Monday, July 7, 2014

On Collective Responsibility and Moral Relativism




Israeli actress Moran Atias mourns after the
discovery of the bodies of the three kidnapped teens

Muhammad Abu Kdheir, flashing the three the
fingers victory sign


            Last month's kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers did the impossible - it united a nation wracked by painful divisions both political and cultural.  For 18 days Israel held its breath -  that is, at least the Jewish population of Israel.  For weeks, thousands of Palestinian and Israeli Arabs went out of their way to twist the knife in the midst of universal Jewish anguish, mocking the three kidnapped teens, flashing three fingers in a proud victory sign, flooding social media outlets with smiling selfies relishing in the barbarity of Hamas and the anguish it had caused Israelis everywhere.  A ray of hope remained, however, that the boys were still alive.  Israelis, secular and religious alike, joined in mass prayer rallies and solemn vigils, hoping that the army forces combing the southern West Bank would successfully locate and retrieve the teens - alive.  The tension was palpable throughout the country as people waited with baited breath, glued to the internet news outlets with a dedication that in any other circumstance would be diagnosed as OCD.  

            So when the bodies of Eyal Yifrach, Naftali Frenkel, and Gilad Shaer were discovered on June 30th, the blow was especially hard.  Shock turned to mourning as the nation came together in grieving.  Hamas sent its condolences with rocket fire on Israeli cities.  Thousands of Arabs on both sides of the Green Line reveled in the news of the horrible discovery, including a 16 year old Arab boy from Jerusalem, Muhammad Abu Kdheir.  Two days later, Israel was greeted with another grisly discovery - Abu Kdheir's charred body found in a Jerusalem-area forest.  

            While the nature of the killing remained shrouded in mystery for days - it was initially suspected to have been an honor killing by family members over the boy's alleged homosexuality - it instantly set off an explosion of rioting in the Arab sector.  Another predictable reaction, both inside and outside of Israel, are the calls for Israeli "soul-searching" after the murder, condemnation of various sectors of Israeli society, and the rancid accusations of moral equivalency between Palestinian and Israeli extremism.   

            The habitual sadism of Palestinian terror, whether by Hamas or the PLO, is utterly different both quantitatively and qualitatively from this apparent act of revenge.  Palestinian society, with woefully few exceptions, has from the outset endorsed a culture of animalistic brutality.  It was not in a cultural vacuum that thousands upon thousands of rockets and missiles have been fired at Israel from the Gaza Strip, even after Israel's self-emasculating withdrawal, or hundreds of terrorists have snuck into the Jewish state to kill civilians with suicide bombs, assault rifles, or even butcher knives.  While the much maligned rise of Hamas was seen in the West as a sign of growing Palestinian radicalism, the reality is that while the PLO formally renounced terrorism, in practice it remained a certified practitioner of it.  

            The inconvenient truth is that the Palestinians have never had a true peace party, no mass-movement for rapprochement, no significant effort to build bridges.  For the Palestinians, the peace process was never about forging peace, it was about hustling the Jewish state for as much land as possible, gaining international aid, and hobbling Israeli self-defense with the threat of foreign intervention.  The arrogance of Western negotiators was matched only by that of the Israeli left, both of whom imagined they were capable of imposing via a final status agreement the kind social engineering the United States sought to achieve in Iraq and Afghanistan through state-building.  
       
            But Palestinian society is a society where the masses flooded the streets cheering on 9/11, rejoicing in the deaths of 3,000 Americans; where revilers handed out candy to smiling passersby after two Palestinians broke into a Jewish home in the dead of night and butchered a family in their beds, nearly decapitating the family's three month old infant; and where villages across the West Bank blasted fireworks after hearing that the three kidnapped Israeli teenagers were dead.  

