Who Is To Blame For The Occupation?
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By Matthew Gindin May 16, 2017
Conversations about the Israel-Palestine conflict have long been maddeningly predictable. “Pro-Israel” and “Pro-Palestinian” voices line up against each other — categories in themselves crazy-making, as if treating violent conflicts like football tournaments makes any sense. Discussions quickly degenerate into a battle over who is ultimately to blame, with different historical narratives thrown at each other like cognitive missiles. As well as the hurling of different storylines, competing names are deployed — indigenous versus colonialist, legal versus illegal, occupied versus disputed, Beit HaMikdash versus Al-Aqsa.
Who is the bad guy? Who is truly deserving of the world’s opprobrium? Tremendous amounts of energy and millions of dollars are spent on advancing competing mythologies to establish a villain.
And not without reason. As the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari argued so effectively in his bestseller Sapiens, mythology has been a key power behind humans becoming what we are today. Mythology has held empires together or torn them apart, organized millions of people into unities, caused people to live their whole lives engaged in obscure religious practices, or caused people to accept unjust harm or even death for themselves or their loved ones.
So mythologies matter. Yet sometimes they do more to obscure the true nature of problems and what could be done to fix them then they do to help. Of the many historical examples that could be chosen to illustrate this, let’s look at one that is tragically still current.
In many countries in the world, it is widely believed that when someone commits a crime it is the community’s obligation to make them suffer for what they have done, and doing so will not only satisfy the demands of justice but will also reduce crime through deterrence.
As Raoul Martinez argues at length in his brilliant Creating Freedom, the claims in the above paragraph neither satisfy justice nor the evidence we have about how to reduce crime. Whether a person will commit a crime is massively determined by the “lottery of birth”: Genetics, whether one is abused or not, whether one is born into poverty or wealth, where one lives, and whether one happens to be born into an underprivileged minority or not, for instance, have been shown in study after study to be profoundly decisive for the trajectory of one’s life. Punishing someone for who they are (the reality that largely determines what choices they make) seems less just when the concept is more thoroughly interrogated.
Even more damning for the mythology upon which our intuitions about justice rest is the fact that the evidence is overwhelming that increasing the length, severity, and harshness of punishment actually increases crime. Humane prisons like Norway’s Bastoy prison, where murderers and rapists live comfortable and enriching lives in healthy community with each other, reduce the rate of recidivism dramatically (from the European average of 70% to 16%). This is extremely counter-intuitive to those of us raised and weaned on the mythology of redemptive violence, yet many studies confirm the superiority of restorative justice to its punitive sibling. Do we really care about making the offender suffer more than we do about preventing them from hurting other people in the future?
There is a significant similarity between our punitive mythologies and the way we look at the Israel-Palestinian conflict. In both cases we are blinded by our narratives of victimhood and justice. We are more concerned with discerning who is at fault, blaming the guilty, and punishing the wicked then we are with solving the actual problems based on an empirical interrogation of what will work on the ground.
Readers who have weathered a long term relationship like a marriage or a business partnership may recognize a familiar lesson here. In times of conflict precious time and energy is easily thrown into the existential garbage bin of trying to come to an agreement about who is more to blame for the problem (the other person, of course). Once that bad air is cleared, partners can begin making progress by asking, “What can we do about this problem?” With regards to the occupation, we have had 50 years of bad air punctuated by a few attempts to bring peace and progress, most of them ineffective.
I know what some of you are thinking. “How dare he compare Israel-Palestine to a marital squabble?” Depending on your point of view you may object that it is more of a rape, or you might point out that Israel was willing to accept a peaceful agreement long ago, but the Arabs refused.
You see what you did there? You went right back to the narratives of justice and victimhood, blame and rage. How’s that been working for us so far?
I would humbly suggest that we in the Jewish community needs to withdraw our attention from issues of justice and blame. We should engage in any activity, with any person, if we think it can move things forward towards the goal, everyone should have uppermost in our minds- reducing suffering and death, and promoting human flourishing for everyone.
Rather than debating the moral or ideological purity of Linda Sarsour, a person of good will on the other side of the narrative from many of us, we should think about what progress can be made in bringing the Jewish and Muslim communities together through working with her, what we might learn from listening to her, how a partnership with her and people like her might forge bonds that can shift the weight of history between Jews and Palestinians.
I asked Amna Farooqi, Muslim Zionist, Palestinian human rights activist and former President of J Street U for some advice because she embodies the trans-dichotomous thinking we need to develop to move forward.
“If you frequently engage with Israeli groups or associations, or send donations to Israeli organizations, individually or through your synagogue or Jewish communal organization, start engaging with groups that are doing on the ground work to end the occupation, including progressive Palestinian organizations. Look at where your money is going,” Amna Farooqi wrote to me in an email discussion about this issue. Farooqi, past president of J Street U, is a Muslim Zionist Palestinian Human Rights Activist who embodies the trans-dichotomous approach the new generation of activists sorely needs. “The Israeli left and civil society is facing a lot of challenges, and it’s important for them to receive support the way right-wing groups in Israel do from abroad,” she added.
“It’s frustrating,” Farooqi wrote, “because most of what we can do feels reactive, but stay engaged and speak out against harmful actions. Some Jewish communal organizations also do a bad job of talking about Palestinians without talking to them, and that goes for Palestinian rights groups too when it comes to Israelis. Invite the people that make you uncomfortable.”
“In a more proactive sense, there are exciting initiatives happening on the ground. Don’t just celebrate it, donate to it, encourage it. We’re in a time where people don’t care as much about facts and prefer easy rhetoric and convenient narratives. That is especially prevalent in this conflict. Read different news sources!”
The occupation may or may not be morally justified. No doubt activists on both sides will continue to debate their case. Three things are certain. The first is that convincing ourselves and others that Israel is not the real villain, or that the Palestinians are not the real villains, will not solve the problem.
The second is that as long as we remain more invested in our narratives than in actual change for the real human beings suffering in this conflict, leaders will manipulate us. They will do so by affirming our mythologies in order to channel power to themselves, with no real interest in resolving the conflict. Today this is true of many leaders on both sides, who cannot be relied on to move the region toward peace.
The third is that the occupation has grievously bad effects and a way must be found to it’s end. The only sane road to peace is the diligent study of what can be done to change the facts on the ground for all the human beings involved, regardless of what “side” they are on, regardless of the sins of their fathers, regardless of what we think they “deserve.” Because that’s what will make the lives of our children better.
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