Catching up on Israel/Palestine
Between planning the course I’m now teaching (noted in the previous blog entry) and dealing with other things, I’ve gone a long time without touching on Israel/Palestine. I’ve also had the feeling, as I do with blogging more generally, that often there’s not much new I want to say even if I have the time to say it. Sometimes I’m tempted just to post a link to something I wrote months or even years ago. The details of whatever that past topic was may differ from the current topic, but for the most part those connections are clear enough. I’m not convinced that everything is worth repeating. Maybe I’m not a blogger at heart.
One year after my month-long visit to Israel and the West Bank I remain interested in returning, and am now hoping a preliminary connection to a West Bank university gels into a firm plan. In the meantime, I continue to keep up with events and collect tidbits to blog about if the mood ever strikes.
I did begin to write two weeks ago about Ariel Sharon, though I never finished the entry. Most of what I was reading at the time was annoyingly chirpy about Sharon’s late “change of heart” and “sincere desire for peace.” That the Zionist left and other Israeli peace forces came to consider Sharon an ally, and that Kadima is portrayed as the best hope for future Israeli stability, struck me as utterly divorced from morality.
Around that time I got an email from Jewish Voice for Peace that paralleled my own sense of Sharon’s legacy. An updated version on their website, which has details about Sharon’s history, now says more or less the same thing:
If anyone had said ten years ago that Ariel Sharon would leave office being remembered as a “man of peace,” they would have been laughed at by virtually anyone across the entire political spectrum. Yet the mainstream media’s coverage of events over the past several years, right up to Sharon’s current hospitalization, makes it fairly clear that this is how he will be recorded, at least for a time, in the popular mind of America. Israelis, no doubt, will have a considerably more nuanced and informed view, but his legacy there still seems to be largely one of a man who changed his ways in the last years of his life. Palestinians, on the other hand, will always remember him as the “Butcher of Beirut”, the man who built a wall in the West Bank and, in general, as a war criminal and merciless opponent.
But if Sharon is going to be thought of in the near term as a man who changed his course toward peace, it is both our hope and our task at Jewish Voice for Peace to convey the reality of Sharon, both his early days and his time in the Prime Minister’s office.
What emerges is the picture of a man who knew no boundaries in fighting for his agenda. We see in Sharon a man who rose ruthlessly to positions of power and, when he attained them, was both clever in his machinations and brutal in his actions. No careful study could possibly conclude that Sharon was ever a “man of peace”. But he is a man who is ending his career at the height of his popularity in Israel and the US, and who has, inarguably, made a profound impact on the Israel-Palestine conflict.