"Well, surely nobody will be so callous as to say that there is less despair among Palestinians today--especially since the terrible events in the Gaza Strip and the return to power of the Israeli right wing as well as the expansion of Jewish-zealot settler activity."
"There were also young women, some of whom, it seems, would otherwise have been killed for 'honor' reasons and who were offered the relatively painless alternative of a martyr's fate. Nasty, vicious, fanatical old men, not human emotions, were making decision and deciding the days and the hours of death. And the hysterical ululating street celebrations when such a mission was successful did not signify despair at all but a creepy form of religious exaltation in which relatives were encouraged to make a feast out of the death of their own children as well as those of other people...Women martyrs are obviously not offered the same level of bliss and promiscuity by the Koran."
--Christopher Hitchens
Slate, July 13, 2009
The striking thing about this essay is the year it was written: 14 years ago!
He was speaking about the decline in the number of suicide bombers in Palestine at the time which had people wondering if the Palestinian complaint was cooling off, even subsiding.
Hitchens noted elsewhere, when asked about the Palestinian "cause," their displacement from land they occupied by a European immigration to the Middle East, (sometimes referred to without a shred of irony as "The Holy Land," a land of peace and love, to be sure,) but what Hitchens said was the origin story of some, if not most, nations has been one of a great crime, or, at least of injustice.
He did not have to say specifically he was thinking of, and he may have been thinking beyond the history of Europeans displacing Indians from the East Coast of America, and from the Great Plains, until they were all rounded up and contained, and then, in many cases, slaughtered in small "reservations" or death camps.
What he was saying was that this is the plain, lamentable history of the human race, likely as far back as the displacement of the Neanderthals by the Cro Magnon homo sapiens, but what we have to deal with in the case of Palestine, is that this is another example, and we have to deal with the reality of newcomers displacing former wardens of the land.
The story is so old and so consistent in its fastidious replications, that we can almost substitute the proper nouns for one another.
"Settlers" move in and are, at first, massacred by "natives" who express their displeasure by savage offenses, whether by scalping, beheading, dismembering, burning or other more imaginative forms of torture, and these horrors are then invoked by the offended settler group as reason to regard the natives as subhuman, beastial, barbarians and any reprisal, then, is justified.
Some of the tactics have been refined over the years to accommodate the power of mass communications which the Indians of America did not have at their disposal: the Palestinian insurgents, hiding behind the skirts of the downtrodden group, hold up their dead women and children and appeal to the conscience of those powers who may work in concert with their oppressors. And the dead women and children are victims, innocent in the sense they never threw a bomb themselves. They are victims as the children of Hiroshima and Dresden were innocent.
Of course, in the cases of Hiroshima and Dresden, we had those counter images of the raped victims of Nanking and the children of the concentration camps, and it was widely understood the bombings were to correct those wrongs. Never mind, the children of Hiroshima and Dresden knew nothing of these offenses.
The idea of a moral force behind such atrocities has been entertained at least as far back as Lincoln, who, wondering why such horror and devastation had been visited upon his nation, asked if a righteous God had demanded that for every drop of blood drawn by the bondsman's lash had to be repaid by one drawn by the sword.
Today, the Israelis say they will not stop until they have extirpated their Hamas tormenters. They speak, without appearing to notice the problem with the word, of "extermination," of Hamas, as if you could exterminate a movement. The Israelis, of course, need no lectures about extermination.
A people, of course, can be exterminated. Nobody knows that better than the European Jews.
But you cannot kill an idea, especially one sauteed in hate.
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