Death as a Way of Life

QED

January 2002

On January 3, 2002, the Israeli navy intercepted the Karine A a ship heading for the Palestinian Authority’s port at Gaza with a cargo of 50 tons of arms and ammunition. Israel claimed that the Palestinian Authority, Iran, and Hezbollah had collaborated in this smuggling operation.

The capture of the Palestinian arms ship means we can breathe easier. This profusion of weapons won’t be aimed at Israel. There’s also a sense of gratitude toward the soldiers who participated in the raid. But the voices of the spokesmen for the army, the government, and the media evinced an undisguised joy at having finally found “conclusive evidence” of the Palestinians’ nefarious terrorist intentions. As they would have it, it is now beyond a doubt that “the Palestinian Authority is infected with terror from the soles of its feet to its scalp,” as Shaul Mofaz, the Army’s Chief of Staff, declared at the press conference. He seemed to be trying, for a moment, to bring back the glory of the heroic 1950s, or even of the legendary Entebbe operation of 1974.

But what proof is this? It is proof that if you oppress a nation for thirty-five years, humiliate its leader, abuse its people, and offer them no hope, that nation will seek to protect itself however it can. Would any of us act differently than the Palestinians if we faced the same situation? Didn’t we, in fact, do exactly the same during the years we spent, at different times in our history, under occupation and tyranny?

Avshalom Feinberg and Yosef Lishansky traveled to Cairo in 1916 to get money for the NILI underground organization so that the Jewish community in Palestine could defend itself against the Turks; members of the three underground organizations of the 1930s and ’40s — Haganah, LEHI, and Etzel — acquired and stashed away as many weapons as possible, and the caches where they hid these arms still symbolize the Jewish struggle for survival and freedom. We still admire the Zionist fighters who participated in daring operations to capture arms during the period of the British Mandate, operations that the British considered acts of terror.

But when we performed such exploits, they were not terrorism. They were the legitimate actions of a nation that was fighting for its independence. When the Palestinians behave similarly, it is seen as proof of everything that we have been so keen to prove for years.

It was embarrassing and infuriating to hear Mofaz and the minister of defense, Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, lecture the Palestinians on how they are “wasting their money on buying arms instead of taking care of their hungry, indigent population.” These are the words of men whose soldiers — following instructions from the government — are abusing Palestinians day and night, depriving them of food and property. It was no less shameful to observe the Israeli press coverage of the ship’s capture. The reporters, awestruck at the heroism of our soldiers, all without exception embraced the sanctimonious assertions of the prime minister and chief of staff about how murder and terrorism burn in the hearts of the Palestinians almost as a second nature.

Now we’ll have the celebrations, the glee of “we told you so”: We told you that the Palestinians don’t keep agreements (unlike us, of course, who honor all agreements); we told you that they will do anything to obtain offensive weapons (whereas we only aim daffodils at Arafat’s window in Ramallah); we told you that there’s no one to talk to, so we’d better keep tightening the noose around their necks (and that way we’ll definitely bring about the profound change in Palestinian nature, so that they’ll agree our conditions). We told you that Arafat is, in fact, bin Laden himself (yet we are all disciples of the Dalai Lama).

In their attempt to smuggle the ship in, the Palestinians grossly violated their agreements and the Israeli army must, of course, do all it can to thwart such escalation. Nevertheless, how can we dull the judgement of an entire nation? How can we keep ignoring the big picture, the acute feeling that Israel — in its deeds and its blunders, and especially with the malicious behavior of its prime minister — is pushing the Palestinians further toward such actions, which provide us, time and again, with that “conclusive evidence” — evidence that is of absolutely no real use to us in achieving our goals?

These are repulsive times. Times in which good sense has been reduced to a zombie-like stupor. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon will squeeze every last drop of propaganda out of this ship. The media, for the most part, will fall in line behind him. The Israeli public, too tired and apathetic to think, will accept every categorical statement that will supposedly resolve the difficult internal contradiction and moral dilemma it is living with and will reinforce its shaken sense of its own justice. Who today has the strength to recall the beginning, the root of the matter, the circumstances, the fact that this is about occupation and oppression, about retaliation and counter-retaliation, about a vicious cycle of blood, about two peoples who are turning corrupt and violent and, finally, insane?