But who bears the greatest blame? There’s no subjectively satisfying way to answer that question, and by that I mean, no matter which side you come down on, no matter how convincingly you argue the case, you’ll still hear a chorus of very vocal and possibly dangerous voices that will never be swayed by your logic.
But you jump in anyway, and weigh in with your two cents. You examine the respective gripes as much as you can, you try to sift away as much of the propaganda and chest-thumping as you can. And you try to decide whose case is stronger.
The fundamental Palestinian beef, it seems to me, is a land-based one. The seizure of land, a diaspora that may or may not have been forced, the continuing build-up of settlements in disputed territory.
All those things are reprehensible.
The Israelis, on the other hand, most deeply protest the killing of their civilians. And more recently, their politicians.
Arguments pro-Palestinian: you are fighting for your homeland—a cause that men have been fighting and dying for since the dawn of time. Yes, you’ve gotten a sliver of your home back, but the humiliations that you exist under are intolerable. There is no Superpower sending you tanks and jets and missiles, so you fight back the only way you can.
Arguments pro-Israeli: you are being subjected to terror on a daily basis. A great many of you recognize the injustices the Palestinians have suffered—not unlike the terms that the Americans are unsteadily coming to with their own mistreated indigenous population. Also like the Americans, you are a democracy. You attempted to deal with the problem democratically, by electing those able to extend an olive branch to the Palestinians. The Palestinians chose street war. They got street war.
And that’s where we find ourselves, with Rabin’s dream gone like the soap bubble it always was. Neither side can easily go back now—precisely because each of those above arguments are weighty in their own right.
But whose is weightiest?
No Solomon, I; but I’ll say this: waging a war of terror on the innocents is never forgivable, or explainable, or acceptable. And the Palestinians, I think, crossed that line first. And if you argue that men have been not only fighting for their homelands since the Ages, but also fighting dirty total wars for them, then I say this…the primary lesson of the 20th Century must be that we have to break with the demons of our past. If, that is, the civilizations we have fought so hard to nurture are worth keeping.
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