Activists block peace

Editorial

The Israeli military last Saturday boarded another ship attempting a publicity stunt to challenge Israel’s military blockade of the terrorist-controlled Gaza Strip. The navy turned the passengers, including former B.C. member of Parliament Jim Manley, over to police.

The incident coincided with another prominent publicity act by outside do-gooders equally blind to the big picture. Leaders of 15 Christian churches in the United States signed a letter calling on the U.S. Congress to reconsider its aid to Israel. The letter is in keeping with the ignorant one-sidedness of Canada’s United Church, which recently passed a similarly ahistorical misinterpretation of the issues.

The American letter, mostly from liberal and so-called “mainline” churches, declared that its writers had “witnessed widespread Israeli human rights violations against the Palestinians, including killings of civilians, home demolitions and forced displacement, and restrictions on Palestinian movement.”

Jewish leaders predictably condemned the statement, pointing out yet again the painfully obvious hypocrisy of people allegedly concerned about human rights speaking out only against Israel, instead of such regimes as Syria’s, or even on behalf of their own coreligionists in places like Nigeria, where Christians are under the sort of existential threat that Jews have faced throughout history.

The letter demonstrates ignorance of history and international law, condemning settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which they describe as “claiming territory that under international law and United States policy should belong to a future Palestinian state.” Israel is not “claiming” this land through settlements – Israel claimed it in a defensive war 45 years ago. And “territory that under international law” should belong to a future Palestinian state will be determined when that future Palestinian state is created, through peaceful, good-faith negotiations based on mutual commitments to coexistence. Not before.

These activists’ disproportionate obsession with Israelis and Palestinians would seem less pathological if they demonstrated any sense of perspective over why these policies, which they seem morally called upon to protest, exist in the first place. Palestinian civilians have been killed and Palestinian homes have been demolished; these are matters of fact. What these commentators refuse to address are the complex facts of the conflict that have led to this tragic state of affairs.

The vacuum in which this sort of commentary thrives sees this conflict as a one-sided battle in which Israelis, motivated by nothing but sadism, terrorize and make miserable the lives of Palestinians. The unanimous blaming of Israel and the near-beatification of the terrorists – whether it be Hamas or Fatah – are a moral failing for which these activists will presumably be judged at some later date.

What is truly unforgivable, though, is not what they have done to Israel; it is what they have done and continue to do to the Palestinians. By refusing to condemn terrorism against Israel and, instead, by rewarding it with moral support (and even, in the case of the show-boaters like those arrested last weekend, material support), activists like these perpetuate the conflict. They do not hasten a Palestinian state; they delay it.

Those who piously drape themselves in clerical or political righteousness bear some responsibility for the ongoing violence. If there were a global movement to condemn Palestinian violence, even a fraction as vocal as the movement against Israel, there might be a genuine Palestinian movement for peace. And if there were a Palestinian movement for peace, there could be good-faith negotiations for a two-state solution. Indeed, Palestinian statehood was never as close as in the 1990s, when the Palestinian leadership pretended, for too brief a shining moment, to have abandoned violence.

If the activists who purport to support the Palestinians did something truly revolutionary by demanding that their Palestinian allies put down their arms, accept Jews as neighbors and plan for a life of peace, they might actually help bring about peace instead of preventing it; they would be making the world better, instead of perpetuating conflict.

^TOP