There are two pieces today,
There are two pieces today, from opposite sides of the political spectrum, that perfectly encapsulate two disparate ways of looking at the world and the people in it.
The first is the lead piece in Frontpage Magazine, by Editor David Horowitz. In it, he paints his usual ideological portrait: we are entering the time of Great Conflict, where the near East will try to destroy the West. We are entering a war that will permit no compromise, only victory or our destruction. Israel, he maintains, is our front line position in this war. That country and its neighbors are like the two stones of a mill, and their heavy, grinding points of contact are the end product of the driving force of the cultures of the West and near East. It is an abstract piece, where nations represent not individuals but ideologies, and clash in the rarified space of ideas as much as--or more than--they do on the real fields of battle.
Contrast that with this piece in today’s Salon. It’s an interview with Filmmakers B.Z. Goldberg and Justine Shapiro, whose documentary “Promises” is up for a Best Documentary Oscar. Made between 1997 and 2000, the film follows seven young Israeli and Palestinian children as they live their young lives in the midst of burgeoning conflict. I saw the film when it aired on PBS in December, and it is indeed very affecting…heart breaking, actually. To see such young children already mouthing the ideas and prejudices of their elders is nearly enough to rob one of all hope. ‘Nearly’ enough, I say, because one of the documentary’s centerpieces is the meeting of Faraj, a Palestinian boy, and Yarko and Daniel, two Israeli boys, at Faraj’s refugee camp home. For a brief moment, the commonality of the human desire to know and be known is there. But, by the end of the film, checkpoints and increased hostilities have prevented further meetings. Faraj, now two years older and entering a disillusioned adolescence, has the nascent spark of the Intifada in his eyes. Yarko and Daniel have pulled back, both because of the danger and, one senses, because of their parents, who seem to have decided that they have done their bit for peace.
It is these children, and thousands like them, who are the grist between Horowitz’s millstones. These are the young people who will grow up imbued with the ideologies of their parents, and who will be ground to dust by the forces of history. It is all very well for Horowitz to blame the Arabs, and to portray the Israelis as vanguards of Western democracy who just want to live in safety. It’s very tidy, rhetorically comfortable, and an easy position to argue from. It’s also overly simplistic, and very nearly inhuman. Ideologies are created, believed, and conveyed by people. They do not descend to earth from somewhere in the ether, like voodoo spirits, to ride their hapless subjects.
That we must defend ourselves from the ancient sacrificial evil of our enemies is beyond question. But we must be careful that we do not become cavalier about those human beings who will pay the price during the course of that defense.