            That's not to say that all Palestinians endorse savagery - they don't.  But it most definitely is socially accepted in huge swaths of Palestinian society.  City streets and government buildings are named after mass-murderers while public television inculcates even the youngest viewers in anti-Semitic hatred and the legitimacy of violence.  It's a difficult concept for Americans to wrap their minds around.  Without a doubt, Americans would be outraged if a foreign country - especially one in the midst of negotiations with the US - would name a city square in its capital city after Osama Bin Laden.  In Palestinian society there is an unrelenting effort to delegitimize the so-called "Israeli occupations" - in plural since they view the creation of Israel in 1948 as the first - and worst - occupation.  From state television to pop culture, hatred of "the Zionists" is inculcated and violence legitimized and glorified.  

            Only such a society could produce the kind of terrorist factories where countless young men  and women offer their bodies up for martyrdom hoping to kill and maim as many Jews as possible.  Only such a society would produce popular approval of such actions, where even middle class Arab families - people who ostensibly appear so similar to their Western counterparts - could relish in even the most debauched act of violence.  On the Palestinian side, nationalistic violence is a compulsion and the next brutality is just a matter of time.  On the Israeli side,  it's a bizarre aberration. 

            The ugly murder of Muhammad Abu Kdheir, if indeed perpetrated by Jews in an act of revenge as is widely suspected, draws some stupendously superficial comparisons.  Unlike the habitual violence of Palestinian anti-Semitism,  nationalistic Israeli acts are not only far fewer, they are essentially different in nature.  Palestinians are obsessed with the existence of Israel and their hatred of it and are consumed by an unending need to avenge themselves for the foundation of Israel.  Their violence is, to them, inherently justified, and is meant to dash Israeli hopes at establishing a normal, peaceful existence.  

            Since the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire and the transfer of the region out of Turkish hands, Palestinian violence has wrought a horrible toll on a Jewish community who's natural response has almost always been one of havlaga - restraint.  Not answering attacks tit for tat.  Not taking an eye for an eye.  But there has also always been a breaking point for Israelis where after absorbing one too many massacres, bombings, or other outrages, something inevitably snaps.  At times the response is official, by the army or, in the pre-state days, by the Hagannah para-military force.  At other times, however, when there has been no governmental action, the response is the unsanctioned violence of either small cells or even single individuals, often ones pushed over the edge.  In the 1930s and 1940s it was the underground groups the Lehi and the Irgun; in the 1980s it was the Jewish underground; in the 1990s it was Baruch Goldstein; in the 2000s it was the second Jewish underground, Eden-Natan Zada, and Asher Weisgan.

            The critical difference between the sparse Israeli acts of violence and the almost unending Palestinian waves of terrorism is the former truly does not reflect Israeli society.  Even the Israeli right does not espouse the kind of violence supported across the Palestinian political spectrum.  The far-left imagines the phenomenon of so-called "price tag" vandalism - which has emerged amongst the hard-line Israeli nationalist crowd over the past decade as a way of responding to daily Arab stone-throwing - as some sort of Israeli equivalent to Palestinian terrorism.  

            Of course this charge is ludicrous.  No one can argue with a straight face that spray-painting graffiti or puncturing tires is even vaguely similar to blowing up buses or decapitating babies.  But this is not merely an exercise in hysteric hyperbole, it again misses the point entirely.  However wrong-headed the price tag vandalism is, it too is a venting of pent up frustration from years of abuse at the hands of Palestinians and neglect from the state.  Palestinian villagers across the West Bank - not to mention their city-dwelling brethren in east Jerusalem and the Old City - have integrated stone throwing into their daily routine, with no reprimand or consequences from within Palestinian society.  Jews living in the biblical Israelite cities of the West Bank like Hebron, Shilo, and Beit El, are constantly subjected to stone attacks on the roads.  

