Palestine

A Battle of Perspectives.

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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. ↩︎

Danger Polls.

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The world is a strange place. Something captured my imagination. Being a pollster in Gaza and the West Bank. This, apparently, is a real thing.

I found out this morning that people did polls in Gaza and the West Bank after October 7th, when Israel started Israeling after Hamas Hamassed1.

There were pollsters running around after October 7th2 in Gaza and the West Bank (the West Bank has it’s own troubles). That seems a very brave thing to do, wandering around while things are exploding and asking people their opinions.

Being a pollster there sounds like a pretty exciting job in that area – a job for young people, hopefully with health benefits. Dental would be good too, though it seems that hospitals are at a premium at this time. Do you get to march in front of the line and say, “I’m a pollster, I have a headache” in front of the line of people with missing limbs? I doubt it. Health insurance rates must be high, too.

What do you do when you’re not polling? What do you do if you’re wounded? Do you find a pigeon, scribble a note with the appropriate findings and say defiantly with your last breath, “The poll must be completed!”

Gaza and the West Bank have been very scary places for some time. This does not mean that random exploding things falling on parts of Israel makes for Israel to be ‘safe’, but it’s more reasonably safe than the occupied territories because there, you get both the IDF and Hamas 24/7. No election since 2007. Only the people who shouldn’t have guns have them.

How would it be to be born in an occupied territory? To have no rights that can’t be taken away? To see in the distance, above a wall, a modern nation funded by another modern nation? I *might* think that it wasn’t fair. Maybe a friend gets killed by that modern nation’s people. Maybe a family. Maybe I feel injustice with no outlet, no real representation. Or maybe I just don’t care, wandering around and eeking out a living, but it seems that I would care. Would you? I’d probably feel a little angry, honestly.

I might kick a can really hard, then get detained for littering. Things probably would not go well for me, for I have been spoiled by a better illusion of freedom.

I joke a bit in this post, but that belies what I’m trying to do: Add context to a world that screams should the wi-fi get sketchy. We are all just staring out of our caves through our flat screens, not understanding the starvation being twistedly enforced in unforgettable ways, ways that the world has now seen in imagery that cannot be forgotten.

It seems that during all of this, the somewhat simple task of simply doing a poll – something that we take for granted in much of the world – is so very different there, in a war zone, but there are people there doing it because they clearly think it’s very important, more important than the two lizard argument being presented to US voters.

Anyway, if someone applies for a position at your company who has been a pollster in a war zone, I’d say that you’d want to hire them. Actually, anyone who has found a way to survive there should be advanced to the top of the stack of those applications just based on resilience.

  1. We have two new terms to use. I remember when going postal was new, and we humans have made it so we have new ways to express groups of individuals going postal in the same direction. We need a word that combines the two, the dance of complex history. Until then, we’re stuck with the cumbersome phrase, “Gaza War”. ↩︎
  2. The poll can be found here, on the Palestinian Center for Policy and Research website. ↩︎

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

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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. ↩︎

Protesting The World.

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I have avoided this topic for some time.

I oversaturated myself yesterday about the college protests over the Israeli-Hamas war, where civilians have been showing up dead faster than police can arrest protesters around the world in the United States. Clearly, I have a bias, and that bias is for civilians, not a ‘side’, but in supporting the civilians, I end up having to look hard at the people killing and maiming them.

The children didn’t do anything wrong but be born in an accident of geography that happens to be behind walls – or in front of them – on every side of their existence. That’s pretty shitty1.

As someone without a distinct tribe, that’s what I see. As a TCK and a hyper-multicultural, I’m not vested in the tribalisms of yesterday, the present, and the future. I just see people.

This morning, washing dishes, I thought about it, and I recalled my youth and what my mother said about cleaning my room.

Anecdote on Perspective

As a boy, my room was… well, not something that would pass any form of inspection. My mother, who then in the 1970s spent all day cleaning, boycotted my room for her own reasons – some selfish, some not – and tasked me with cleaning my room. This was one of the first responsibilities given to me, and I did not like it. Since I didn’t like it, I didn’t spend much time on it – but time is relative, and as a child, play time is always less time than responsibility time.

This did not work well for my mother, who would ask me if I had cleaned my room and I would say, “Yes!”. Of course I said that. The backyard beckoned, the friends on bicycles beckoned, even the dog beckoned. And, of course, it was never clean. She would stand at the door, look in my room, and say, “That’s not clean. Keep cleaning.”

I didn’t know what she meant. Everything is exactly where it should be, in my eyes, even the dirty socks in the toybox thrown there in a rush so I could go out and play. I had no idea what she meant.

One day, apparently after taking a deep breath, she stood at the door of my room and looked in and said, “Come here.” So I did, and she said, “When you look at your room, pretend that you’re me and look at your room from here.” From that vantage, I could see I had not hidden my mess as well as I had thought.

