I texted the friend: "Support the people of Palestine how?"
His reply: "By trying to spread awareness of what is actually going on in Gaza. You obviously know how biased our media is on this issue."
My response (via text) was: "I disagree on some level. Dissemination of what's going on in Gaza isn't the issue, though the combination of an Israeli media blockade and Hamas propaganda makes it hard. The real issue is the completely unsophisticated conversation we have here about the nature and strategy of the conflict and our role in it."
I'd like to expound on what I meant by that.
President's Bush's first public comments on the conflict contained the following statement:
"The situation now taking place in Gaza was caused by Hamas," Bush told reporters in the Oval Office, referring to the Islamist movement that rules Gaza and is deemed by Washington to be a terrorist group.
"Instead of caring about the people of Gaza, Hamas decided to use Gaza to launch rockets to kill innocent Israelis," Bush said. "Israel's obviously decided to protect herself and her people."
I don't want to quibble with the factual accuracy of Bush's statement, I'd only like to illustrate the degree to which it is part of an unending pattern, particularly the laying of sole blame at the feet of Hamas. There have been literally hundreds of separate incidents of violence between Israel and Palestine, and more than a few full-fledged conflicts, and our government (and in too many cases our media) have taken a nearly identical view of each one.
Statements like these require our focus for two reasons. We are not bystanders in this conflict. We supply Israel with billions in annual military aid, including recently purchased munitions currently being employed in this conflict. Secondly, these statements are concrete and binding policy guidelines. Official public statements like these don't always (or nearly always) equate to follow-through policies. We talk about carbon reduction and detail how "clean coal" is compatible with that goal. We talk about how important it is for Georgia to join NATO and stand up to Russian aggression in former Soviet states with no real intention of following through on either front. Harry Reid tells us that a Blago appointee will never be allowed to serve in the Senate.
But, in referencing this conflict we continually make the most dichotomous and simplistic statements imaginable, and then enact policy as though they were unequivocally true. Put simply, the statement, "The situation now taking place in Gaza was caused by Hamas" is a bad basis for policy over the short term, and exponentially worse as time goes on, as it allows us to intellectually disengage from a conflict over which we should have a large degree of agency.
I think the mistake many on the far left (and more increasingly in emerging Progressive circles) make is in trying to be some sort of a counterbalance to this destabilizing rhetoric by pointing out the asymmetric nature of the conflict -- such as the completely disproportionate casualty numbers and overall level of destruction. They try to attack the validity of Bush's first sentence, when in fact it's the nature of the conversation itself that's crippling us. It's worth noting that substituting the word "Israel" for "Hamas", probably leads us to an even less true, even more stupid and destabilizing policy perspective. What we need to do is find a way to expand the conversation. It's the only way we'll ever find the political and rhetorical space to maneuver outside the tiny, impotent box we've barricaded ourselves in.
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