[Peace-discuss] My revised letter

[David Green]

Dear friends:

I want to share a revised version of my letter that
was published yesterday in the N-G. Even though I had
sent it to them minutes after the first, they printed
the original, and edited some stuff out. I tried to
make the ending more thoughtful. For what it's worth,
I'm obviously desperate to provoke a thoughtful
reaction of any kind without resorting to "us versus
them" rhetoric. (I've been trying to do the same on
Prospect, in order to avoid damage to my face). Any
suggestions--philosophical, literary, political,
poetic--would be appreciated.

Editor:
            The selective and one-sided history that
Ken Goodchild (letters, 1/6) relates in response to my
recent letter neglects the realities of clearly
non-defensive Israeli aggression (1948, 1956, 1967,
1982, etc.) that have been thoroughly explored by
Israeli historians. It also reflects a common desire
to ascribe qualities of good and evil to the conflict.
But this native-colonialist conflict, like others
(including our own), is not about  fixed labels of
good or evil, but about the mundane realities of how
the resourceful and determined impose their will upon
the weak and defensive. While Israel was not born with
overwhelming power, it has relentlessly used its
economic resources (including U.S. resources),
diplomatic skills, propaganda skills, and penchant for
violence to achieve many of its stated goals against a
weak and disorganized Palestinian “enemy,” whose crime
has been to be a poor and poorly-led Arab people
claiming its land as its own and resorting to violence
to defend it. 

     In the context of the history of
settler-colonialism, Israel’s success is remarkable
primarily in that historically despised European Jews
have been able to find favor with their Christian
oppressors by enacting their own narrative of
settlement and conquest, accompanied by the historical
mythology, moral rationalizations, and thinly-veiled
racism that characterize Goodchild’s letter. But this
does not make Israel evil. It means that the Jewish
state, like almost all others, subscribes in practice
to the political immorality that might makes right.
Injustice is nothing new, and can be constructively
addressed by those of conscience and good will on all
sides, including Jewish-Americans. But this requires
self-criticism. It behooves all of us to examine
complicated but not particularly controversial
evidence which clearly disrupts our collective and
reflexive tendency to view ourselves (the powerful) as
good, and our self-chosen “enemies” as evil.

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