(Cross posted at Nontrivial Pursuits)
In my last blog entry, I asserted that the Palestinians would happily give up the fight and embrace Israel's existence if (1) they were given an extremely generous cash settlement for their loss of land, and if (2) the United States were to officially recognize that the Palestinians had been victims of a great injustice for all of these years. Today I want to address condition #2.
If the Palestinians were offered
only an extremely generous cash settlement, it still
might not be enough to win Israel the true peace and good will of the Palestinians that we want. Fortunately, there is an additional something we could do that would cinch the deal. We could give them something that would finally enable them to bury all of the bitterness they've carried around for all these years. Interestingly, it is something that Israel cannot give them, but the United States can. Also, it is something that would not cost the American taxpayers a cent. What is it? A formal admission by the United States government that we had been `wrong all along' in getting ourselves involved in the dispute between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
Why would we do such a thing? Let's ask [Senator] John Edwards.
In "The America We Believe In", John tells us, "...the foundation for moral leadership is telling the truth. While we can't change the past, we need to accept responsibility, because a key part of restoring America's moral leadership is acknowledging when we've made mistakes or been proven wrong--and showing that we have the creativity and guts to make it right." Of course, Senator Edwards was not talking about the same issue that I'm now addressing, but I think his wise words also give us guidance on how to end the Israeli/Arab conflict.
Mistakes made in the past are responsible for the fear we currently have of one day suffering a nuclear terrorist attack. It was good old Harry Truman who first got us involved in the Arab-Israeli dispute and it was his decision that put us on the side of the Israelis. At the time, the American people were feeling a lot of sympathy for the Jewish people after the horrors of the Holocaust were revealed, so it was easy for them to consent to a plan to `give them a homeland' where they would be free of persecution. Unfortunately, everyone in the press conveniently forgot that the land the U.N. decided to give to the Jews happened to belong to someone else.
To understand how the Palestinians (and some Jews) see the creation of the state of Israel, imagine a similar thing happening here, in America. What if the Indians who lived in New Jersey 300 years ago fled by boat to Europe instead of becoming assimilated into the developing American culture? What if, over the years, those Indians educated themselves and kept their sense of `nationhood' alive and maintained a dream of some day returning to their homeland? What if they started emigrating back into New Jersey 50 years ago and made it clear that they intended to get their land back? What if the majority of European nations supported their cause and sent them military hardware and financial support? How do you think the modern inhabitants of New Jersey would feel about the claim that the land really belonged to the Indians because they had once lived there 300 years ago?
I'm pretty sure I know how most property owners in New Jersey would respond. Outraged? You bet. Militant? You can count on it, if the seizure took place at gunpoint, as it did in Israel in 1948. The truth is that it is impossible for the United States to justify its support for Israel while declaring loudly to the world that it is outrageous and immoral for one country to invade and annex another. It's theft at gunpoint, any way you look at it. This is why the Palestinians and their Muslim sympathizers are so crazy angry at the United States, because they see the incredible hypocrisy of our political leaders and are outraged that we do not see the injustice and sympathize with their plight.
Yes, it's true. Our sympathy for the Jews is the thing that led us to make an incredibly stupid decision to approve of an illegal and immoral act. Maybe we weren't guilty of malevolence, but we are nevertheless paying the price now for the moral/intellectual lapse we had back then. Since Nine Eleven, we have been spending hundreds of billions of dollars on Homeland Security and on the Iraq & Afghanistan wars and we will be spending trillions more in the future if we cannot get ourselves on the right side of history. Does this mean that we are supposed to start hating the Israeli Jews now? Of course not. But no longer can we play favorites.
John Edwards is right; if we could only start to admit our past mistakes in this area and demonstrate some `creativity and guts to make it right', we would be able to restore our moral leadership in the world and actually bring an end to the long nightmare that has tortured the Middle East. We need to admit to the Palestinians and their Muslim sympathizers that we were wrong to see them as mindless "haters" and not recognize that their anger and outrage have been justified. If we were to give the Palestinians/Arabs/Muslims of the world this apology, there would not be a dry eye anywhere in the Muslim world.
If you think about it, the Arabs have always wanted to like us and for us to like them. That's why they've always tried to reason with us and explain why it is that they are the victims in their dispute with the Israelis. They can see that there is good in the American people, but they can also see that our sense of loyalty has clouded our judgment. With an American mea culpa, we would finally be able to use our leverage to bring an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict. (It would probably work out for the best if it appeared to the Palestinians that we had pressured the Israelis into committing themselves to the Extreme Generosity Settlement plan).
There is, of course, a heckofa lot more that can be said on this topic, but I think I'm going to end it right here for now.
Oh yeah, here's another linkto some Jews who are not Jew-haters, in spite of the fact that they don't support modern Israel's 'right to exist.'