Pure Loss

By Crispin Sartwell

True: The other day, rough-housing between my two sons, 14 and 12, got out of hand. When I arrived, 14 was sitting on top of 12, administering a beatdown. I knocked him off. Now 14 might have felt aggrieved that I was taking 12's side. But though I didn't know the whole history of the fight, I knew who I was morally obliged to help: whoever was getting hurt.

That, I propose, is good rule of thumb in understanding conflicts. And though the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians is complex, that is why I think that the Palestinians are fundamentally on the right side.

And though the sibling rivalry analogy trivializes the Israel and Palestine, a situation rife with history and death, they are both examples of a fundamental moral principle: making people suffer is wrong.

Mao Tse-Tung, who understood oppression extremely well from both sides, once said that "repression breeds resistance." And it should: meeting repression with resistance is not only necessary, it is admirable.

That is not to say that suicide bombing can be morally justified. It cannot be, under any circumstances. Killing random people is not insurrection, it is sheer gratuitous, useless murder. It is not even "terrorism," exactly. Perhaps "nihilism" is nearer the mark: it is a sheer erasure, a pure loss.

Indeed, though we sometimes try to understand suicide bombing as a strategy, and though we may speculate that there are forces in the Middle East capable of using it strategically, suicide bombing is fundamentally an act of expression rather than a military or propaganda maneuver.

In any case, the military and cultural situation of the Palestinians is close to hopeless. But it must be evident that the bombers themselves are doing what they are doing precisely because of that hopelessness, to speak it. If you think about it from inside the bomber for a moment, you know that suicide bombing is fundamentally an expression of despair. Then, we and Israel had better think about what it is that drives people to despair.

The actions of the Israel sometimes seem just as unconnected to practical operations, just as profligate, just as grimly enthusiastic for atrocity, as the Palestinians'. But in the long run they are more systematic and far more destructive. Israel is imposing deprivations on a scale that suggests a policy of cultural annihilation.

The situation is of course ironic, since if anyone should be able to empathize with an oppressed people, it is Jews. But perhaps, in the unprecedented historical disasters that we Jews have suffered, we have lost some capacity for empathy to the resolution to survive. Jews have learned what ferocious will survival requires, and have shown ourselves that we have this will. Others have it too.

Here we have a sparsely equipped, impoverished non-nation engaged with one of the wealthiest and most aggressive war machines in the history of the world. This is not an even contest between two peoples: it is fundamentally an oppression and so it is fundamentally wrong. And American taxpayers bear responsibility as financiers of the violence. With the big kid, we are hopping gratuitously on the little kid.

But little kids have their own ways of exacting vengeance. That Sharon's government has expanded settlements and engaged in the most pointed and symbolic humiliations amounts to a policy of provocation to violence. I wonder how anyone seriously believes that by pursuing its present policies toward the Palestinians, Israel is making itself more secure, or advancing toward anything but an enduring disaster.