A Battle of Perspectives.

I had just returned to Florida from a 30 day ‘vacation’ in Trinidad and Tobago, and I was invited to have dinner with some friends who both worked where I had in different departments. It was before the turn of the millennium, my friend was in the midst of domestication, and I had some pepper sauce I had made while down there from bird peppers picked in the yard.

As usual, it was a good dinner, and as I recall I had also brought some rum from Trinidad – I never really enjoyed rum, but it was something to bring from my recent trip and there were no two better people to have it at the time. After dinner, we sat at the pool overlooking the pond, and somehow the whole Middle East came up. Everyone liked talking to me about the Middle East for some reason; I had no roots there, I only had access to the information everyone else had access to. Maybe it was because I was a veteran. Maybe it was because of a project I had completed for Israel when I worked where they did. Maybe it was because I was brown. Maybe it was because I grew up partly outside of the United States.

I dreaded these conversations because I grew up around Muslims in Trinidad and Tobago, and I had grown up around Jews in Ohio. In neither place did either group speak ill of the other at the time. They were busy being who they were, living their lives.

She brings up Israel, and I had only recently found out she was Jewish. She talked about how terrible it was that her people were being attacked all the time in Israel, and I agreed – civilians being attacked is never a good thing, and at the time random rockets had been tossed at Israel from some group or the other that were Palestinian, and she went on about how terrible these Palestinians were. My knowledge of the area being less than it is now, I did know that the Palestinians she was talking about were living in occupied territories, not unlike the ‘Reservations’ in the United States for Native Americans.

Being me – I have an unfortunate tendency to be me – I mentioned that it was terrible, that it wasn’t good of them to be launching rockets at civilian targets. It was a problem, there was no doubt about it, but then I asked, “Well, what do they want?”

She looked at me, having been caught mid-rant, as if I had grown another head. I expanded. “Well, if they’re attacking people, they want something. People don’t go around just launching missiles without a reason”. She stared at me a moment, and she said they wanted to kill Jews. That was pretty obvious, so I asked, “Well, why do they want to kill Jews?” and suddenly I was painfully lectured through World War II history, and the Holocaust – which did happen, by the way, and it’s shameful that I have to write that.

After she wound down, having heard her out, I said, “It seems weird that people who have so much in common would be so violent with each other.” She asked what I meant, and I said, “Well, kosher and halal are pretty much the same idea, the same concept, as an example.” She told me they were not the same thing, but a rabbi1 and I had eaten in a Middle Eastern place in New York City years before, and he simply asked if the meat was halal and was fine with that.

She had become very upset. She’d brought it up, I honestly didn’t want to talk about it anyway, so I tried to change the topic but she wouldn’t let it go. They hated her people. It was deeply personal for her, and I felt bad because she was a friend and I didn’t want her to be upset. The whole time, her husband, my other friend was quiet, but that was his way.

These people, she told me, were animals.

I’ve never liked when people do that, so I said that they weren’t animals, and that there had to be some reasoning – however flawed it might be – that had them upset enough to launch missiles randomly into a human populace.

She told me that I didn’t know what I was talking about, that I didn’t know the history, and got up to go inside – but before she did, I said, “You’re right. I don’t know what I’m talking about. I don’t know the history of Israel.” In a moment, she was smiling again.

She was absolutely correct. I had no idea of the history. So she sat down and told me the history, late into the night, and I listened and asked questions carefully.

I got a big hug before I left and all was well.

The More Palestinian Perspective.

Over the years since then, I’ve encountered more Muslims than Jews that talked about this issue, and they gave me their perspectives, which were sympathetic to the plight of Palestinians. So I head that side as well, though I never heard them refer to Jews as animals2. Of course, none of them were Palestinians, and the only anchoring point they had with the Palestinians was a common religion.

Yet no one really helped the Palestinians in meaningful ways. The surrounding dictatorships only seem to use it to political ends, not to end the politics of it.

What I Learned.

