Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s
Ottawa Citizen is another letter on the Gaza war that gives me an opportunity to comment further:
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http://www.ottawacitizen.com/opinion/letters/Polarized+thinking/1178303/story.html
Polarized our thinking
THE OTTAWA CITIZEN
JANUARY 15, 2009
It has been very disquieting listening to and reading about Israel's Gaza war, in the Canadian and American media. The Canadian government's unwavering support of Israel falls directly in step with American policies. How different from the more balanced British and European views. Unfortunately, this war has polarized Canadian thinking, and one is afraid to approach friends or family, who may hold a steadfast view, that brooks no debate. We have to ask ourselves, "Are we not humans first, or are we simply Canadians, Jews, Arabs, Zionists, Israelis or Americans?" It's time to put aside self-serving nationalistic fervour. While we are debating the why, where or how of the conflict, innocent people are dying, and infrastructures are being obliterated. This war has to stop, and it has to stop now.
Grace Ahrens,
Ottawa
© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen
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I’ll work from the bottom and then the top to get to the main point:
• The war “has to stop” when the two combatants agree and neither has accomplished its aims or
cried “uncle!”, yet;
• The ‘balance’ Ms. Ahrens seeks lies in, essentially, blaming Israel for almost everything; and
• Her question -
"Are we not humans first, or are we simply Canadians, Jews, Arabs, Zionists, Israelis or Americans?" – deserves an answer. We may all be humans but, for centuries, even millennia, we have not recognized one another as such. For example: We have enslaved one another and we do so today, in part in the
belief that some people, based on e.g. skin colour, are not quite as human as the rest of us and
may, therefore, be enslaved without violating one of the great, human, moral codes. We are a complex mix of race, creed, nationalism, humanism and, above all, culture.
Jews pose a special problem. I am a child of the
None is too many generation. When I was a child anti-Semitism (prejudice against Jews, specifically) was rife; the
image of the Jew was still
Shylock while the Arab was, if anything, romanticized as a
noble ”knight” of the desert.
But we learned about the
holocaust and even if old habits died hard we – those for whom the horror was a real, current event – decided that, finally, the Jews had earned the
right to a safe haven of their own. Israel is it. There are plenty of flaws in the planning and execution of a safe haven for the Jews but at least a couple of generations of people (including Canadians) are committed to the idea that one must exist, no matter what. More important, the people of Israel have agreed on “never again” and they are acquiring the means to make that statement into a fact.
There is a moral dilemma: amongst the greatest of all
crimes against humanity have been perpetrated against the Jews – just because they were Jews. But now the Jews have a modern, vibrant and militarily powerful state and they are, relatively, unconcerned about using their power to secure their national aim: never again. And we, the liberal, democratic West carry two huge burdens of collective guilt that makes it impossible to ‘let nature take its course in region’:
First, we retain,
as we must, a great burden of guilt for the whole “none is too many” attitude that actually helped along the “final solution” by convincing the Germans that there was no alternative way to be ‘rid of the Jews’ since no one else wanted them, either; and
Second, we have a new burden of guilt because we helped the Israelis ‘displace’ the
Palestinians.
Our thinking is not polarized;
we are polarized because we are not, simply, humans, we are complex mixes of race, creed and culture – and the latter, in many respects, colours our politics more than either skin colour or religious preference. I, for example, am
culturally predisposed – partially by
cultural guilt - to side with the Israelis, imagining them as the beleaguered defenders of the Jew’s last, best hope. I can rationalize the facts – and
I think they are facts that:
• There is no ‘peace’ so long as Israel exists where it is now, and the Arabs will not surrender, they will not quit until they get their ‘peace;’ and
• Sooner or later the Arabs have to win once – but one, only one, single Arab victory is one more than Israel can ever tolerate.
But all my rationalization will not overcome my
belief that the Jews
deserve this one, last, best hope and that they are right to fight for it and we – a bigger ‘we’ than just the American led West – have to find a way to give the Palestinians redress for their very real, very legitimate grievances, without forcing Israel to surrender its core
raison d’être.
Maybe I, maybe we all are polarized. I suggest we cannot help it and trying for a false sense of moral 'balance' is pointless.
Edit: typo - and where I meant to say an
