The Crazy Lie of "Pinkwashing" and the Liberal Case for Israel

[Ken Burch]

115. I'm not talking down to them

What I'm saying is that people who are being subjugated by a foreign army can't be held to the same standards as people who aren't. Your position would be comparable to the British Crown demanding democratic reform in the Colonies before it pulled the Redcoats out(and believe me, if you were black or a woman, or gay, or a member of any religion other than Protestant Christianity, your life in the Thirteen Colonies was pretty much just as repressive as life under Hamas-the differences were only of degree).

You can't treat an entire country like inmates who should face a parole board. And you can't hold every Palestinian responsible for what Hamas or Fatah does. Only the leaders and the militants themselves are responsible for the violent acts. The rank-and-file in Palestine do not have the power to change the tactics the leaders use. What part of "Collective punishment is wrong" do you not understand? What part of "Collective punishment simply doesn't work" don't you understand?

And what part of "you are sabotaging the work of pro-democracy Palestinians by perpetuating the status quo" do you not get? How can you possibly think you are helping those people, and where do you get off acting as if they should feel grateful that you're there? Of course some of them might say things you want to hear to you...but for God's sake, you're effectively holding guns at their heads, so what else would you expect them to say? In Warsaw, Prague, or East Berlin during the Warsaw Pact era, a lot of people would have publicly stated that they wanted the Red Army to stay and protect them from the decadent West. But would you actually have believed them when they said that?

Palestinians are as good as anybody else, and can act as honorably as anyone else. But the country whose army has its troops on their land is not the country that has the right to demand better behavior of them. And it's bullshit for you to act like you're saving them from Hamas. You're not. Hamas is declining in support even in Gaza, and the only thing that gives them any leverage on the Palestinian "street" is Israeli condemnation of Hamas and Israeli demands that Palestinians repudiate it as a precondition to anything changing. Those actions on the part of YOUR leaders keep Hamas in business. If they 'd just shut the hell up, Hamas would wither away, because most Palestinians have little if any use for it-however, by attacking it, Israel makes it a point of honor for at least some Palestinians NOT to disown it. Why would you expect anything else, when your leaders create a situation in which they make it look to Palestinians as if doing the sensible thing is a form of collaboration? The best way to get rid of Hamas is to ignore it to death. Given that nothing your side has done has worked against them(if it had, Hamas would be gone by now), you have nothing to lose by trying.

And there's no reason to assume that greater democracy on their part(which most of them do want)is going to change how they react to Israel. Why would you think that greater democracy would lead to more Palestinians saying that they'd settle for whatever crumbs Bibi would leave them? Have you ever heard of greater internal democracy in anybody's liberation struggle leading to people being more accomodating to the side they're seeking liberation from? When has anything remotely like that EVER happened anywhere? The Zionist movement had full democracy, yet you never heard anybody within Zionist circles saying they'd like the British to stay longer.


You are the one who is condescending to the Palestinians...playing an active role in oppressing them and then acting as if you're entitled to make demands of them before you stop the oppression. You are the one who is insulting them by acting as if the whole thing is THEIR fault and that they could make it stop if only they behaved better. Neither is true, and you know it. Even if every Palestinian became a Gandhian tomorrow, nothing would change in terms of what your government is doing. None of the settlement construction would stop and you wouldn't be back in the barracks or back at home(and believe me, I hope the time comes when you are back at home and nobody in your country ever becomes a soldier again). The power of the settlers drives the status quo in the West Bank just as much as what Palestinians do does. You are naive if you don't believe that.

Also, tell me this...given what's happening in the Arab Spring, isn't it a bit silly to assume that Hamas can only be stopped BEFORE the Occupation ends? Why can't you have some faith that Palestinians are capable of getting rid of them without you and your fellow soldiers demanding that they do it? Why can't you accept that they might do that on their own once they're FREE of the IDF?

You argue that your presence holds back Hamas and other extremists...but what you miss in that argument is that the continuation of the Occupation for decades and decades has played a major role in bringing Hamas to power. Hamas was only able to rise because the preservation of the status quo allowed them to argue that they, and they alone, could end the Occupation(because, at that point, Fatah clearly couldn't, due partly to their mistakes but partly also due to intransigence on the part of YOUR leaders). Before 1967, there WAS no Hamas(there was the Muslim Brotherhood, but it was apolitical and would have remained apolitical if the West Bank hadn't been taken, as it always had prior to that).

Also...why should Gaza ever have gone to Egypt? The people of Gaza didn't want to be Egyptians. Egypt didn'w WANT Gaza(it was only ever Egyptian territory because of the way the League of Nations bureaucrats drew the maps after World War I). There was never any good reason for Gaza to be part of Egypt or any chance that it would have been part of it. If a country doesn't want a piece of territory, you rarely if ever hear of that country being forced to accept it against their will. So even if that was something Sadat "outnegotiated" Begin on, it's irrelevant and trivial. It has nothing to do with the fact that the Palestinians were left out of Camp David(when the only way to include them was to include the PLO).