Israelis And Indians

Palestinian tactics are often attacked or defended on dubious grounds. Whether these tactics are terroristis irrelevant; some terrorism is defensible, some not. The same applies to whether the acts are murders.Whether others are bigger terrorists or murderers is also irrelevant; two wrongs don't make a right. WhetherIsraelis have committed crimes is not directly relevant either; that they have committed crimes is notsufficient to justify killing people, civilians, who have not committed them.

The problem, as anyone will tell you, is that Palestinians deliberately kill civilians. You would think,then, that we would never do such a thing. Maybe not. Those who conducted strategic bombing raids against NaziGermany, or for that matter those who set speed limits on our highways, did not. These actions, it seems, werefine. Bombs would definitely stray into civilian areas; lower speed limits would definitely mean fewerchildren killed and maimed in accidents. We knew this with certainty, but we didn't *intend* theseconsequences. Apparently this makes us far better than the Palestinians. The scholastically fine distinctionbetween deliberately killing civilians and knowingly killing civilians has become, it seems, a moral chasm.

Sometimes, though, we treat the deliberate killing of civilians with reverence, or at least feel a specialmoral pride in our refusal to condemn it. The best examples are from American history. We have not forgottenthat American Indians deliberately killed civilians, including children, and sometimes as a policy. But no onedemands an apology from contemporary American Indian leaders; quite the reverse. Nor is this simply a matterof the silly business of apologies or other manifestations of political correctness. (If political correctnessis involved, it comes from focusing on the warfare of 1850-1890, when the whites were the worst killers, noton the earlier periods when things were more even.) Why then, do we keep silent about these presumably awfulcrimes? Why don't we rub them in the faces of our children, so that they will never forget that such presumedevils presumably tainted our land?

It is necessary to put the question more sharply to exclude weasely answers. The Indians sometimes murderedinnocent civilians, including children. These acts were right, wrong, or morally indifferent. Which were they?

I can't see that they were morally indifferent, can you? Were they wrong? If so, they must have beenawfully wrong, because they involved murdering children. Is that what we want to say?

I suggest not. I suggest the acts were terrible, cruel, and ultimately justified. My reasons are familiarto everyone. The Indians' very existence as a people was threatened. More than threatened; their society wasdoomed without resistance. They had no alternative. Moreover, every single white person, down to the children,was an enemy, a being which, allowed to live, would contribute to the destruction of the Indians' collectiveexistence.

The Indians had no chance of defeating the whites by conventional military means. So their only resort wasto hit soft targets and do the maximum damage. That wasn't just the right thing to do from their point ofview. It was the right thing to do, period, because the whites had no business whatever coming thousands ofmiles to destroy the Indian people.

The comparisons with the situation of the Palestinians are beyond obvious. To start, what I have writtensneaks in some misconceptions. There were no people called "the Indians". They were diverse, ascultures and as individuals, some peaceful, some warlike, some responsible for the massacres, some not. Itwas, of course, the whites who lumped them together and demonized them (just as this sentence does to thewhites). The Israelis kind of do that when they destroy the houses of old women and blockade cities to thepoint of starvation and medical catastrophe. And when anyone supports the Israelis, they are responsible forthis sort of collective 'punishment', even if they don't - as they often do - indulge in the same coarsegeneralizations.

As for the other points of resemblance, not only Israeli, but much non-Israeli Jewish propaganda does itsbest to conceal them. But concealment is impossible. Guess what? The Palestinians didn't travel thousands ofmiles to dispossess the Jews. It was the other way around. Often the Jews had very pressing reasons to leaveEurope. So did the whites who settled in North America. And both groups of settlers couldn't quite take inwhat they saw: that gee, there were other people already there, and the land was theirs. When possible, bothengaged in sleazy land deals to get their foothold; when not, force was used. But always there was noquestion: the whole land would be theirs, and the state to be constructed would be their state.

Both groups of settlers somehow contrived, despite these goals, to believe that they wanted nothing but tolive in peace with their 'neighbors'- neighbors, of course, because they had already taken some of their land.And sure, they did want peace, just as Hitler wanted peace: on his terms. The most casual survey of Israelipolitics indicates that mainstream, official, respectable Jewish opinion asserts an absolute right to Israel'spresent boundaries, and at the very least would never abandon the continually expanding settlements. What isconsidered extreme Jewish opinion, which asserts rights over the entire area occupied by Palestine, is not theIsraeli extreme. The far right in Israel claims a territory that stretches as far as Kuwait and southernTurkey. This matters, because, given Israel's fragmented politics, the extreme right wields a power out ofproportion to its numbers. The conclusion must be that Israel, as a collective entity, wants peace with allthe sincerity of, say, General Custer.

Like the Indians, the Palestinians have nowhere to go. All the Arab states either hate them, or hate havingthem there. And, like Indians, Arabs and Palestinians are not all alike: do we scratch our heads and wonderwhy, when the Cherokee were kicked off their land, they didn't just join the Apache or Navaho? Like theIndians, the Palestinians have not the slightest chance of injuring, let alone defeating Israel throughconventional military tactics. Like the whites, every single Israeli Jew, down to and including the children,are instruments wielded against the Palestinian people.

Of course the two situations aren't quite analogous. Things are clearer in the case of Israel, wherevirtually every able-bodied adult civilian is at least an army reservist, and every Jewish child will grow upto be one. And the American settlers never spent years proclaiming how happy they would be with the land theyhad before embarking on a campaign to take the rest of it. One might add that the current situation of thePalestinians is more like that of the Indians in 1880-1890 than earlier, because the Palestinians have lostmuch more than half of their original land.

The Palestinians don't set out to massacre children, that is, they don't target daycare centers. (Nor dothey scalp children, but according to the BBC, that's what Israel's clients did in Sabra and Shatila.) Theymerely hit soft targets, and this sometimes involves the death of children. But, like anyone, they will killchildren to prevent the destruction of their society. If peoples have any right of self-preservation, this isjustified. Just as Americans love to do, the Palestinians are "sending a message": you really don'twant to keep screwing with us. We will do anything to stop you. And if the only effective way of stoppingtheir mortal enemies involved targeting daycare centers, that would be justified too. No people would doanything less to see they did not vanish from the face of the earth.

(Michael Neumann is a professor of philosophy at Trent University in Ontario, Canada. He can be reachedat: mneumann@trentu.ca)