We are all Palestinians
In fact, over the course of history any number of fair-minded thinkers has cloaked similar struggles in a veneer of romanticism, describing them as necessary, valiant and just. The American Revolution, the French Resistance, and probably even our civil war may be good examples. It's the imagery applied to the Jewish revolt against Roman rule in 70 C.E. Yet applying these descriptions to the Palestinian cause seems peculiarly inappropriate. There's open intolerance of any portrait depicting a dispossessed nation of Palestinians engaged in a justifiable effort to reclaim their land. It's an intolerance that strips the Palestinians' challenge of the earmarks of an authentic liberation struggle. Instead, their cause seems marginalized as a hate supreme; of little more than a primitive outpouring of bone-deep bloodlust; an endless spasm of naked terrorism, organic in nature and produced by some inexplicable strain of anti-Jewish hatred.
Yet, the harsh reality is that in one way or another, we are all Palestinians. For years, I've vainly struggled to rationalize how America's obstinate Don't Tread on Me culture and insurrectionist history of inception lends any credibility to its role in efforts to de-legitimize as "terrorist," the Palestinian cause. In all fairness the Palestinian reaction to the loss of their homeland in 1948 is completely analogous to the way we would react today had we been run out of Texas by armed Mexican settlers orif Vermont were seized by Marxist militias operating across the Canadian border.
I'm also puzzled as to how this off-framework view of the Palestinian cause survives amidst fairly widespread awareness of an identical strategy -- terrorism -- undertaken by Israel to uproot Palestinians from their territory in the first place. As history points out, Ben-Gurion, along with former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, were among this terrorist strategy's chief proponents and participants. This raises the obvious question: What's the difference? What makes this tactic acceptable for the aggressors yet morally reprehensible for the aggrieved? The currently defined Palestinian/Israeli paradigm could easily lead one to conclude that the Palestinians successfully repulsed the terrorist attacks of Ben-Gurion and cohorts in 1948, but have since continued attacking Israelis pretty much on general principle. Ergo, it is the iniquitous Palestinians who are the warrantless aggressors in all this.
"The basic doctrine is that Israel is the hapless victim of terrorism, of military attack, of implacable and irrational hatred," asserts MIT Linguist Noam Chomsky in the forward to Israel's Sacred Terrorism, by Livia Rokach, (whose father, Israel Rokach, was an Israeli Minister of the Interior during the 1950s) " Israel is often chided for its response to terrorist attack, a reaction that (Israel's supporters) deem wrong."
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