Soon, my room looked clean from that vantage point, a tribute to my mother showing a different perspective, flawed by being twice my height at the time. It was flawed for other reasons, but from her perspective, it worked because she didn’t have to look at a dirty room when she walked by2.

This would serve me well on Navy and Marine Corps bases: Learning what inspectors looked for and making sure it was sat(isfactory). But it didn’t teach me why the room had to be clean. That would happen as I matured.

Battles of Perspectives.

The world has become so polarized that it seems often we forget to consider things outside of ourselves, or our tribes. As someone generally outside of the tribalisms, I often see individuals and groups fighting over things that they disagree about and forgetting everything they agree about. Sometimes it’s a matter of social inertia. Not everyone is cut out to be a free thinking individual3. I used to get upset about the blind followers, but having interacted with them over a half-century, I understand why some of them are the way they are and are probably better off that way.

Even so, the leaders of groups have a responsibility to their followers to be mindful of what they’re doing. Eventually, because humans tend to more vocal disagreement than agreement, people split off and do their own thing – which gives us diversity of perspectives that we often ignore. As someone expressly against the killing of children, Israel’s actions and policies do not align with what I would be willing to agree with – yet I cannot deny that the Jews I have known over the years deserve a place to live in peace. Israel increasingly doesn’t seem to be that place for anyone. I’m sorry if that offends anyone, but if you have to kill children to protect yourselves, you have to wonder what you’re protecting yourself from.

On the flip side, I don’t think kidnapping civilians is something that’s tenable. In fact, it seems an act of desperation, that things are so bad that you need to make a point by absconding with another human to imprison them until someone else meets your terms. Anything negotiated at gunpoint only results in ceasefires, and ceasefires are just pauses in war where children are born to die when the ceasefire is over.

Many people are trying to clean the room by hiding their socks in their toyboxes when it comes to ethical stances, while some are simply protesting to make the world a better place – a better place from their own perspective.

Protests.

When things get bad enough, people are moved to side with something because they want to feel like they have done something. When I saw the invasion of Ukraine, I wanted to go over and help with the medical as a former Navy Corpsman, and explored it seriously only to find that I had become old, I had a wonky knee sometimes, that battlefield medicine had evolved a lot in tools and equipment, and that I would be a liability in a war zone4. I had purchased tickets to get there that I cancelled, not because of the potential for death or injury to myself, but because I could cause others to die or be injured.

It was humbling in ways that I still wrestle with at times.

So I got on Twitter, pre-Musk era, and supported there through social media, because I could do that but I found myself looking at the mob and seeing things that I considered overstepping. I pulled back. I still support Ukraine sovereignty, but I am careful about weighing the cost to others.

Protesting for or against something isn’t as high of stakes, but in a way it is. I believe in peaceful protest, but peaceful protest always gets people together with perspectives that may be slightly different, that we overlook because at the time they may work towards our ends – and sometimes that hits us in the soft nether regions later on and undoes the good we thought we were doing.

It’s like when the Soviet Union was still a thing. Pilots in Germany would come perilously close to starting a war as the pilots tested each other constantly. With too many people on alert for different perspectives interacting so closely, things can get very hairy very quickly. Sooner or later, something goes just a little too far and both sides need to pull back because they don’t actually want a war. Only fools want war, thinking it’s like a Hollywood production of Rambo. If fools were the only victims of other fools, humanity would be much stronger for it, but fools have a tendency to kill people who are not fools simply because they disagree with them – even if they’re on the same ‘side’. There’s really no such thing as friendly fire. Just fools with excuses.

We should first do no harm.

Israel And Palestine

The sad truth is that until now, Palestinian children weren’t really counted when they were alive and now we count their dead. The sad truth is that the whole situation could have been resolved decades ago and the Palestinians have found themselves to be convenient pawns of the big players in Middle Eastern politics. The sad truth is that those same children grow to become adults and don’t want to be pawns anymore.

It would seem that the protesters for the Palestinians have the same thought, that they see something that should be fixed and want it to be fixed. This I can agree with wholeheartedly and without reservation. It’s clean, it’s ethical, and it reflects the values of humanity that we’ve all been taught at some basic level.

What I cannot agree with is supporting Hamas. What I cannot agree with is supporting the policies of Israel that have galvanized the attention of the world by their ruthlessness and impunity for human life, as Russia has shown in Ukraine.

I’m all for people living peacefully, but that seems almost oxymoronic because of the lack of mindfulness of leaders of followers, and of followers that should know better.

Now the violence is spilling blood on the other side of the planet, all because we as a species have let the issue sit for far too long.

I don’t know what the answer is. I know what the answers aren’t.

