Stand for Israel

I have a friend — a dear, longtime friend — with whom I often disagree on matters related to politics and world affairs. The disagreements occasionally turn into arguments, but the friendship has endured, and will endure – we’ve known each other too long, and been through too much together.

One of the things we disagree on is Israel. After Newt Gingrich’s comments of a couple weeks back that the Palestinians are an “invented” people, my friend bristled. This, he insisted, was not the point. It was simply that both sides in this conflict — the Israelis and the Palestinians — needed to behave in a “civilized” manner.

Implicit in this statement is the notion that both sides are not behaving in a civilized manner. It’s an idea all too common in modern thought. Weary of the ongoing, seemingly intractable Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and under the influence of media coverage that is quick to point out every misstep Israel makes (and loath to point out examples of Palestinian terrorism and rejectionism), people who adopt this way of thinking reason that both sides must be equally to blame. There are no heroes, no villains in this fight — just two parties that stubbornly refuse to treat each other with dignity and respect.

The problem with this narrative, of course, is that it has no basis in history or experience. It’s especially hard to stomach when you read stories like this, which involves Israeli doctors at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem saving  unborn Palestinian conjoined twins through an innovative medical procedure.

This is what civilization looks like. It’s scientific achievement, harnessed for human good; it’s simple human compassion, extended not just to your own people, but to all people. Palestinians are treated every day in Israeli hospitals and receive the same high level of care that everyone else does, irrespective of their ethnicity or religion.

A note to my friend: Israel is well-versed in “behaving in a civilized manner.” If Palestinian leadership made similar efforts, we wouldn’t be at odds about the Middle East. There would be peace — or at least an absence of the day-to-day conflict that has come to characterize the Israeli-Palestinian relationship – and we’d have to find something else to argue about.