A recent exchange with a reflexively anti-Muslim American prompts me to post what is tragically not an unnecessary reminder that not all Palestinians are Muslims, that not all Palestinians and Muslims hate Jews, that not all Jews hate Palestinians and Muslims, that not all anti-Semites are Palestinian or Muslim or Arab, and that reflexive support for Israeli violence against Palestinians is no more sane or useful than reflexive support for Palestinian violence against Israel, no matter the disparity in resources, and that in fact it infantilizes Israelis in particular and Jews in general by suggesting that they are incapable of behaving otherwise.
The proximate cause of the discussion was this story about a man who was hauled off a plane in Miami screaming that he wanted to kill all the Jews.
The plane was taxiing away from the terminal at Miami International Airport on Wednesday night when 43-year-old Mansor Mohammad Asad of Toledo, Ohio, began making loud anti-Semitic comments and chanting, apparently in Arabic, Miami-Dade police said in a statement.
“I’m Palestinian and I want (to) kill all Jews,” he said, according to witnesses.
My correspondent’s response to the story was to sarcastically remark that “this is why we need more Muslim immigration.” Conscious of the historical record demonstrating that white Europeans, many of the Christian persuasion, have killed considerably more Jews than have the dusky races, I pointed the silly bigot to this storehouse of home-grown anti-Semitic bile and suggested that along with banning the immigration of Muslims, we should probably exile all non-Jewish white people, with emphasis on those describing themselves as Christian.
This didn’t go over well; following were first, the accusation of leftist anti-Semitism and then, when I identified myself as a member of the tribe, the usual accusations of self-loathing Jewry on my part, along with the (in my experience) novel suggestion that I read Dostoevsky and study up on Nihilism. Not an intrinsically bad idea, but not exactly on point either.
Most non-Jewish Israel partisans in the US seem to assume that it is only in the US that Jews object to Israeli government policies toward Palestinians, and that the objections are grounded in that self-loathing, left-wing psychological deformity so often projected onto the likes of me.
It’s of no use, then, to showcase a serious effort like J Street, which describes itself as a pro-Israeli, pro-peace organization, because American Jews who fail to demonize Palestinians are simply ill.
With that in mind, I some while ago compiled a list of Israeli organizations with a pro-peace agenda. I made that, along with my usual recommendations of information sources that may provide a more nuanced understanding of the situation there, available to my correspondent but, as usual in these circumstances, to no avail. I don’t know whether anyone will appreciate the effort any more here than there, but here it is regardless.
For coverage of Israeli affairs beyond the careless domain of US sources, I recommend Ha’aretz, the editorially liberal Jewish daily, and Ynet News. For Palestinian news, consider the Palestine News Network and Electronic Intafada. For a visual record of what the Wall is doing to Palestinian farmers and families, check out this Digital Journalist photo-essay, now almost six years old but none the less affective for that.
Here’s a partial list of Israeli peace organizations. No doubt there are others, but this is a start.
Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions
Public Committee Against Torture in Israel
It has been my experience that proponents of peace between Israel and Palestine—non-genocidal peace, to be clear, and non-apartheid peace—are more than willing to more or less thoroughly explore all of the various perspectives from which parties to the conflict view it, while those reflexive supporters of one side or the other to the exclusion of one side or the other, aren’t. I suspect that on some level, the latter feel as though they can’t afford to.
