The Daily Grasshopper

On Saturday night, I went to the Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline. In the interest of full disclosure, I will say that I went there to see the documentary “Fidel,” but I read the wrong theater listing and had missed the start of the last show by about half an hour by the time I arrived. But I had a great parking space right in front of the theater that I didn’t want to waste, so I went and saw Roman Polanski’s “The Pianist” instead.

The movie is based on the story of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a talented Jewish musician who lived through the Nazi occupation of Warsaw during World War II. He lost his whole family to the Holocaust. The film portrays, very graphically, the systematic destruction of the Jewish community in Warsaw, beginning with their having to wear Stars of David on their sleeves, and then on to the forced relocation, and the hardships of life in the ghetto, and then, ultimately, horribly, the Nazis’ “Final Solution,” where Jews were taken off in cattle cars to the death camps in Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor.

Most of us are familiar with the rough outline of the Holocaust, if not all the specific details. Six million Jews murdered, most in ghastly fashion. Others forced into labor camps where they endured the most brutal treatment imaginable. Incredible stories of bravery and human dignity prevailing in the face of the most unspeakable barbarism. It is without question one of the most horrific incidents in the history of mankind, which is saying something if you have a passing knowledge of even a little of the history of mankind.

There is a scene in the film that struck me. The pianist, Szpilman, and his brother are trying to leave the ghetto. At this point they are still allowed some freedom of movement (the Nazis were very clever about not springing the full extent of their plan on people until it was too late). But the Nazi guards used the checkpoint as an opportunity to humiliate and intimidate their Jewish subjects. As I watched the Jews being forced to dance around to the delight of the German soldiers, my mind couldn’t help but fast forward to the Occupied Territories of Palestine in the 21st century, where members of the Israeli Defense Forces impose a similar sort of collective punishment on their subjects, the Palestinian people.

Now, making a direct comparison of today’s Israel with Nazi Germany is facile, and irresponsible, to boot. That’s not what I’m trying to do here. Discussions of Middle East politics are difficult enough without raising the specter of Hitler. I’m talking about a specific activity, the dehumanizing of another group of people. The Nazi soldiers did it to the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. The Israeli Defense Forces do it to the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories today. In the movie, we are told that the Jews in the ghetto, certain that they had nothing to lose, resisted. Their resistance was fierce, and they wound up holding out for almost a month before the Nazis crushed them.

Which brings me to yesterday’s news. Twenty-three people dead in a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, and scores more injured. One of the grim realities of the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians has a parallel with the Warsaw ghetto uprising: the Palestinians, deprived of their land, their crops, their water supply, and their dignity, have nothing left to lose. That is what is behind this Intifada that is taking innocent lives in Israel (in Sunday's bombings, most weren't even Jews, they were foreign workers). And for every suicide bombing, there are Israeli “reprisals,” which purport to target radical militants, but which inevitably kill civilians. Further convincing the Palestinians that there is nothing to lose. And so the cycle continues.

Our government fully supports Israel’s occupation of Palestine, incidentally, extending more than $3 billion annually to the Jewish government. Our support of Israel has made us quite unpopular in the Arab world, as some Americans are beginning to realize in the aftermath of September 11. International human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have condemned the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. More importantly, the international community, through the UN, has passed dozens of resolutions calling on Israel to withdraw from these areas. President Bush has made a big deal recently over Saddam Hussein’s flouting of a dozen or so UN resolutions since the Gulf War. Israel is in violation of more than 40 UN resolutions. Bush has talked about the need to eliminate Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. But his administration (like those that preceded it) is strangely silent on Israel’s nuclear weapons program. These are just a couple of examples of what Arab countries see as our hypocrisy in dealing with the Middle East situation.

Here’s a quote from a June, 2001 report by Foreign Policy in Focus (long before Bush had begun talking about war on Iraq):

"Washington has yet to recognize the hypocrisy of promoting an ever-stronger Israel while citing Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction and its failure to adhere to UN resolutions—charges of which Israel is also guilty—as reasons for subjecting the Iraqi population to more than a decade of sanctions. In fact, states like Iran, Iraq, and Syria view the development and acquisition of chemical and biological weapons as a counterbalance to Israeli weapons acquisitions. They see in Israel an aggressive, expansionist power that has occupied a piece of every country it borders. Furthermore, Israel’s refusal to sign the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, its maintenance of nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them, its disregard for international law, and its emphasis on preemptive military strikes, mobile weaponry, and quick-strike capabilities all reinforce this sentiment in a region with a historical tendency to solve disputes through violence."

The front pages of the Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, and the New York Times all carried full-color photos of the aftermath of the bombings in Tel Aviv, and well they should. But the pictures we almost never get to see are the ones of U.S.-made helicopters firing U.S.-made rockets into Palestinian neighborhoods, in “reprisal” for the suicide attacks. We never see U.S.-made tanks and bulldozers entering Palestinian refugee camps, indiscriminately plowing over the homes of innocent people in an attempt to get at the terrorists. We never see pictures of Palestinian children dying of bullet wounds from American-made M-16s. All these things are paid for with our tax dollars, and we are kept very well insulated from these realities by the mainstream media in this country.

But these pictures exist, and other people see them. They appear in newspapers throughout the Arab world, and on Al-Jazeera, the TV station that Osama Bin Laden made famous. And the same outrage we feel when we see dozens of innocent people slaughtered in Israel is the same outrage Arab and Muslim people feel when they see innocent Palestinians murdered in reprisal. Neither side is justified in its use of violence. But the Israeli government’s actions are being underwritten by our tax dollars, and we are not being adequately informed about them. That’s a problem. Here’s a place you can see pictures of Occupied Palestine:

http://www.zmag.org/meastwatch/podur_palphotos1.htm

http://www.zmag.org/meastwatch/ellphotoessay/ell_rafaphotos.htm

There is a great deal to know and to understand about the situation in the Middle East, and I don’t pretend to know all that much of it. Here’s a place to get a good overview:

http://www.merip.org/palestine-israel_primer/toc-pal-isr-primer.html

Like I said, there's a lot to know, and I'm no expert. What I can say with certainty, though, is that our continued unilateral support of Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine, coupled with an attack on Iraq, is going to make Americans even more of a target for terror than we already are. Anyone wondering what the future holds for Americans if we keep opting for the military solution in the Mideast should look at the photos on the front of yesterday’s papers.