Perspectives on the Middle East: A response

by Simcha Shtull

Original Flash Presentation

Dear Annie, Tammy, Wendy, Jane, Iris, and Barbara,

I am sending this letter only to the six of you, because I feel close to you and trust you.  I get these political emails and I feel I'm on another planet and I generally keep my mouth shut.  But this "multimedia" slideshow upset me so much that I feel a strong need to answer. Not to convince you of anything, but -- for myself -- to know I have spoken up.  Keep it to yourself, chuck it if you like, and i don't feel a need to discuss this when we're together. Just know that your friend feels something terrible is happening here, and that as long as we keep passing around these emails, and chanting "it's mine mine mine mine" we will never ever ever get out of this quagmire.  As least I will have some tiny peace of mind that I spoke up.

I have been raised on this "history" too as portrayed in this slideshows, in America and here.  I was a student of history, and although I didn't go away with vast amounts of knowledge (given my sieve of a brain) one thing I did learn from my studies, and it was a very, very, very big and important lesson:  I learned that nothing but nothing is as simplistic as this slideshow presents it.  

For one thing, most modern scholars dispute the account of the historicity of Joshua's conquest in the first place.  I'm talking about classic scholars like Noth, Mildenhall, and many Jewish ones as well. There was, most likely, on the whole, a peaceful assimilation of the incoming tribes,  with some outbreaks of fighting. The archaeological evidence that there is, does not support a forcible invasion around 1250 (like the slide show claims).

But that's not my point at all. Even if it were true, I would have been glad not to have been part of the invading ancient Israelite armies, taking land from longtime  inhabitants.  Unless we pride ourselves in being a militant, military people, I'd rather the truth lie with the version of the historians who claim the conquest is not historical fact.

We keep talking about "the region."  This larger region was under Egyptian, then Philistine influence.  There was a 75 year period when a united Israel made an impact on the region (David/Solomon), but that impact diminished after the death of Solomon and was negligible long before the Assyrian conquest of the north in 721.  The whole discussion of the use of the name Palestine was highly inaccurate (Palestine was first used by Herodotus in the fifth century BCE well before the Romans).  In any case, that discussion is pretty irrelevant.

History is so much more complicated than we learned in day school or in Hebrew school.  "The Arabs conquered the area more than 2 millennia after the Jews began to live there"  Is this so?  The Philistines (indigenous people in the region, before the Israelites) could be claimed to be the precursors of the Palestinians.  After all, the Philistines intermarried with the Canaanites and their descendants intermarried with later Arab invaders; so a Palestinian has as much right to the land, as a Lithuanian Jew returning two millennia after his ancestor was exiled from Judea.  The slideshow's logic (and what I see in all the emails I seem to be getting) of Joshua's conquest, etc. would lead a Greek to believe that because Alexander the Great conquered certain empires, he has the right to go back two millenia later and reclaim the territories and to hell with everyone living there ever since: their settlements and their culture mean nothing.

"The Arabs and Turks didn't have their own culture in the region during the period 650 to 1917."  What a presumptuous thing to say!! And was there a distinctive Jewish culture in Palestine during that period? Did we produce art, literature, music, architecture, Jewish law during this period in the Land of Israel?  Well yes, some Jewish mysticism in Tzefat and the canonization of Te'amei Hamikra in Tiberius, but that's about it. The real center of Jewish culture was in Babylonia, then on to Spain and then to central and eastern Europe.  

True, the Arabs rejected the partition.  That was tragic.  It is also tragic that when the Saudis recently put a peace plan on the table which recognized Israel's right to exist for the first time ever, Sharon ignored it and continued to pursue a policy of aggression that made sure it was buried under a mounting pile of Palestinian and Israeli limbs and corpses.

"The Refugee problem is only the Arabs fault."  Israel is jointly responsible for the refugee problem. You cannot remove or frighten people from their homes (and let's not be naive and claim no one was removed from their home; look at what's going on today!) and then say it is up to another state to take them in. This is one of the implications of Zionism and you can see it happening in the West Bank. People are being forced off their land to make way for new settlers. People are being forced off their lands to allow islands of settlers to be contiguous with Israel. This is only serving to make the situation worse.

After the 1967 war, Israel was required by international law to return the occupied territories.  Following the Oslo agreement Israel tried to impose conditions on the Palestinians that the Palestinians found unacceptable. Imposing conditions is not negotiation. The Palestinians have found an ugly but effective way of fighting back against a superior military power. Pounding them more and more will clearly not stop them; it will not wipe out groups of terrorists, but create new ones, as is happening day after day. Violence creates violence creates more violence.

I object to the emails I am getting because we sound just like their radicals.  It's mine mine mine.  "It's mine because when Muslims pray, they keep their rear ends pointed to Jerusalem, while Jews turn their faces towards Jerusalem." Yes, I've heard that one too.

Slideshows like this one are not only inaccurate but they are counter-productive in my book.  You cannot talk with someone unless you can see the world through their eyes. The "we are 100% right and you are 100% wrong" approach has proven itself a pretty disastrous and bloody path to take. We can't change our enemy, we can only change ourselves; we cannot change how they behave, only how we behave. Isn't that what we teach our children?  

So we should start by doing something that shows we want peace, like dismantling settlements in the West Bank. Until we do that, nothing but nothing will ever change in this region. We should not be concerning ourselves with being "right" as this slideshow tries so hard to do; we should be focusing on being "smart." Because until we do that, we'll continue to have two groups on either side of the fence, and sometimes crossing over it, screaming at each other over and over and over, screaming their mantra -- like the author of this  slideshow: "It's mine mine mine mine mine mine."  And each believing in its truth 100%.  And each dying for it.