            For anyone who lives in such areas, the attacks are inevitable; for someone traveling regularly on roads like Route 60, it is unthinkable that they would never be subjected to a brick smashing through their windshield or a stone hurtling through a window, injuring those inside.  Aside from the sometimes fatal crashes these stonings can cause, the real fear is the roadblock, to be driving on one's way to work or back home, possibly with children in the car, only to suddenly find the road blocked with boulders as masked men spring up from the sides of the road, hurling throwing stones, Molotov cocktails or perhaps dragging drivers and passengers out for a far more ghastly fate.  The fear of the lynch mob is hardly imaginary: dozens of Israelis have run into that terror.  Some manage to escape, while others, like two Israelis who were ripped to pieces and disemboweled in 2000 after accidently taking the wrong exit, are killed in displays of brutality that almost transcend the term "lynch".

            And yet the Israeli government has often been exceedingly lax in responding to the seemingly endless Palestinian crimes.  After the murder of the three kidnapped boys and under a barrage of rocket fire from Hamas in the south, the Israeli response towards the terror group has been almost invisible - a single terrorist leader killed in a targeted killing and a some Hamas operatives arrested in the West Bank - arrested with the guarantee of being freed in the near future, no matter what crimes they may have committed.  Even Aziz Salha, the terrorist who proudly displayed his bloody hands after disemboweling the two lynched Israelis in 2000, has been released by the Netanyahu government, assuring future terrorists that no matter their crime, they will serve no more than a few years.   

            As far as guaranteeing safety on the roads, the situation has degenerated so badly that even the army itself is subjected to firebombs and mass stonings with only minimal efforts made for self-defense.  The army vehicles which retrieved the bodies of the three murdered Israeli boys were subjected to a deluge of stones and firebombs as they sped up Route 60, extricating themselves as quickly as possible from a road where thousands of Israelis must travel daily, suffering from the same kind of regular violence.

            In the absence of any governmental effort to crackdown on the violence and instill order, is it any surprise that some would take the law into their own hands, doing whatever they could, however feeble or ill-conceived, to fight back?  Incessant abuse inevitably breeds counter-violence, a response which is more emotional than anything else.  That some blacks in the United States in the 1960s strike out blindly in frustration, as the Black Panthers did, over the ongoing situation in the South, was an unavoidable byproduct of the terror campaigns conducted by the KKK, the refusal of local governments to adequately protect them, and the larger Jim Crow establishment  which legitimized that hatred and abuse.

            Again, that is not to say that the crimes committed by black nationalists were justified, any more than are the price tag acts of vandalism or the murder of Muhammad Abu Kdheir.  But it does shift the onus of collective responsibility.  Crimes are always the responsibility of those who directly commit them.  In some instances, however, they are also - and not only - the responsibility of some collective, some larger group or society which encouraged them or fostered the perquisite culture of hate.  

            This concept of collective culpability is frequently abused, however, for political witch hunts or to legitimize some ideological craving.  Feminists picked up on the murderous actions of an unbalanced young man, Elliot Rodger, in California to cast collective guilt on masculinity and white males in particular.  Never mind that Rodger's misogyny was a product of his more general anti-social, psychotic tendencies or that he evinced a hatred of sexually active men that was just as powerful as his bitterness towards women.  

            In Israel, however, the accusations of collective guilt are particularly offensive not since there is no collective responsibility, but because they are directed at the victim rather than the aggressor.  Again, that is not to remove the personal culpability of the actual perpetrators - they are always responsible for their actions.  The question here is, who is responsible for creating the situation and the abominable cycle of violence.  It is surely not an Israeli public which endured years of terrorism and rocket fire, nor is it even a settler population that has been subjected to decades of daily abuse.  

            One of the remarkable ironies of the situation has been the almost obsessive need for many - even outside of the Israeli left or international anti-Israel movements - to remove the onus from Palestinian society.  Even President Bush - and I'm referring to Bush 43, the oft-touted close friend of Israel, not his father, whose relationship with the Jewish state was somewhat less cordial - blamed Palestinian radicalism on the frustration created by security checkpoints established throughout the West Bank road system to prevent the movement of terrorists into Israeli cities.  

