Sleep little darling, don't say a word

by anna at 10:06 AM on November 13, 2004

Now that Mr. Arafat is safely ensconced in the ground, dirt-napping for all eternity, it seems appropriate to muse about what is arguably at the root of all that is wrong with 21st century life: what Arabs delicately call "the Palestinian issue."

Israel has existed for most of our lifetimes. It is more or less of an accepted fact. But it wasn't always so. By way of history, there was the Holocaust. Germans incinerated millions of Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals. In the end they were vanquished by valliant Allied forces. When the full extent of the carnage became apparent, the world was horrified. Millions of people had been slaughtered based solely on their religion, ethnicity or sexual proclivities.

No one felt it necessary to repay the Gypsies or homosexuals. Perhaps this was because relatively speaking, few of them died as compared with millions of Jews. So the victors got together and decided that something needed to be done, a grand gesture. One must remember that at the time there was no Jewish state, so there were no officials Jewish leaders with whom to consult. But somehow it became known that they wanted to establish their own state. They wanted it to be in a place with which they had historic ties going back to Biblical times.

They wanted it to be in Palestine, which at the time was under nominal British control. More importantly, it wasn't an official country. Without sovereignty (look it up, George W,) it made it easy to decide to oust 900,000 people presently residing there from their ancestral homeland. So in 1948, word went out: Everyone needs to pack up their shit and move into tents in these wretched refugee camps that made our shameful Indian reservations look like Shangri-la. Surprisingly, most complied. They vacated homes that had been in their families for generations. They ceded ownership of their property to make room for the new Jewish state.

Others refused. They were forcibly removed and dragged kicking and screaming from their homes. There is documentary evidence of this. An Israeli filmmaker wanted to show it to his people but the government put the kibosh on that plan.

Now first imagine that this happened in your 'hood. How would you react? What if it happened in the next 'hood over? Wouldn't you welcome the newly homeless into your realm? Well, probably not. Neither did the Palestinians' Arab neighbors. Oh they love to bitch and moan about it, but they don't want waves of unemployed people traipsing in to ruin their oil economies. In Saudi Arabia, many Palestinians are employed as domestics or in other menial capacities. But aside from that, these folks were basically between a rock and a hard place.

Periodically Israel's Arab enemies would endeavor to take it back by force. This never worked because the Israeli fighters are better equipped and are also much fiercer soldiers. Most of these wars were over in a matter of days. Israel captured territory on the battlefield, fair and square, in self-defense. For the Arabs it was all the more humiliating because many Israeli soldiers are women.

But here's the oddest thing: WWII was a very wide-ranging affair. There was intense fighting in Europe, across the South Pacific, in China and in northern Africa. There were U-boats right off American shores. However, the Palestinians were one of the few peoples with no blood on their hands. They had nothing to do with the war and even less to do with the wrongs perpetrated on the Jews. Why they didn't just carve out the choicest sections of Germany, such as the lush and fertile Rhine Valley, and cede it to the Jews remains one of life's little mysteries.

Is it just me or did Arafat always look vaguely dirty in his do-rag?