arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)

In a typically tendentious move, Israel last week launched a campaign in the United States and Europe to show how monstrous Palestinian society is.

Their soldiers, it would appear, had come across a "controversial photo" found in a family album during their takeover of a Palestinian home in Hebron, showing a child "dressed as a Hamas militant" and wearing a "suicide bomber's harness."

Israel diffused the photo worldwide. A nebulous issue, an inescapably trivial pursuit, you say? Not as it turned out.

The story, if story it is, got wide coverage in the US, and the European print media devoted a lot of ink to it. The BBC saw fit to air a report on it filed by its correspondent in the West Bank.

At first blush, one's reaction is, "Those darn, violent Palestinians!" Only later would the more logical reaction hit home: "And what the devil were these soldiers doing rummaging around in a Palestinian private residence, anyhow, flipping through a family photo album?"

I don't know if the prime motive behind this campaign by Israel was to besmirch what they have not already besmirched about Palestinian reputation in the West, but the end result of the whole exercise was to unwittingly raise the one question that goes to the heart of the conflict in Palestine: Could a people be justified in using the rule of the gun to govern the lives of another people, feeling free to send their soldiers to barge into your home, there to walk into your bedroom, where your wife sleeps, and search through your chest of drawers, looking for family albums and heaven knows what else? (Next time you're told about "the only democracy in the Middle East", think of that).

How would you like to live like that? And if you don't, what would you do about it? Would you get to a point where, after thirty-five years of this kind of humiliation, you say, to hell with it, if I can't choose the way I live, then at least I'm left with the dignity of choosing the way I die? How would the experience of being raised under these conditions shape your mind, your very consciousness? What kind of person would you become when, throughout your entire life, you were ruled by the code of the bully imposed on you by a foreign ruler? In sum, what kind of idiom and metaphor would a society, long denied freedom, invoke when it views the world around it?

It's all about freedom, you see, nothing else. A people have it or they don't have it. You are with them or against them. You cannot remain indifferent or neutral because by not taking a stand, you are in effect giving your approval to the prevailing order. The issue is of the utmost gravity, for there is nothing in this world outside freedom. Everything in our lives, in our human condition, bespeaks of it. Our language, our culture, our politics, our meditations on the future, even our codes of perception, are anchored in freedom. Shorn of it, life is hollow and meaningless. And in this case, the very opposite of freedom is that brutal row of ten letters: occupation.

And the occupation in Palestine brings us back to the photo of that infant dressed as a bomber. Strange, disturbing, horrendous? Not really.

We cannot assume that, over the last three-and-a-half decades of living the surreal lives people are made to live in the West Bank and Gaza, profound changes had not taken place in the Palestinians' repertoire of consciousness, their view of the world, their value system, their inward preoccupations. We can not pretend that the unspeakable pain that Israel is inflicting on Palestine is unrelated to a sane discussion of what the victims of that pain have been driven to do.

This issue — the response of a subjugated people to the challenges of their history — is of obvious relevance. It compels us to admit that we cannot, and should not be impertinent as to, extrapolate from our own situation as Americans or Europeans, indeed even as Arabs, when we speak about how Palestinians have chosen to fight their tormentors. Does anyone, in other words, have the right to tell an oppressed people how they should conduct their struggle against a ruthless, determined enemy?

Surely, there is a wide gap, a dissonance, between the view of the world embraced by members of a community raised free and secure, and that of a community whose sensibility is shaped at the whetstone of despair. In a subjugated culture, particularly one where the leadership had either betrayed or failed its people, the individual will recast his surroundings and the context of his self-definitions through what anthropologists call the teleological spirit of history, a paradigm different from yours and mine.

You may think that suicide bombings are wrong. You may feel that Palestinian society dehumanizes itself by resorting to "terrorism." And you may convince yourself that endowing a fallen patriot ("shahid" to the Palestinians) with heroic attributes is egregious. Think what you must, feel what you will, and convince yourself of what you should. But human beings are the product of the objective world they inhabit. They do not become who and what they are in isolation of it. If the Palestinians are such monsters — their monstrosity extending to dressing up an infant in a bomber's outfit — then ask who turned them into such creatures. Ask Israel. For wherever there's a monster on the loose, be sure to look for the very Frankenstein who created him in the first place.

And, yes, do you often wonder, as I do, about those soldiers who daily violate the sanctity of Palestinian families' homes? What do these soldiers do when they go back to their own homes? Do they hug their children and act as if nothing extraordinary had happened in their lives that day? Do they read the Torah as if its precepts do not enjoin from what they have done? Do they listen to music, read books, watch a soap opera, get ready for bed, as if they had just had another day at the office?

The mind balks at the two alternate worlds that these Israelis inhabit — two worlds where as Israelis dehumanize Palestinians, they surely end up dehumanizing themselves in equal measure.

Were I a Palestinian living under occupation today, I would say to these people: Get out of our home and homeland before it's too late for both you and us. Stop compounding our rage by having us live under your rule and making us dependent on you for a living, picking crops as farm hands on lands once owned by our families.

And, don't you see, the invincible enemy whom you dread like no other, the suicide bomber, is your own creation. The mirror is cracked and the image you see in it is blurred, but that enemy is your own reflection.