thing. It does what we do, for our reasons. Surely
if we're civilized, we can put away the knives."
- The Lion in Winter, James Goldman
Over
a decade ago, I wrote two optimistic posts on Palestine. It was 2014 and things looked promising.
Americans finally started to sympathize with the plight of Palestinians and consider their grievances. In
the first post, I gave great credit to Jon
Stewart who humanized Palestinians when few other celebrities had the courage to do so. Anthony Bourdain was another prominent media personality who stepped up.
But I added that weathering the War on Terror had also played a large part. We had regrets over invading and occupying Iraq. Those eight futile years
of violent quagmire set the stage for introspection and
healthy skepticism about our country's foreign policy. It was both totally unexpected and long overdue.
We did a great deal to regret. As
occupiers, we had naturally acted like occupiers. The Abu Ghraib prison scandal is just one example: We had dehumanized the Iraqis nearly immediately. America's
Constitution explicitly forbids the use of “cruel and unusual punishment” in
the original 1789 Enlightenment language. It's one of those things Americans think of as a defining trait that affirms our moral authority as the good guys. It's an important component in our collective self-image. We need to believe that we don't do those things. But the Bush Administration arrogantly defended its use of torture. Then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales dismissed the Geneva Conventions as “quaint."
We routinely raided homes in the early morning hours and droned family gatherings. We
called ourselves “liberators" – initially confidently,
later defensively. That claim got stale fast. You cannot occupy
another country without becoming a monster in the process. If the
populace wants you out, your only two options are leaving or getting
vicious. And things predictably escalate after the latter. Evil deeds are inevitable: It's a given. The tragedy has a trajectory and what's “quaint" is thinking it could play out any other way.
Equally
predictably, anyone who questioned the righteousness of our purpose was quickly
accused of self-hatred, disloyalty, and/or terrorist sympathies. Early on, George
W. Bush said, “You are either with us or you are with the enemy."
By 2008, such rhetoric had gone from stale to rancid and that
factored into Barack Obama winning the White House. But another significant side-effect of this was Americans began
to see the Israeli Occupation of Palestine with the discomfort of
self-recognition.
Of course, American gentiles already knew that Jewish people who criticized Israeli apartheid got called “self-hating," but our recent experience made it hit different. We saw the very same manipulative playbook being employed. American gentiles became less likely to see this as some communal squabble we should probably stay out of. We now had some first-hand insight and could no longer ignore that we were already deeply involved. Our shared shame slowly began to dawn on us and it got awkward and damning – mostly for officialdom and its centrist explainers, less so for ordinary Americans with working moral compasses.
Each newly seen political or military similarity opens our eyes to others. There are so many similarities that some are still unreported or underreported. For example, Israeli prisons and detention centers for Palestinians are just as horrific as Abu Ghraib – arguably worse. Of course, respected human rights groups like Amnesty International have documented that Israelis have used systemic torture for years, yet our press remains fairly deaf to that fact. So, for many Americans, there are still fresh surprises ahead.