This has been a week of eventful mornings in this part of the globe brought about by events that were unfolding at about midday in the Middle East. I woke up this morning to the news that the regime in Libya had come to an end as I did two days ago to the news that an exchange of prisoners was underway between Palestine and Israel. Today, I said to myself that the people of Libya got what they wanted after four decades of harsh rule whereas two days ago I could only wonder when the people of Palestine will be rid of a savage military occupation that has lasted more than six decades already.
Indeed, I sat in front of the television set on the morning of October 18, 2011 to watch the exchange of prisoners unfold between Palestine and Israel. It was a magnificent moment seeing these people go home and be greeted by their loved ones with hugs and kisses though we did not get to hear what they were saying to each other as there was no audio. But there was a consolation in this regard because we heard a speech and we were treated to an interview, each of which made the moment even more magnificent. What we heard was a speech of hope and renewal given by Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority. And we watched an interview conducted with Gilad Shalit, the Israeli prisoner who was by then on his way home.
Shalit was asked if he would work to have the Palestinian prisoners who are still in Israeli jails released and he said he would do so because he wanted to see them go home to their loved ones and wanted to see peace come to the two peoples. These words brought to mind the views I heard a few days earlier and those I read on the subject, all of which contrasted sharply with what Shalit was saying. They were views expressed by North American commentators who made themselves sound like they were on the side of the Israelis but were saying things that went contrary to the sentiments expressed by Shalit; and went contrary to the views expressed by the overwhelming majority of the Israeli people as shown in the poles that were conducted in Israel a day or two earlier.
So I asked myself why the difference in the points of view? And before I could begin to search for an answer, my memory brought back the old quarrels we used to see erupt every so often between the Jews who lived in Israel and those who called themselves Jews but lived outside of Israel, mostly in North America. On the whole, the first group of people were a more dovish lot as they expressed a willingness to seek an accommodation with their neighbors while the second – who were frequently joined by non-Jewish voices -- were seeing the struggle in the Middle East as a fight to the death between good and evil. And these people consistently adopted a hawkish stance that unsettled the Israeli Jews. Thus, to express anger and dissatisfaction at the North Americans who took liberty to speak in their name, the Jews of Israel reminded them of the fact that they were the ones who must live with the Arabs or die fighting them. And the Israelis stressed this point as they complained bitterly that the North Americans – be they Jewish or otherwise – attached a low value to their lives simply because they supported them financially. And they resented this situation very deeply.
However, I did not think that Shalit was processing thoughts as complex as these during the interview on the day of his release. What he said was more in line with the sentiments I heard expressed many times before by soldiers who fought each other like mortal enemies but then saluted one another respectfully at the end of the war. Some of these warriors even praised the ones they fought against in recognition of the fact that they must have had a reason as good as theirs to fight as hard as they did for their own cause. Like these soldiers – be they Germans, Americans or Japanese -- and contrary to the views of the armchair warriors who sit in the fantasy land of North American punditry, Shalit did not see himself as the good that was fighting evil; nor did he see the Palestinians as the evil that was fighting the Israeli occupation.
Instead, Shalit saw himself as a soldier in a tank who fought against a people that had nothing but bare hands with which to defend themselves and defend their loved ones. He saw himself as a soldier in an army that is equipped to the teeth with the most lethal weapons produced by the American military-industrial complex, an army that is fighting against a disarmed people who are kept in a state of total helplessness. He may not have thought of the methods by which any of this was made possible but he will -- without a doubt -- learn about them in due course. Eventually, he will come to realize that what happened to him has happened because of several factors that came together. Among these are circumstances that were brought about by the weight of the local politics which is played out in America. They are the weight of the international diplomacy that is being conducted by America in favor of Israel. They are the weight of the billions that America borrows to stay afloat and do mischief around the word mostly for the benefit of Israel. And they are the weight of the trickery that is imposed on America by a Jewish lobby that tells it what to do in every situation. Eventually, Shalit will come to realize that as a nation, Palestine was rendered helpless in the same way that he was when he stood outside the tank without a weapon in his hand to defend himself.
During the interview, Shalit seemed to be aware that more than a thousand Palestinian prisoners were released in exchange for his release and that thousands more remained in Israeli jails. And he must have felt that if anything, these numbers alone expressed with some eloquence the uneven fight that is waged by the two sides. And he must have been aware that the number of Palestinian civilians killed by the Israeli army and by the settlers as opposed to the number of Israelis killed by Palestinians trying to defend themselves was skewed to that same degree. For these reasons, he could not have entertained the thought that he was on the side of the good fighting a side that is evil. It is just that evil is never this weak.
