The view from Australia | Part 2 on Gaza

This series is about Israel’s policies in Gaza. I think they’re so unconscionable that I can’t believe they’re up for debate even among Jews — and yet they are. Instead of criticising Israel, I invite you to explore the basis and consequences of a pro-Israel’s-policy view. I’m not naive about changing minds but gotta try. This is for you if you: (1) support Israel’s policies in Gaza and the West Bank (2) consider Palestinians and Israelis to be equally human, their lives equally valuable and (3) don’t consider Jews to be a superior race.

Part 1|Part 2|Part 3|Part 4|Part 5|Part 6|Part 7|Part 8|Part 9

Most of the reactions I’ve seen about the conflict are from the Jewish community in Australia. This is a particularly pro-Zionist community that in my experience has tended to support pretty much all of Israel’s policies at least for as long as I’ve been watching. Even in the US, it seems that younger Jews didn’t support Protective Edge as much as older Jews. While I haven’t seen polls from Australia, it feels that the community is pretty united in support of the IDF.

To build on some previously-posted examples from when I went to a Jewish high school:

• We had a debate in assembly about whether the peace process was worth it. A student debating from the negative team said that the Arab countries should not be trusted because think about it — “does a leopard change its spots??!?eleventy”. Think about it.
• Better still, someone practiced his budding computer skills by making an A4 poster for his folder. It had a picture of Arafat with the caption “don’t trust those fucking Arabs”.
• Of course the term Arab being thrown around as an insult was an integral part of the school culture.
• When the second intifada started in 2000, we had an urgent assembly for our year to set us straight about things we were hearing in the media. They needed to be sure that we knew exactly where the blame lay (I’ll give you 7 guesses). But after the assembly, someone was saying to his friend that it was all a waste of time. “Just take all the Palestinians and shoot them.” A nod of agreement.
• Another student at one point listed his solution to “problems” in the Middle East. “We [Israel] should nuke: Iran, Iraq [this was in Saddam’s time], Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia”. I can’t remember all the countries but he had a shopping list.
• The above were stand-out incidents but a normal part of going to my high school was belonging to one of the Zionist youth movements. They’d have weekend activities, camps etc, with promoting love for the state of Israel as one of their core missions. I don’t think the majority of the school belonged to one of these but it was still a very influential part of the culture.

Wait, you biased ideologue! Surely there are schools in Australia where Muslim children have a similar or worse culture of dehumanising Jews.

Well yes, while I don’t know much about these, I wouldn’t be surprised that anti-Semitism exists in schools in many terrible forms. My point isn’t to compare but rather to set the background for the situation. A lot of the Jewish community who are my age had a similar experience. This is not a coincidence.

There’s a phenomenon called PEP: Progressive Except for Palestinians. It originates in the US but is pretty common in Australian Jews. This includes many people I know, both friends and family. People are signing petitions started by anti-immigrant organisations that are actually fascist. The use of Fox News as a citation source by people who would normally laugh at the network has skyrocketed. All of a sudden, Andrew Bolt is being praised for the bravery of telling it like it is.

With this in mind, I’ll outline what I believe to be the closest to the community’s consensus view on the Gaza conflict. It’s an amalgam of some of the many views I’ve been exposed to.

I know the situation is intolerable for both Israelis and Palestinians and so I would love a permanent peace agreement, including a two state solution. However, Israel has a legitimate right to launch a military operation against Hamas. Hamas is a terrorist organisation whose charter calls for Israel’s destruction and so cannot be a legitimate partner for a peace (or even for good-faith negotiations). In firing rockets and attempting ground attacks that target civilian populations, Hamas is committing crimes against humanity that no state would tolerate. It is therefore Israel’s duty to its citizens to wipe the organisation out.

Because Hamas’s military infrastructure is – deliberately – tied up with civilian infrastructure, this operation is particularly hard to conduct while minimising civilian casualties. Still, the IDF has taken exemplary precautions to minimise them. Unlike Hamas, Israel doesn’t deliberately target civilians. The civilian deaths are horrifying but are entirely to blame on Hamas cynically using the civilian population as human shields.

It’s certainly not about them being Palestinian and we hope that a long-term ceasefire can end ending the deaths on both sides. Racial and religious animosity is definitely not the driving force here; security is.

Furthermore, the international media has shown itself as hopelessly biased. They devote a disproportionate amount of attention to this conflict, which is dwarfed by dozens of other conflicts worldwide. The focus is overwhelmingly on the suffering of Palestinians. This ignores the fact that Israelis constantly live on edge with daily rocket alerts and evacuations and is used to dehumanise them. Some of this is caused by anti-Semitism, which as we’ve seen from the news is a lot more widespread and insidious than people think. Outside of overt anti-Semitism, there is the double-standard: a Jewish homeland must justify itself in a way that no “normal” country has ever had to. A lot of it though is just good people who don’t have the background in the conflict being manipulated by the anti-Israel lies and PR machine.

You should be able to guess by now what I think of pretty much every part of the above. By the end of the series I hope to have addressed most of it.

Part 1|Part 2|More to come

Yep, comments are closed. There are plenty of other venues to respond that don’t involve me paying to host pro-IDF rhetoric. I must be a coward and an enemy of Freeze Peach^TM. What am I afraid of???