The answer is not ignoring the problem – we’ve done that for decades. The answer is not funding weapons to one side, ally or not. The answer is not becoming as polarized as we allowed the whole situation to become. The answer is not creating laws that make it illegal to criticize a country’s policies and actions. The answer is not violence between protesting groups. The answer is not making the world more unsafe. The answer is not giving to one group at the cost of another. The answer is not electing politicians who ignore the problems because of election cycles while effectively shouting ‘squirrel!’ and pointing at some other issue.

Sometimes, we have to sit down and wrestle with our humanity and acknowledge how ugly we can be, even if our own tribes don’t see it because they’re too busy dehumanizing the other side.

Humans are always stronger together, except when humans are together.

So I go back to my favorite quote and wonder what we can build together that would make things better, because the world is broken and we can’t afford the amount of glue to fix it. We have the technology and will to do great harm, but no one seems as intent on the greater good.

We should change that, through social media, through interacting with each other even when we disagree, and find ways to build things because otherwise we’ll run out of things to destroy.

We should be better than this. Let’s try that.

  1. I try not to use profanity, but sometimes profanity is the only way to express something. I wrestled with that sentence. ↩︎
  2. Closing the door would have helped her too, but it wasn’t something I would dare say at the time. ↩︎
  3. including some free thinking individuals. ↩︎
  4. I had good friends who allowed me the dignity of coming to that conclusion myself. ↩︎

Sourcing Humanity

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This meme has been wandering around a lot lately, and it’s almost amusingly something that those who support either side of the conflict between the State of Israel and Hamas agree on – for very different reasons.

Of course, it’s Noam Chomsky that is cited on this, but… I couldn’t find a source, instead finding a source for Barbara Schecter Cohen saying it.1 For something as popular for so many people, you’d think people would get the source right.

What I’ve found with it is that those who support the State of Israel like it, and those that support Palestinians really love it. Nobody seems to be supporting Hamas, which is probably as it should be, but to date it doesn’t seem like anyone is supporting the Palestinians in a meaningful way. It’s a failure in that regard. It certainly hasn’t made the State of Israel safer, and could be a central issue when it comes to the Presidential election in the United States.

All of this exists in a world where we increasingly can’t trust what information we get. I don’t support Hamas, I don’t support the State of Israel. I will support the Palestinians but even as I write this it’s quite likely that they are becoming extinct – with the use of AI, no less.

It seems like the technologies of humanity are conspiring against the concept of humanity we were taught.

With all that technology, we can’t seem to source a quotation properly, and the meaning of it is subjectively good for just about everyone who thinks everyone who disagrees with them is wrong. At a meta level, that’s even more disturbing.

  1. What I did find was a citation of it where Barbara Schecter Cohen apparently said it before a public audience at the Zekelman holocaust center.
    ↩︎

A Thought On Democracy.

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By Saioa López, Lucy van Dorp and Garrett Hellenthal – López, S., van Dorp, L., & Hellenthal, G. (2015). Human Dispersal Out of Africa: A Lasting Debate. Evolutionary Bioinformatics Online, 11(Suppl 2), 57–68. http://doi.org/10.4137/EBO.S33489 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4844272/, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50508700

Those of us in democracies think that they’re the best way of doing things that we have found so far. We tend to think that democracy started off when it was first called democracy by the Greeks.

Yet, if we look throughout human history, we see what democracy looks like.

However you believe humans showed up, be it by deity or evolution, the common thread is that humans started somewhere. From that somewhere, humans scattered all over.

We don’t talk about why because we don’t know why.

We could have fun speculating. Maybe there wasn’t enough food in an area. Maybe one group migrated away from another group because they couldn’t agree on which end of the spear to use when hunting, where the group that used the wrong end was erased by history because of their stupidity. Maybe they couldn’t agree on how many stones to throw at an adulterer. Who knows? The point is that a group made a decision to leave and voted with their feet.

There’s a reason we use this term.

This was democracy. If you didn’t like how things were going you could leave. You could wander off that way in the belief and/or hope that things would get better over there, and maybe it had something with the society where you were.

Humanity did this until it started running into each other again. Our technology advanced, and we could cover greater distances than our ancestors did, and we could do it faster.

Suddenly, there’s nowhere to go. We run into situations these days where nations that are democratic are often split close to 50/50 on decisions, and nobody can leave. No group can get together and form it’s own nation-state, really, because that would require every other nation-state to identify that it is a nation-state.

Nomadic humanity has nowhere to go. We don’t talk about this because there’s quite simply nowhere to go. We can’t go anywhere without bumping into other humans, and there’s always some reason that we can’t get along that magically seems to reinforce those borders where people who are dressed the same wearing rubber gloves. There is a ritual to crossing borders, a ritual which has become more and more complex because people find comfort within their boundaries.

You can get political asylum, but the people within the nation-state you’re going to have to agree that you need it.

We have people that have built walls around other people, then complain about how they behave within those walls even if they don’t agree with the way people do things within those walls. That never ends well unless the wall comes down.

What are these borders worth to us? I’m sure I don’t know. They’re worth it to some people.

For now…