The tensions have been built up over the decades – 7 of them – and nothing has been sorted out. An occupied people would of course have some extremists that want to fight back. Until recently, Palestinians weren’t really given voice in the public forum. How could that happen? Everything that came out of the area, everything that went into the area, passed through Israel’s hands. Yet not all Palestinians have resorted to violence. Hamas came into power, but it’s not really a democracy in the occupied territories, and how could there be a democracy there within what is cast as the Middle East’s only democracy?

And when you live in Israel, you don’t want exploding things hitting civilians either. So you get angry Israelis when that happens.

So there’s a lot of angry people doing angry things, but some angry people are better armed, and have mandatory military service that seems mainly to be about keeping the Palestinians in the occupied territories while settlers move in.

The situation is out of control, clearly. The Balfour declaration was born of war, quickly following the declaration of war by the British Empire on the Ottoman Empire, garnering support of Jewish people for the war against the Ottoman Empire. The whole existence of Israel seems to have been built on war, and it battles for existence are extraordinary.

Yet what we’re seeing today is not a part of history, it’s a culmination of history, and while history was being studied, the world has changed. We’re connected now to see things we could not see before, we’re more aware of human rights, and empires are waning. We should not be killing civilians anymore, unlike what Putin’s Russia has been doing in Ukraine. We say we hold ourselves to a higher standard.

It’s time for the situation of Palestinians and Israelis to be resolved, once and for all, not as a final solution, but as a lasting solution.

But it’s not being resolved as the world watches the same mistakes being made again. I cringe at what Israel has been doing, just as I cringed at the actions of Hamas on October 7th, but disproportionately.

I hope in 10 years this is all a bad bit of history, but from what I’m seeing, it could either be remembered as a terrible part of this century or just more of the same. The world wants it to end.

  1. I’d fixed his laptop that he was returning to a store while he was in line ahead of me, and only later found out he was a rabbi. We became friends, though I lost track of him in his travels and mine. I hope he’s well. ↩︎
  2. I had an Uncle who was Hindu that called the Palestinians animals, and was a big Netanyahu supporter in the 90s. ↩︎

N.R.A. Thinks Middle East Needs Second Amendment Rights.

The Nationally Ruffled Association’s1 (NRA) spokesperson, Mr. Rooster McGraw the 3rd (he was emphatic about that), has broken their silence on the war in Gaza and put out a press release, tapped out on paper.

He also wants to be certain that the Nationally Ruffled Association is not associated with the National Rifle Association, though he is surprised that they haven’t put out anything like their release.

The release cites the United States Second Amendment (the right to bear arms).

The overly verbose release states that had the Palestinians had the Right to Bear Arms, they could have overthrown the tyranny of Hamas, but the tyranny of the checkpoints has not permitted arms to do so, so we got some clarification from Mr. Rooster McGraw.

“It’s all a cluckup, you know? Had those Palestinians been able to rise up against the tyranny of Hamas, the whole October 7th thing wouldn’t have happened. Instead, we have what we have here. A failure to bear arms.”

When questioned more about this, he says, “We learned a lot from the National Rifle Association, which is how we got rid of those foxes”, he says as he points at his fox skin hat, “people should have the right to defend themselves. You critters have arms. We only have these wings and our feet, so we’re out at the range pretty often practicing at night. ‘Cause that’s when foxes come, ya know?”

When we pointed out that a lot of civilians have been killed or injured, his response was, “Well, that’s just a cluckup. I don’t know who the cluck decided that only the terrorists should have weapons. We need less gun control in the Middle East! We don’t need no gun laws!”

We tried to ask more questions related to Israel and settlers, but Mr. Rooster McGraw simply looked down, scratched the dirt, and said, “Getting dark soon, gotta go to the range. Freedom and Liberty need to be defended! Sell them all guns, that’s what I say! And tell the National Rifle Association to rename themselves if they ain’t gonna export the Second Amendment!”

In a cloud of dust, he flapped off.2

  1. It’s imaginary, for those of you who need that spelled out. ↩︎
  2. In case you missed the first footnote, or are particularly dense, this is satire based on the fact that the Palestinian civilians cannot defend themself against Hamas or the IDF, and haven’t been able to for decades. You can’t overthrow tyranny with rocks. ↩︎