

The American public may at any time turn into a jury like that, and they have to be distracted.  The poorer a motive, the more wrong an action, the more flawed a reason, the more it needs to be covered with PR.  That's what PR people are there for, as longtime Public Relations sage Vic Gold learned from one of his bosses ("I don't need you when I'm right") and made the title of his book.  

 And oh how covering of the Israeli wrong has grown.  PR (persuasion) going on to lobbying and money (campaign contributions) and more devices of rhetoric than Aristotle, the great theorist of persuasion, ever thought of.  The wrong was covered and is still so thoroughly covered that 88 U. S. senators recently signed a letter opposing UN resolutions like the last one, against further settlements (NYT, above).  That's pretty close to the number of senators who receive campaign contributions through AIPAC, the main lobbyists for Israel.  (AIPAC itself does not make political contributions; it uses its resources to link members of Congress with pro-Israel donors.)

As I have said before (Post 225), the Jews going along with the settlers, making a majority, aren't the Jews I know.  Jews to me are sharp-minded CCNY graduates come to get an advanced degree out in the Heartland where they shot the bejesus out of appeals to the holy scriptures of primitive people.

And I have asked, more in anger than in pity, "What do I have to do with these new Jews?  Why in the hell should I support a Congressman who supports these primitives, primitives who want aid so they can continue their primitive project, one that drags my country into all this trouble?  And who have a prime minister who reproaches and scolds us when our support for his primitives falters?"

Now there is a question that arises, and shouldn't arise, and that Jews hate to see arising but whose rise is inevitable here, it fits so closely with what I have said about the Congressmen, that a torrent of PR has washed them to Israel's side.  What, to a candidate for election or re-election, is better, more persuasive PR than a big contribution to his or her campaign fund? 

That, fitting so closely the pogrom-igniting stereotype of the rich Jew pulling the strings of the government of the country he sojourns in, is a dangerous question to ask, and would not be asked here if the answer were not, "No, that is not true.  There is something better and more persuasive than money, and it probably sways more Americans to Israel's side than money."

I'm not sure what it is but I know I'm close to it when I place the wrong the Israelis are doing among wrongs I've read about in history.  The British putting Boers in concentration camps, the Romans raping the Sabine women, the Athenians killing the Melian men and making slaves of the women and children.   The latter is the worst (I've talked about it many times), and provokes the most fertile speculation.  How would I respond to the Athenian government hiring a lot of PR people, really slick sophists, to gloss it over? to Athenian extremists hiding Melian graves? to an Athenian statesman scolding me for having doubts about them?

As a young reader I'd been rooting for the Athenians and, the interesting thing, this wrong did not make me quit rooting.  Why?  Because I so admired what the Athenians had started building in their society, and seeing how what they started with played out, that I just couldn't switch sides.  Even though the side I was choosing was clearly wrong, and the side I was rejecting was clearly right.

Now I am not reading history, I am standing in the moment of its making, and, with possibilities open, choosing between envisioned products. "How will what the Israelis start with play out and how will what the Palestinians start with play out?  Which do I go for?"  The Israeli playout wins hands down over the Palestinian, or maybe I should say Muslim, playout.  As, when I stopped with my finger in the page of the history book, the Roman playout won over the Sabine and the Athenian won over the Melian.  Despite the crimes.

I am tolerating wrongs, unbearable to me at one point in my youth, but bearable now because I have learned from a larger number of history books that there are no starting points that don't rest on a wrong, and that no playout is free of wrong..  And, from my own reactions while reading, I have learned that if the playout is interesting enough I inevitably forget about the wrongs and get all wrapped up in the playout.  Sure it was wrong for the males in this Latin tribe to just grab these Sabine women for wives, but damn, they had something going for them the Sabines just didn't have, and I wanted to watch that play out.  As I did with other things they did to other tribes as they went along.

I now see myself applying the Test of the Playout to my own tribe.  We committed terrible wrongs against the Native Americans.  As I read of them does that switch my interest? my vision of the future?  How, I ask with my finger on the page, do I see the Cherokee cultural possession playing out? the Inuit?  Any of the wronged tribes?  Compared to what I see around me, the realized future of the day of the crimes, the Native-American playout is unexciting, to say the least.  

The excitement is in the promise of what a culture has going.  To the native Hawaiians trying to keep the Thirty Meter Telescope from being built on their sacred mountain (NYT, 10-3-16) I say, "Look, we've got something going here, and unless you can show me that what you've got going is more promising for the future, more exciting, more worth watching unfold in a book, I'm with those forcing you off."  To make the eviction easier, for them and my less convinced friends, I add,  "With all possible  accommodations to your feelings and traditions, of course."

There's no reason this shouldn't apply to the West Bank Muslims.  They're not innately inferior, they're not different humans.  They're just off on an unpromising track.  They're primitives and they have too far to go.  They once had some interest but now they're a bore.

Yes, the intensely religious Jews now determining Israel's policy are as boring and unpromising as the religious Muslims, but there's a difference.  Though they are fixed in their religion, they are not fixed in their government, which has, in the way of the West, provision for their removal.  The playout could go in favor of Jews like the ones I once knew.  There's your excitement and interest and hope.   And there's my support or Israel.  And if that's the support I, a fountain of objections to Israel's behavior, give, isn't it going to be the support given by Americans who make fewer objections and quieter complaints?