            The idea of Palestinian "humiliation" at these checkpoints has become a virtual truism not only in the anti-Israel radical left but even amongst people who would identify as supporters of the Jewish state.  The claim itself is a bizarre one to make; crossing these checkpoints is certainly far less humiliating or frustrating than the post 9/11 TSA security checks all Americans suffer through when flying.  One should wonder, then, why the TSA hasn't inspired a wave of suicide bombings by frustrated frequent flyers.  The dichotomy is a fascinating one between Bush's recognition of checkpoints as an unbearable burden for security even as he imposed far worse on his own nation.  

            Beyond the general idiocy of the checkpoints-cause-people-to-blow-themselves-up-on-buses theory, the more basic idea that abuse and trauma suffered by the Palestinians lead to terrorism is a complete fallacy, one which again sees a situation totally at odds with reality.  Palestinian violence exists despite Israelis treatment and despite the best efforts of Israel, since  the Six Day War, to improve the conditions of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.  And if something as trivial as traffic delays caused by checkpoints can be blamed for Palestinian terrorism, what about the daily violence and fear Israeli settlers have been subjected to for decades?  

            Settler violence - price tag or otherwise - and the other occasional outbursts of Israeli nationalistic violence, on the other hand, are very much the result Palestinian violence and abuse, and the unfortunate tendency of the government to wait for tragedy before taking action.   Unlike the Palestinian mosques and universities, which have served as veritable terror factories, which at the height of the Second Intifada pumped out martyrs with alarming consistency, even the most supposedly "radical" organizations and rabbinic schools in Israel have no record for mass-producing Jewish jihadists.  

            Even the vaunted Od Yosef Hai Yeshiva in Yitzhar, arguably the most radicalized settler educational institution, hasn't managed to produce a single terrorist.  In fact, the height of radicalism and violence its alumni have managed to "achieve" is the throwing of stones back at the Arab villagers who have made life on the roads a living hell.  It is likely that some are also guilty of price tag graffiti.  Vandalism's never nice, but an institution whose greatest sin is having a few errant spray painters in its ranks is not even within the same cultural universe as those that serve as hotbeds for suicide terrorism.  

            Even the few outbursts of actual Jewish violence - which generally seem to occur only once or twice a decade, after sufficient frustration has built up until a certain boiling point is reached by someone - occurs as a result of and as a direct reaction to Palestinian violence.  Baruch Goldstein, the American-born doctor and army reservist who in 1994 opened fire on a crowd of Palestinians in Hebron, is the classic example.  Hebron had been a flashpoint of Arab violence for decades.  During the Intifada and subsequent negotiation process with the nascent Palestinian Authority, the lives of Israelis living in nearby Kiryat Arba had been made hellish.  And no one bore the brunt harder than Goldstein, the local doctor, who was the first responder to the wave of terror attacks in the area.  The death of his close friend in one such attack, it is suggested, pushed him over the edge and at a time when the Israeli army was pulling out from much of the West Bank and handing over control to the PLO.  

            As noted above, we cannot relieve individuals of the responsibility of their actions.  That is hardly the intent of this piece.  What is crucial to understand, however, are the differences between the quite frequent and grotesque Palestinian violence and the extraordinarily rare Jewish responses to it.  Arab attempts to murder and maim are daily; the Jewish responses, born out of the rage and frustration of living in an impossible situation of habitual abuse, seem to boil over only about once or so every decade.  That appears to be the pressure point, where someone, somewhere inevitably snaps, whether it's a religious nationalist like Goldstein or a secular Israeli like Asher Weisgan.  It's a remarkable level of restraint, a testament to Israeli society, not an indictment of it or any segment within it.  The fact is that we must understand - without condoning it - that, if the murder of Muhammad Abu Kdheir was indeed committed by Jews, then the responsibility - on the Israeli side, at least - rests with the murderers alone.  It is absolutely not a sign of some fault in Israeli society.  The collective blame can and should be placed solely on Hamas and the Palestinian society that sired it.