Not just words, the Tower of Babel

These are hard times. The Middle East is awash in a sea of blood, while we play over the right words to describe what's going on. And yet, words are so vitally important: When we're naming things about a conflict, we're focusing our lens, deciding on what to see and what to skip. With the Palestinian-Israeli crisis, we're judging truth from a distance, but that doesn't mean our vision can't be clear, sharp and just. But for that to happen - for us to see the whole complex picture - we've got to access all the words, hear all the stories. One story simply can't swallow the other story. So, nothing could be more lethal than the U.S. government and media - our "authentic" source of words, by the way - legalizing Israel's story.

But, is it really Israel's version that's legalized? Consider what we see in the news. Scene one, Palestinian terrorists blow themselves up in market places, killing innocent Israeli citizens and inflicting a reign of terror on a peaceful, democratic nation. Scene two, Israel "retaliates." Note the pattern we see is provocation and response. Israeli deaths send shock waves in U.S. newspapers and news channels, but the death toll in Jenin is unknown; in fact, Sharon has officially refused to cooperate with the inquiry in Jenin. Bush has proclaimed Ariel Sharon, the person charged with the unspeakable Sabra and Shatila massacres, as a "man of peace" while Yasser Arafat is sponsor of Palestinian terror and implicitly a terrorist.

Labels drop in place, backed by a public narrative that demands us to put our faith in it. What's more, it's all or nothing: Either you believe, or else, you obviously want to drive Israel into the sea and hence, are an "anti-Semite." The argument fiercely pins the blame on one side and itself refuses any kind of accountability. What's more, it's unjust; what the Israelis suffer at the hands of Palestinians is in spotlight, but what the state of Israel wrecks on the Palestinians is clamped under doublespeak - Israel "retaliates," "pin-points strategic targets," "sends messages for the Palestinians to stop the violence." You can find the loveliest example in U.N.'s Feb 2002 Economic and Social Council report; "targeted killing," "active self-defense," is used to explain Israel's policy of assassination, responsible for the death of 71 people, including four children. What need to paint bullets in pictures for PR, when you have words? Orwell would have been proud.

The Palestinian-Israeli teach-in, held on April 19 and sponsored by JHUMA, JHU4Peace and MESA, presented only part of the invisible story. Susan Muaddi Darraj, a Christian Palestinian writer and Joshua Ruebner, Executive Director of the Washington group, Jews for Peace in Palestine and Israel, gave hard facts which have long disturbed onlookers and humanitarian groups. For instance, Israel receives $2 billion in aid every year from the U.S. treasury, part of which returns as payment for state-of-the-art weaponry: F-16 fighter jets, TOW missiles, armored tanks, Apache and Cobra helicopters-gunships and other high class equipment. Power is its own temptation; Israel has not always been careful of human life in their record with Palestinian civilians. In 2000, Amnesty International published a press release condemning the sale of helicopter gunships to Israel, because "Israel has used U.S.-supplied helicopters in punitive attacks during incidents where there was no imminent danger to life and that Israel has used helicopter gunships to fire on Palestinian civilians, including children, some of whom have reportedly been killed or injured as a result." Can we say, then, that the terror and violence is exclusively Palestinian?

If the Palestinians are accused for a martyr culture that recruits young men and women as suicide bombers, images of young Israeli soldiers drafted at age 18, are themselves hardly more than boys shouldering weapons of destruction and no less disturbing.

There is simply no way someone that young understands the terrible gravity of human life, the responsibility that comes with shouldering a lethal machine. The grotesque marriage of youth and violence is found in both sides - Israeli soldiers have been guilty of indiscriminate shooting in their turn, and for proof, talk to people who've smelled the stench from Jenin.

Also, as Ruebner pointed out, violence always has a context - this is true for when the crisis is an economic one: The posh European milieu of Israeli towns and neighborhoods contrasts with the rock-bottom poverty of Palestinian villages and refugee camps, where people are trying to subsist in less than $2 a day. Under the all-purpose justification of "security concerns," the Israeli army has uprooted 80,000 olive and fruit trees, and with it, the independent livelihoods of Palestinian men and women. Homes have been demolished, and about 30 Jewish settlements, including some major cities like Kiryat Seher and Tel Zion, have mushroomed on the 22 percent land that is legal Palestinian territory. 400,000 settles have moved in behind the 1967 borders and 480 km of roads have been built to access their settlements. As Darraj pointed out, the roads end up creating islands out of Palestinian villages; it takes a trip of 50 miles to bypass a road and get to a neighboring town 5 miles away. The result: segregation, isolation and containment. And all this, remember, in Palestinian territory.

Jeff Halper, a professor at Ben Gurion University, describes the setup in his own way. He calls it Israel's "matrix of controls," a system which uses settlements, roads, military checkpoints, permits for travel and permits for building to grasp control over every aspect of Palestinian life. With checkpoints, the Israeli military decides if one can leave one's village and go to work, market, school, the doctor or hospital, church or mosque. All this, of course, is to contain Palestinian terror - including schoolchildren, breadwinners and women in labor - the virus that threatens the health of the Jewish nation. And yet, I wonder why it hasn't struck anyone how malicious this justification really is; it produces the reality it talks about. A population of poverished, isolated, desperate, brow-beaten people might indeed become terrorists, so that the silent world may sit up and actually see them, even if with faces never originally their own.

Let's return to words, this time Ariel Sharon's. In a televised speech to AIPAC, he said, Israel's three week incursion in the West Bank "has opened a window of opportunity to put the peace process on a different moralistic track, free from the threat of terrorism." This reference to morality is the crowning irony, showing us what a mockery politics has made of language. Irony, I want to remind all of you, is when pain is so bitter that one can only laugh. These are hard times, when we have to distrust words, especially the simple ones that filter our world in good and evil and sanction the visible broken bodies over the invisible, unnamed ones.