Before I Bed Down Tonight... I'd Like To Say... For Most Of My Life... I've Supported Israel...

[BlueMTexpat]

62. I am like you in many ways.

Then I became a Peace Corps Volunteer to Morocco in the 1960s and heard a different narrative from the Arab POV, which caused me to begin questioning things that I saw and heard in the US media. Then I met Palestinian Arabs who had left Palestine to try to build lives and careers elsewhere. They are every bit as admirable and as desiring of peace and understanding as are many Israelis, but they still feel a strong attachment to their homeland and to their family members still there. That put faces to Palestinians for me.

That is what we in the US have mostly not seen. We have all too often been shown the faces of admirable Israelis (of whom there are many) but not anywhere near the same amount of faces of admirable Palestinians. We also demonized the PLO for a long time, just as we demonize Hamas now. Any group that can be elected by a population, as Hamas was in 2006, cannot be all bad, so why do we - who "support" free elections - never accept the results of an election if they are not what we wish and continue to punish the population for exercising its freedom to vote? In fact, as many who are familiar with the area know, many of the most radical elements are actually offshoot PLO cells rather than Hamas at all. But Hamas is almost always characterized as the "bad guys" - certainly by US media, who always have to find "good" guys and "bad" guys for their overly simplistic coverage of events - not simply those in Israel.

In 2000, I actually visited Israel as part of a UN team and witnessed for myself the very jarring sights of Israeli settlements, often settled by the most radical right wing settlers from the US, no less - not native Israelis or even moderate settlers. Such settlements continue to encroach on occupied land. I am not Palestinian or Arab, yet I was outraged at the sights. I could only imagine a tiny bit how Palestinians themselves might feel.

A few years back, I reread The Source, James Michener's lengthy novel of the area and the successive waves of settlers to it, with the backstory being a group of archaelogists who are uncovering a dig. The primary financier of the dig is an American Jew from Chicago, who leads his own very modern life (at least for the 1960s) there. When he first visits the dig, he is less impressed by kibbutz activity and the building of a new nation (which was the pride of the native Israelis in the novel) that would encompass all residents - Israelis and Arabs alike - than he is by encouraging the most conservative Jewish religious practices so that American Jews who did not even practice those rites had a focal point for the "purity" of their religion. The native Israelis (sabras) in the novel did not see the focus on their religion as the best future of the area.

To me the story is a metaphor for much of what has happened since: Americans, especially conservative Jews and Christians, who project their own ideas of what Israel should be onto the nation instead of letting the nation evolve for itself by coming to terms with its neighbors in a way that enables the security of all.