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- 12/08: Seth Greenland
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Muslims Vs. Jews: I Don't Have the Answer, Do You? |
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 by Philip Smith, September 12, 2008 |
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TAGS:
Setting a good exampleI'm standing on the subway platform at Broadway/Lafayette
with my friend Abe, a Lebanese guy who has a HUGE schnozolla, which makes me
look positively Arayan by comparison.
This Hasidic guy with the hat, the beard, the robes, the whole deal is looking us over. Back and forth between Abe and me. I can't figure out what this dude is up to.
Slowly, he starts to walk over to us, "Uh-oh," I think, "we're going to be converted or something."
Now he's right in front of us and is looking back and forth at both of us. Finally he makes the decision to speak to Abe, "Which train do I take to Williamsburg?"
I realized that the whole stare down was that he wanted to make sure that he was speaking to a Jew and not some unholy outsider. Well, he made the wrong choice. He was speaking to an ARAB and when he got home I'm sure he was going to get one big spanking. I started laughing and thinking, "Yo, bro, I'm the Jew here, talk to me..."
All this to say that every day I am dismayed by the ongoing subtle and not so subtle war between Arabs and Jews. This has been bothering me for most of my life. For some reason I know as many Arabs as I do Jews, actually maybe more, and no one has ever tried to blow me up--or whatever happens between these two peoples. Yes we talk, yes we disagree, but we are closer than many of my American colleagues. The sad thing is that we are more similar than we are dissimilar.
I wish we could fix this problem. It would change the tenor of the world. Yes, I know that it is easy to heap all the blame on one side, and yes sometimes I do that but that tactic hasn't worked and isn't going to work. I'm not saying this to be all lovey-dovey. I actually have no solution or suggestions other than to work on this one-on-one.
In many ways I feel so bad for the Palestinians, not because of the so-called iron hand of the ‘oppressors' but because of how they are duped by their own people. The vast majority of people want to be able to see their kids happy and going to school, they want to relax after dinner with their family and maybe have a picnic and a color TV. They need medication for their sick kids, they need money to eat. No one talks about the roughly $20 million dollars a year that Arafat's wife gets from the Palestinians while she lives in Paris (not the cheapest city on the planet) bathed in jewels and spouting crap that she would be proud if her daughter became a suicide bomber but girls don't do that sort of thing. What, she is certainly driven by a noble cause, with a deep heart for her people. That 20 mil would build a school or two, start a new farm, buy people tools. And that's not a one time deal, that's every year. So while decent people struggle she goes shopping.
Yes, I know it's all more complicated than this and yes, THEY should fix it and stop shooting missiles at Israel. But sometimes you just have to try. I always felt that the day that Bush took office he should have taken Arafat and whoever the Israeli guy was at the time into a room and said, "Look, this crap stops now, you all don't leave here until we fix this." But that takes leadership and vision and instead Bush got on his high horse and "refused" to talk to Arafat while casualties mounted on both sides. I would say that this was not an effective strategy. We could have made a difference or at least tried to make a difference and didn't. So more people died and on it went.
I know everyone will start barking over this and the volume will get turned up and fingers will start pointing. But there just has to be a better way for all of those involved to lead decent lives and turn away from this makeshift war. In my life, I always believe there is an answer for everything and a solution for every problem. I know I have no suggestions but maybe someone smarter than me does because we all need to fix this not only for ourselves and for our children but for God as well.
Philip Smith spent the last week guest blogging for Jewcy. This is his farewell post. Want more? Check out his book, Walking Through Walls.
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Ismail
I find pieces like this so incredibly dispiriting. Where shall I begin?
1. The opening anecdote has only the sketchiest relevance to the point of the article (which is, as far as I can tell, that people ought to be nice), not to mention bearing the faint odor of novelistic invention (a Hasid in NYC unsure of how to get to Williamsburg? Really?) Although the part about Lebanese guys with heroic honkers certainly rings true.
2. Smith warns us not to blame one side, then spends the rest of the piece cataloguing the shortcomings of the Palestinian leadership, which is like shooting fish in a barrel. But to mention Palestinian impoverishment and the dearth of medications without referencing the Israeli siege? The disgusting Suha Arafat is the main problem?
3. "...the day that Bush took office he should have taken Arafat and whoever the Israeli guy was at the time ..."
Look, if you don't know that Barak was PM at the time (remember, Bush's first term more or less coincided with the end of the Camp David talks-an auspicious time that would cause even the casual student of the region to recall the names of the principals-anyway, Bush would hardly collar Barak knowing that, in two month's time, he'd in all likelihood be replaced) and couldn't be bothered to invest the 20 seconds you'd need to find out, why do you think anyone would think you have a single interesting syllable to utter about the Middle East?
