I had a conversation at lunch yesterday with a friend, a neocon Jewish American, that fascinated me. We were getting ready to get up from the table when he said, "Hey, wait a minute, do you want to talk politics for a minute?" We proceeded to discuss the events in Iran and at one point I brought up my amazement at the protesters' embrace of non-violence and their courage in the face of aggression. I said, "I wonder if this will be a lesson to the Palestinians. That perhaps if they renounce violence and embrace peaceful resistance they too could garner more international support for their cause, a la Gandhi." His reaction fascinated me. He got this very serious, dour look on his face and replied, "That's what worries me. The biggest existential threat to Israel is that the Palestinians will realize the potential for non-violence and embrace it.
I finally understood why some of the more cynical neocons cannot stand the Green Revolution. Without a conflict, without a bogey man to demonize, they are scared to death. In their minds their legitimacy comes from the fact that they are better than the bogey man, that they are necessary to keep the bogey man at bay. I don't think that the nation of Israel is so fragile that it could not come to terms with a peaceful movement for Palestinian statehood.
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I've said something similar for a long time, although not about non-violence. If the Palestinians had merely restricted their bombings and other acts of violence to military & police targets, instead of going after innocent victims, they'd have gained legitimacy as a resistance movement instead of just being branded as terrorists. They might already have a state.
ReplyDelete"I finally understood why..."
He clearly doesn't understanding anything. His friend was simply making a point that if the Palestinians were smarter they'd pose a greater threat to Israel. He takes a perfectly reasonable point and derives a bunch of nonsense about "cynical neocons."
Maybe I'm reading too much into it in another way, but I take that remark to mean a whole series of things concerning what Palestinians might be able to do in a non-violent way.
ReplyDeleteFor example, they could demand citizenship in Israel. Rather than trying to destroy it from without, they could become part of it. If non-Jews became a majority and gained power within Israel, it wouldn't be a Jewish state any longer. I'm guessing that's the kind of "existential threat" he's talking about.