To start off, here is another excellent article by Glenn Greenwald.
I have discussed the topic of moral equivalence many times in the past. In fact, it was the Shehada incident that led me to start writing about the topic in the first place. Greenwald starts his article with a discussion of the assassination of Nizar Ghayan. But it was the Shehada killing that set the precedent for Ghayan. Then it was a one ton bomb. Now it was a two. Then Israel tried to argue that the murder of his wife and children as unintentional. Now Israeli officials and many of Israel’s more vocal “supporters” find this action perfectly justified.
Israelis (and Jews more generally) weren’t always so shameless when it came to war crimes. The very first time I came to Israel was in the summer of 1971, not long after the 1967 war. I was a senior in high school. I went on an organized tour. For the first three weeks we worked as volunteers at Kibbutz Sa’ad. Sa’ad was founded in 1947 by modern Orthodox Jews, part of the Bnei Akiva movement (which was then a socialist movement. It is now the heart of the religious Orthodox settlement movement espousing ultra-nationalist ideas which are very far from socialism). Sa’ad is located not far from Gaza and was pretty much destroyed in the 1948 war and then rebuilt. Despite Israel being in control of the Gaza strip at the time, the kibbutz was still vigilant about guerilla attacks coming from Gaza, which was not uncommon at least in the ’50s.
The first Friday we were working in the fields my good friend lost his glasses. The two of us were allowed to go to Tel Aviv on Sunday, but to make up the lost work time we were told we had to work Saturday night. So Saturday night we met up with one of the Kibbutz members. It turned out our “job” was to help him make deliveries to fruit markets in the Tel Aviv area. So most of the evening we spent riding up front in his truck and talking to him.
Our conversation soon turned to the conflict with the Arabs. Our driver talked about how much Israelis hated war. He stressed that despite all the wars, Israelis don’t hate Arabs and wanted nothing more than to make peace with them. Israel was very different then. This was several years before the settlement project took off in earnest and Israel was still in flux about how to deal with its newly acquired territories. But even in retrospect I have no doubt he was totally sincere, and was in fact expressing widely held views at the time.
By contrast, today the vast majority of Israelis share what Greenwald calls “the sociopathic indifference to (or even celebration over) the deaths of Palestinian civilians.” As I noted in a previous post, the Hamas suicide bombings that started in 1994 certainly contributed to this changed attitude. But the roots go further back.
It began with Meir Kahane and his Kach party, whose ideas quickly took root amongst Orthodox settlers (as I note in the linked article and also here). However, for many years Kach and its ideology was considered beyond the pale by most Israelis. On the other hand, by the time the first intifada rolled around in the eighties, most Israeli did share a generalized sense of contempt towards Arabs. Just like the settler movement had its root in the 1967 war, the war and its aftermath led to this sense of contempt (to read more about the aftermath of the 1967 war see here). The overwhelming and rapid victory of Israel against the massed Arab armies led Israelis to see Arabs as cowards, clowns, weaklings and the like. Israeli popular culture was rife with songs, stories and cartoons that portrayed Arabs as all these things and worse. When Dayan decided to integrate the economy of the territories with Israel proper, the Arabs from the territories became the “water boys” of Israeli society, the lowest rung on the social ladder, even lower than Israeli Arabs who had served that role previously. So while the Kibbutz-nick I met in 1971 still held a more respectful attitude to Arabs, that attitude mostly disappeared over the next 30 or so years.
Hamas’ war against Israel with its suicide bombings pushed this generalized contempt to the extreme of genocidal hatred. A few years ago I was on a panel sponsored by the Workman’s Circle in New York. Another member of the panel was a representative from Israel’s consular office in New York. At one point, he basically said he doesn’t have any concern for the death of Palestinian civilians. Any society which will send a killer into a pizza shop to blow up innocents, is an evil society, he said, so why should he care about their deaths?
Of course this Israeli representative was talking to an audience of Jews so he probably felt comfortable expressing his true feelings. Which brings us full circle to Shehada and Ghayan. While even a few years ago Israelis felled compelled to justify attacks on civilians, now they merely blame those deaths on Hamas. In Israeli eyes, the issue is quite clear cut. Hamas kills our children. Hamas represents the Gazans. So why should we have any compunctions about killing Gazans’ children? They brought this disaster on their own heads. It never occurs to these Israelis that this is the identical thought process of the Palestinians, except in reverse.