4. Despite your kumbaya notions that everyone's in the same boat and no one's (everyone's) to blame (although, as I've pointed out, you don't really believe this, citing as you do Palestinian mischief only), the Israelis happen to be the occupying force of four decades standing. For many in the reality-based community, this makes them the aggressors.
You guys have got to find better guest bloggers. Bring back Batya, the charmingly nutty West Bank settler-criminal with the funny hat, whose insane reflections didn't bother with the phony insipidities of this current guy.
Anonymous
Ismail, your attention to trivialities in the article seem to me to be missing the point. This may in fact be one of the major problems in any argument about peace in the middle east. Anyone who tries to discuss the possibilities for peace seems to be immediately dismissed as an idealist and one side begins spewing blame at the other. You've identified this by perpetuating this problem.
I truly understand your criticisms and perhaps not mentioning Barak being the leader was a bit lazy, but that doesn't undermine the purpose of Smith's article.
If you concentrated more on the piece as a whole rather than listing individual problems you had, maybe you would gather that the article is not an in depth solution, it's simply identifying one of the distressing ironies of the conflict in the Middle East: that Muslims and Jews have a hell of a lot in common and yet are such vicious enemies. I think your anger at Smith is largely misplaced and unnecessarily critical.
Palestiniansareamyth
The only settler criminal are the Arab Fakestinians who love to murder Jewish children. Just ask the 9 year-old Jewish boy who was a recent victim of Arab terror. The only way they'll be peace between Muslims and Jews is when the Muslims stop their hate, violence and get their occupying asses out of Jewish land!
Ismail
"...it's simply identifying one of the distressing ironies of the conflict in the Middle East: that Muslims and Jews have a hell of a lot in common and yet are such vicious enemies. I think your anger at Smith is largely misplaced and unnecessarily critical."
Nope. First of all, the conflict is not between Muslims and Jews; it's between Palestinians and Israelis, or Zionists and non-Zionists, or displacers and the displaced, or occupiers and the occupied. It's become a reflexive trope of what sadly counts as reasoned discussion of the Middle East that the conflict is between Muslims and Jews. This obscures the fact that Christian Arabs also resent being displaced, and that, generally speaking, one dislikes those who drop bombs upon their homes and one does so without needing to check the religious affiliations of the bombardiers.
Just about all warring parties bear some similarities to one another-Brits and the Irish, Tamils and Sinhalese, Kosovars and Serbians et al. It is beneath trivial to note the "irony" of those Semitic cousins in the Levant warring with each other.
I see no purpose whatsoever in Smith's article except for him to emit a sigh of disappointment at the blockheadedness of Israelis and Arabs for not subscribing to his infinitely vague and untutored reflections on a matter whose importance is matched only by Smith's outlandish superficiality.
Oh, and as I noted, his "they all need to shape up" rhetoric did not go so far as to detail a single Israeli malfeasance, only a checklist of Arab shortcomings. Is it uncharitable of me to notice this glaring omisssion?
How you could describe Smith's spacy musings as "...discuss(ing) the possibilities for peace in the middle east" is beyond me. And how it is that you construe my objections as "trivialities" when they are simply specific disagreements with his "argument" is equally mysterious.
Perhaps you are better with the sort of global apprehension of pieces like Smith's than I am. I'm more of a detail guy, and I have this odd affection for fact, logic and rigor.
If Smith wants to tell us how frustrating the world is to him, fine. Just be clear that this may be a psychologically interesting account of his internal states, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with peace in the middle east.
Ismail
By the way, may I make another request for people to either register or adopt a nom de keyboard when conversing here? It makes addressing particular people easier and aids in following the sometimes byzantine twists discussions here take. One can easily imagine the difficulty in responding to an "anonymous" when there are (or seem to be) several of them on the same thread.
All you need to do is invent a screen name for yourself and put it in the "your name" box, whose default is "anonymous" but which will accept your own alias. Painless, quick, you don't have to register and a blessing to the community.
Thanks.
JewcyCraig
Or we can mandate registration. And then you can have an account, Ismail, and I can send you a private message every time your comments make me chuckle.
Ismail
You want a chuckle? OK, here's a chuckle; a priest, a rabbi and an imam walk into a bar...oh, wait, an imam in a bar? that won't work....OK, a priest, a rabbi and an imam go out for a cheeseburger...whoops, nope......hmmm...got it!..a priest, a rabbi and an iman decide to get laid...aw, shit...
Never mind. Go find your own chuckle.
Anonymous
What's his name doesn't see any Israeli policies as reason to feel bad for the Palestinians, but wonders why the parties can't reach a peace settlement. Thanks for the deep thoughts.
Isaac
That made me chuckle...