Watching C-Span 2 --"BookTV" on the weekends-- I stumbled (again) across a must-read book on the Israeli - Palestinian conflict, The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East, by Sandy Tolan. But before I get to the book, a couple of observations.
First, it should be clear that what's happening in the Middle East, Iraq included, is a repercussion, long delayed, of British colonialism. But in a deeper sense, the violence engulfing the region is Hitler's legacy. Israel, it is said, was born of the Holocaust, the endgame of Hitler's "Final Solution" for the Jews. The irony is stark, because now a new holocaust, with all the ethnic and religious trappings of the original, holds the Middle East in its blood-soaked grip.
Secondly, America's complicity in Israel's assault on Lebanon and Gaza is directly proportional to amount of weaponry it supplies the Israeli government. We're continually reminded of Iran's support of Hezbollah, but the extent of U.S. military aid to Israel is rarely mentioned with any specificity in the American press.
Here are some of those specifics from Greg Mitchell of Publisher and Editor:
"Space does not allow a full accounting of U.S. arms shipments to Israel in the past year, but to cite just one current budget line: '100 Guided Bomb Units (GBU-28) that include: BLU-113 A/B penetration warhead.' That only cost $30 million. Another budget line for $319 million cites '5,000 Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM) tail kits.'
"These can be dropped from the air by some of the 102 F-16 aircraft sent to Israel since 2001 (price tag: over $4.5 billion). And those aircraft will stay in the air, thanks to emergency approval last week by the U.S. for $210 million in JP-8 jet fuel to go to the Israeli military. Israel also has from the U.S. over 700 M-60 tanks, 89 F-15 combat aircraft, missiles and bombs of all kinds and scores of attack helicopters."
In all, military aid to Israel since Bush took office comes to $10.5 billion.
But back to the book. The Lemon Tree attempts to humanize the seemingly endless and intractable conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis by looking at it from both Arab and Jewish perspectives. As history, that approach should open the eyes of the average American, who, as Tolan maintains, are familiar only with the Israeli narrative, thanks primarily to the best-selling book, Exodus, and the subsequent movie starring the blue-eyed Paul Newman. But what about the Palestinians?
Here's a excerpt from Tolan's post to TomDispatch, "The Palestinian Catastrophe, Then and Now", summarizing the salient points of his book:
"The Arab-Israeli war of 1948, known in Israel as the War of Independence, is called al-Nakba or the Catastrophe by Palestinians. For generations of Americans raised on the heroic story of Israel's birth, especially as written by Leon Uris in Exodus, there is no place for al-Nakba. Yet this fundamental Palestinian wound, and the power of its memory today, cannot simply be wished away. ...
"I've come to understand that the Nakba is as fundamental to the Palestinian narrative as the Holocaust is to the Israeli one. It is not possible to grasp the depths of the current tragedy, to say nothing of the fury and despair of the Arabs, without understanding the roots of the Palestinian catastrophe. ...
"The refugees from Ramla and Lydda arrived in exile, transforming the Christian hill town of Ramallah into a repository of misery and trauma. One hundred thousand refugees crowded into school yards, gymnasiums, convents, army barracks, or slept in olive groves, caves, corrals, barnyards, and on open ground along the roadsides. They would, in the end, join more than 600,000 other refugees to form an ever growing, ever more desperate Palestinian diaspora.
"In the coming years, the rage, humiliation, loss, and longing for home of the exiled refugees would coalesce around a single concept: Return. This, in turn, helped build what the Palestinians would call their liberation movement, whose tactics ever since would be considered the heroic acts of freedom-fighters by one side, and terrorism by another."
If you don't read the book, at least read the linked post. It may soften some of the hard-line positions taken by those who, like the letter writer in today's Oregonian calling Arabs "sharks smelling blood in the water", believe there is no justification for the Palestinian response to Israel.
By the way, my friend Mike Miller recommends another book to those who seek a greater understanding of the Israeli -Palestinian conflict -- The Iron Wall, by Avi Shlaim.
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