Word: arabize
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When the current crisis began several weeks ago, the host of ABC's talk show "Politically Incorrect," Bill Maher, suggested that Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and Arabs throughout the Middle East had only themselves to blame for their predicament. After all, he said, there are 22 Arab states, and the Palestinians could just go to one of them instead of laying claim to Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank...
This habit of thinking about the Middle East leads to a dangerous lack of empathy for particular groups in the Arab world. Over the last few weeks, I have heard people blame the Palestinians for the Israeli crackdown, saying that Palestinian protesters are the ones throwing the rocks, so they should suffer the consequences. Consequences maybe, but what kind of consequences? How far can a nation go in putting down an uprising...
...millions of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and Jordan face hardship and exclusion precisely because they don't fit in there. They have been powerfully shaped by 50 years of statelessness and no one else in the Arab world has experienced this. What's more, countries like Lebanon and Jordan have their own interior lives, with a delicate balance of interests that allows their various classes and religious groups to live together. You can't introduce millions of foreigners into a tiny nation like Lebanon and not expect to upset the internal balance. You can't, that is, unless you think...
...might think about these concessions to Egypt, Lebanon and Syria, perhaps this much is clear: these are not concessions to the Palestinians. Each of these countries represents a distinct people with a distinct set of claims against Israel. To see their claims as one long list of "what the Arabs want" reflects a certain way of thinking about the people involved, namely that they are all the same--concessions to some are concessions to the others. But any real measure of Israeli concessions to the Palestinians should focus on the central claims of the Palestinians--sovereignty over the Occupied Territories...
Stripped of its association with the Arab race, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is an independence struggle between a stateless people and a vastly superior occupying army--not unlike the conflict between Tibet and China. Palestinians are frustrated because they are too weak to win back their freedom. Yet for the most part Americans don't understand why the Palestinians lash out at the Israelis. The reason that Americans don't understand is that they see the Palestinians as part of a hostile mob of Arabs that vastly outnumbers the Israelis. This gives them a distorted picture...