I had briefly forgotten, when I wrote about my visit last summer to the West Bank city of Hebron, that the infamous Baruch Goldstein massacre—he shot and killed 29 Palestinians and wounded 125 others—had taken place there. I knew about it, of course, and I remember when it happened, but the incident’s location wasn’t something that had firmly impressed itself on me, partly because I had never been there. So I wasn’t thinking about it when I visited Hebron, and it didn’t come up in conversation while I was there, so I didn’t include it in my recent dispatch.
I wish I had, though, because it’s an important part of the story. Goldstein all by himself killed almost half as many people as an Arab mob killed in the infamous massacre of 1929, an incident I did put a great deal of emphasis on. Goldstein’s bloody deed isn’t the only violent act committed by Jews against Arabs in Hebron, but it’s certainly, and by far, the nastiest.
Jewish terrorism doesn’t take up a large space in my consciousness for a reason that I trust is obvious—it’s rare. Goldstein shocked and appalled almost every Jew in the world when he murdered those people. One of their own became a full-blown no-way-to-whitewash-it mass-murdering terrorist. He was killed when some of his would-be victims beat him to death, but had he survived, the Israelis would have thrown him in a cage and left him there for the rest of his days.
All cultures produce murderers, all cultures produce political extremists, and all cultures produce individuals who combine the two into deadly concoctions. Israeli society, though, does a pretty good job policing these people and ensuring that their following is both miniscule and marginalized. So I’m not particularly concerned about the moral health of Israeli society, and I’m entirely unconvinced that the defective people it does produce are numerous or dangerous enough to prevent peace in the Middle East.
Palestinian society produces far more violent extremists, and they hold a massive amount of power in Palestinian politics. There is no getting around this. Hamas rules the entire Gaza Strip with an iron fist and is now part of a “national unity government” with Fatah, a party founded by Yasser Arafat that has no shortage of terrorists among its own ranks.
The Sunni and Shia militias that engaged in murderous sectarian “cleansing” operations against each other in Iraq were more or less equivalent morally, so I described them as such when I filed reports from Baghdad. The violent Israeli settlers in Hebron—and there are some—in no way compare to the Palestinian terrorist organizations that waged such massive and relentless campaigns of mass murder that it took the powerful Israeli army years to put them down.
There’s a serious asymmetry between the two sides, and that’s why I don’t place an equal amount of emphasis on the amount of criminal violence each side commits. Jews and Israelis everywhere recoil in horror from the likes of Baruch Goldstein, but public squares in Palestinian cities are named after suicide bombers and other killers of innocents.
I take no pleasure in saying so. I have far more affection for the Arab world than I ever thought I would, and I’d really like to see their political culture repaired, not just for the sakes of Americans and Israelis who suffer when the Middle East exports its violence, but also for the people who live in Arab societies. I’ve spent enough of my life among Arabs now that it’s just not possible for me to watch their societies implode and explode with indifference. If that doesn’t come across in every single blog post I write, I’m certain that it comes across loud and clear in my book.
Back to the settlers:
I’ve received some angry emails, some from readers I respect, who are peeved that I wrote an “unbalanced” article about the situation in Hebron.
Part of the unbalance of the piece was built in. I visited the Israeli side of the city rather than the Palestinian side because I had access to one side but not the other. (I am currently trying to arrange a trip to the Palestinian side so I can write another “unbalanced” article later.)
And slagging me for omitting the Goldstein incident is fair enough. I didn’t omit it on purpose, but I did omit it.
Some critics, though, were angry that I quoted two Israeli settlers at length without denouncing them as bigoted thugs. And I want to say something about this.
I am well aware of the caricature of Israeli settlers as bigoted thugs, and I’m likewise aware that some of them fit that description. Some have attacked not only their Palestinian neighbors, but also Israeli soldiers.
The two Israelis I interviewed, though, don’t fit that description. I hardly know David Wilder, but we talked for an hour on tape and he didn’t say anything racist or brutal. I’m courteous enough not to libel him as a bigot just because he’s a spokesperson for Jews living in Hebron. I may not have gone to journalism school, but I’m pretty sure the demands of my profession don’t require me to do such a thing.
And I personally know Eve Harow well enough that I can say with confidence that she’s not a bigoted thug. I can’t very well denounce her as one just because that’s a fashionable stereotype I’m obligated to feed.
Most who spend time in the Middle East quickly realize that the majority of people who live over there are just people. Most Israelis, including Israeli settlers, aren’t bigoted thugs even if some of them are. Most Arabs aren’t infidel-killing jihadists even if Hamas is somewhat popular. If they were, I’d have been kidnapped or killed a long time ago. Most American soldiers in Iraq aren’t like the grinning sadists in the Abu Ghraib photographs or characters in Vietnam War movies. Yet I get grief when I humanize Israeli settlers, I get grief from a different type of person when I quote moderate or secular Muslims without denouncing them as taqqiya-practicing Caliphate-mongers, and I used to get grief for refusing to caricature American soldiers in Baghdad. But I don’t go over there to stoke anyone’s prejudices.
The Middle East is a tragic and often violent place with more political extremists per capita than almost anywhere else in the world, but most people manage to be better than you might expect them to be.
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