Leftist Self-Defense

A few weeks when I went to see Diana Buttu speak in San Francisco, I also had an enlightening exchange with another member of the audience. The gentleman, a self-described Jewish San Franciscan, jumped into the conversation when I was giving Buttu my opinion on suicide bombings. I told her that the bombings would interpreted by most Israelis as a signal of hostile intentions, and therefore were not likely to produce an outcome that many Palestinians would find desirable.

The Jewish San Franciscan, a short little middle-aged guy with an abrasive manner, interrupted me and demanded that I explain why people commit suicide bombings in the first place. I countered that it was like asking why some men rape women, it's completely irrational. He said that suicide bombings were nothing at all like rape, they were a legitimate response to oppression. He said that he works with African American youth in the projects and explained that their violent behavior is not irrational at all, it is a rational reaction for people who are desperate and oppressed. He couldn't explain the rational process by which violent crime would actually lift the perpetrators out of their oppression and despair, but no matter.

"How would you respond if I were to hit you in the face?" I asked him in a rhetorical and non-threatening manner. He protested that my hitting him in the face has no similarity with suicide bombing. "But how would you respond if I did hit you in the face?" I insisted.
"I don't know what I would do if you hit me in the face" he said with fervent conviction "But if enough people hit me in the face, I would ask myself what I was doing wrong."
I asked him for his address so I could bring a group of friends over to his house so we could all hit him in the face, but he declined to give me his address and I wasn't going to press the point.

I had absolutely no intention to hit him, of course, but his answer astonished me. I've never heard anybody proclaim so vociferously such a lack of self-assertion and such an eagerness to capitulate to violence. At least not on a personal level. I wonder if this guy is typical of the anti-war protesters who oppose national self-defense and sincerely believe that, say, multi-centi-millionaire Osama Ben Laden and his upper middle class zealots were all desperate and oppressed and simply expressing legitimate grievances against the United States. Are these so-called peace activists merely projecting their own personal ineffectuality onto the entire nation?

And how would that guy have reacted if someone really did hit him in the face or even murdered his loved ones? Who knows, but I don't think it's a stretch to draw a comparison with Peaceful Tomorrows, an organization of families of September 11th victims, which all but blames U.S. foreign policy for causing the Sept. 11 attacks and advocates vague and unspecified "alternatives to war" for countering terrorism.

In Israel, a similar organization called "The Parents Circle", describes itself as a forum of bereaved Israeli and Palestinian families for peace (nearly all the names of members listed on their website are Israeli) and is "committed to putting an end to the cycles of retribution and creating a climate for tolerance, reconciliation and peace". The Jerusalem Post last week had a pair of Point - CounterPoint essays about The Parents Circle. Both essays are worth reading. Frimet Roth, another bereaved mother, compares the members of Parent's Circle to hostages suffering from "Stockholm syndrome" who end up identifying with their captors, and says that they consititute a small minority of bereaved Israeli families. Nurit Elhanan-Peled counters that Roth is "monologic, racist and aggressive" and describes her own daughter's killer as "a young man desperate and distorted by humiliation and hopelessness to the point of killing himself and others, just because he was a Palestinian" and looks forward to the return of the "golden age of both Islam and Judaism when the two lived side by side, nurturing each other and flourishing together". She doesn't mention that the young man who killed her daughter along with several other people was from Hamas, which is not looking for compromise but to "remove the Zionist settlement in Palestine".

Far be it from me to tell a bereaved parent how to mourn for her daughter, or to take sides in an Israeli domestic debate over how to achieve security. But I can't help but observe that when Palestinian officials now say that the use of arms in the intifada was a mistake and call for an end to terrorism, it was because of Sharon's military response, not the moral hectoring of the peace camp.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at December 03, 2002 08:44 AM