On my part, these thoughts made me wonder as to the source of the “good versus evil” image that has been touted for decades; and I wondered why that image was painted in the first place. But I did not have to go too far to search for an answer as it was given five days earlier in an editorial that was published on October 13, 2011 in the Wall Street Journal under the title: “Israel's Unequal Exchange” and the subtitle: “The line between moral values and moral hazard can be thin.” Basically, the editorial writers argue that the exchange of prisoners will cause the war to continue, and they ended the presentation this way: “Sooner or later, Israel will learn the name of its next Gilad Shalit. Sooner or later, too, it will learn that the better course is to give its enemies reasons to think twice before taking hostages in the first place.” And I thought to myself, there is only one reason why someone would write words like these; it is that they see the war as being their own but that the dovish Israelis were frustrating them by refusing to fight to the death. And there is no doubt in my mind that the characters at the Journal think of themselves as representing a good that is locked in a fight against the Palestinians who, in their eyes, represent evil. And to this, I can only shout: What a bunch of immature adolescent bastards!
And there is more because when you read the editorial and you encounter the words: “think twice” at the end of it, you ask: Where the hell did the brains of these people wander while they wrote the sentences that preceded those two words? In fact, to lead up to the words, the writers crafted a number of paragraphs by which they gave an account of the agony that the Palestinians and the Israelis must have gone through over a period of five years as they negotiated the latest exchange of prisoners. Not only that but the editorial even mentions the negotiations that took place on previous occasions to exchange other prisoners. And despite knowing all of this, the Journal characters say that the last agreement was arrived at by negotiators who thought about the matter only once and not twice. You can only conclude from this that the people at the Journal are so wrapped in the cocoon of their fantasy, they cannot see what is outside of it or even see what is inside of it. They are as good as blind.
Here is a sample of what the editorial says in the paragraphs that precede the two infamous words: “Since 1982, it [Israel] has released thousands of Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners in exchange for a handful of Israeli soldiers and civilians … The Jewish state's repeated willingness to pay an exorbitant price for its citizens … The negotiations to return Sgt. Shalit dragged on as long as they did largely because Hamas had reason to believe it could drive the hardest possible bargain.” Given all this, there should be no doubt in the mind of anyone that the writers at the Journal find themselves in the position of having to write editorials not because they missed their calling and were trapped in it but because they were planted in these positions to do the work of the devil. These people are the chosen children of Satan, and they are there to do his work.
You get a sense of that when you see what these people seek to achieve in writing an editorial such as that. What emerges from it is the picture they maintain in their heads of the good versus evil fight they say must be fought to the death. To this end, here is how they describe the Palestinians: “...many of them serving life sentences for murder...” And so you ask: What about the thousands of Palestinians – most of whom are women and children – who are murdered by the Israeli army as they sleep in the bedrooms? These are not accidental murders; they are murders committed with American made precision weapons that specifically target the children and their mothers to inflict maximum pain on the enemy in accordance with instructions given to the Hebrews not once or twice but everywhere – and I mean absolutely everywhere -- in the Old Testament. And these are instructions that the leaders of Israel have repeatedly said they intend to follow to the letter and not deviate from them a fraction of a degree. These people make the late Gadhafi look like a saint.
Furthermore, to describe the unequal exchange in the number of prisoners between the Palestinians and the Israelis, the Journal editorial writers say this about Israel's Jewish values: “...a testament to its national and religious values, which stress the obligation to redeem captives.” And so you ask: What about the values of Hamas which – in order to redeem its own prisoners – captured Shalit and paid the price of seeing an Israeli savage attack on them that killed a thousand or more innocent people? This was not an accidental attack, it came in accordance with the Jewish equation which says an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. The exception here is that when the balance of power is unequal as it is between the American equipped Israeli army and the bare handed Palestinians, the equation becomes a thousand eyes for an eye and a thousand teeth for a tooth. Yes, Judaism is evolving but instead of mellowing, it is becoming more savage than even the horror stories of the Old Testament – all of which makes the late Gadhafi look like a saint.
As to those in North America who impersonate the Jews by writing pro-Jewish shoddy editorials in prestigious rags, the natural optimists among us ask if there isn't something about them that can be considered positive; perhaps a place where the effort to reform them can begin and thus render them less destructive to the human race. Ironically, we find that despite their mental challenges, these people display an extraordinary ability in one area of human endeavor. It is the ability -- as evil as they are -- to portray themselves as the good that is fighting evil, a trick they employ to recruit the innocent and get them to fight on their side against the good which they portray as evil.
Yes, these people possess an ability to invert reality in a way that is mind boggling. They used this ability to make the Palestinians and the Israelis go at each other as if locked in a fight to the death. But I believe that if harnessed properly and used wisely, that ability can be made to work for the good of mankind. However, to make these people see the benefit in doing the opposite of what they have been doing for ages is a problem I do not yet know how to solve. For this reason, I leave the matter for others to think about and search for answers. In the meantime, I am going fishing -- at least as far as this matter is concerned.