My allegory about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the story of a black family that moves into an all-white neighborhood after being chased out of the South by the KKK. They pay too much for a broken down fixer upper and then they work hard, plant grass, fix the broken windows and make it a nice place despite the constant griping and complaining and put downs of the neighbors. The black family refuses to leave, despite the nearly nightly cross burnings on their front yard, the periodic Molotov cocktails tossed through their front door, the robberies, and the shootings. Meanwhile, they face criticism at every turn from the local newspaper for reacting to the attacks against them. When they install a security system, they are condemned for their intransigence. When they arm themselves, they are “escalating the conflict.” When they shoot the rapist climbing in the daughter’s bedroom window, they are slapped with a wrongful death suit.
Their neighbors make a habit of comparing them to the KKK at every opportunity. Moreover, the police do nothing but issue warrants against the black family and cite them for building code violations. The city council decrees the neighbors should be able to build a barbecue and tennis court in their backyard, and that it is unreasonable for the black family to forbid their neighbors from having parties in their living room on Saturday nights. The rapist’s brother has filed a class action lawsuit demanding his right to sleep in the daughter’s bedroom. The neighbors erect a monument in honor of the dead rapist and offer rewards to anyone who shoots a member of the black family. Meanwhile, the local paper editorializes about how “hostile and inhospitable the black family is.” It suggests that they “need to reach out to their neighbors and find a way to get along.” Others argue that it was wrong of the black family to ever move into the neighborhood in the first place and that really, they should just go back to the South where they belong.
Another allegory might work if that one is unclear: in marriage counseling, both parties need to be interested in reconciliation if there is going to be much hope for saving the marriage. If the husband, for instance, wants to reconcile, but the wife wants the husband to drop dead, there’s little room for compromise. When the voices in her head tell her he’s an alien and she is mad because he keeps ducking every time she fires her shotgun at his head, how exactly is it his fault that the marriage isn’t a happy one? One can always point out that there are two sides to every conflict, but sometimes, one of those sides is simply nuts.
If you believe my criticism of the Palestinians is too harsh, you might try paying attention to what the Palestinians themselves are saying and doing. And you don’t even need to learn Arabic. Just visit , which translates most of the Palestinian (and other Middle East) media sources: newspapers, television, sermons and the like.
The Jewish people want peace more than anything. The Palestinians want the Jews to die more than anything. That makes it tricky to find a compromise. The sad reality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that right now only one side wants peace. Maybe someday, if the Palestinians get tired of their situation, peace can happen. It did happen between Israel and Egypt, when the Egyptian President Anwar Sadat finally woke up and decided he was tired of being the Muslim world’s cannon fodder and made peace with Israel. Israel was willing to give back all the formerly Egyptian land that they had won in the Six Day War, including the only functioning oil wells that Israel owned. It seemed like a good deal for the Israelis, but it is starting to look ever more likely that the peace, though it lasted for decades, is only temporary after all.
The Israelis and the Jordanians have also managed to sign a genuine peace accord. Perhaps it will last as long as the one between the Israelis and the Egyptians. So peace between antagonists in the Middle East is possible, since it has happened twice already. So maybe, just maybe, peace might happen someday between Israel and the Palestinians.
But probably not until the Palestinians accept the idea that it’s okay for the Israelis to live. When the Palestinians stop teaching hatred against Jews in their schools, when their textbooks are no longer filled with anti-Semitism, when they cease proclaiming vile anti-Semitism in their daily newspapers and television, when they stop preaching hatred in their mosques, when they stop reading and believing The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, when Mein Kampf is no longer a best seller in the Palestinian controlled territories, and when they condemn suicide bombing against the Jews, then peace can happen. Until then, it is rather unlikely.
One last thing: a bit of historical context. Jordan and Egypt controlled the West Bank and Gaza from 1948 until 1967. In that entire time, the Palestinians never sent suicide bombers against the Jordanians. The world never condemned Egypt as an occupier of the Gaza or demanded a Palestinian state on the West Bank. But there was never a shortage of violence and condemnation against the Israelis. Nobody cared that the Syrians shelled the kibbutzim around the Sea of Galilee on a nightly basis for nearly twenty years. So if Israel gave back all the land, gave the Palestinians their own government, then there would be peace, right? It’s all the fault of Israel, they are so awful, or so the pundits insist.
But then why wasn’t there any peace between 1948 and 1967? Why was the PLO formed in 1964, before the Israelis beat their enemies and took their land in 1967?
But maybe it actually is the case that all the problems in the neighborhood are because of the nasty character of the family that moved into that rundown house.