The following is a response to an article in the Believer, Oct. '06, titled "Understanding Conflict and War and the Price of Land". I enjoy the Believer for its acstetic and literary information. On the other hand the politics of the writers, I assume the publishers as well, is quite reflexive as far as I am concerned. Whether the subject relates to politics or not there will be at least two which reference the stupidity and/or evil of Bush. I have yet to read anyone make a smart criticism nor an intellegent defense. Anyway, hand in hand with such opinions are minds similarly bigoted against Israel. Here is a response I am sending to the Believer and thought to share with you. I enjoy their magazine in spite of the politics.
Elliott Stay Home
Stephen Elliott’s article, in the Oct ‘06 Believer, plays out precisely as any view of a conflict would if, with a bundle of demerits and pen in hand, he had looked over a circle of kids around a schoolyard fight, saw a few savage blows striking the larger of two combatants and came to the conclusion that each is equally culpable in the brawl. In the light of Rolf Potts’ article, which associates tourism with bigotry, these writings, serendipitously separated by a few pages of the same magazine issue, nearly qualified Levant Based Tourism for a Believer theme of the month.
Having spent only nine of the last thirty months in my own country I can vouch for the fact that one can A) recognize what is superior in ones own culture while respecting the accomplishments of those one is visiting, B) recognize that the culture you visit has quite a few traits that your own could do well to learn from, and C) recognize that the opinion of any culture must account for how it has solved its various issues through out its history with the most recent solutions being the most informative for the present. In order for these recognitions to occur one must be prepared to balance newfound impression with knowledge of your subject. Coming in contact with a foreign culture is a basking in the radiating ideas of a foreign collective. One then studies the effects on oneself to read if contact has mutated your thinking beneficially or if it produced cancer. In all cases the view of a passing tourist is too casual for the radiating culture to penetrate much beyond a mental suntan. While the effects of the previously listed recognitions seem of the common sense kind it appears that neither Sayyid Qutb nor Mr. Ellitott invested much in that form of thought.
Mr. Elliott arrived in a war zone in order to cover a conflict that arouses strong feeling in roughly half the Earth’s population. It is a conflict saturated with opinion and the writings these opinions produce. It is a conflict in which the one side that allows dissent is the side most commonly demonized in the press. This same war has also proven what has been long suspected, that the international press is complicit in the manufacture of events that occurred quite differently then how they are reported (Jenin, Qana, Reuters photogate, the Red Cross Ambulance, and the al-Durrah incident are just a few examples) and these reports benefit the non-Israeli only. In conflicts of the modern era press membership has a deep tradition of cover for spies and agents. In this conflict specifically, the press has not acted as an impartial observers and has instead been active in directing the Palestinians to better battle the Israelis. Yet, Mr. Ellitott lacks the background to understand that when his press credentials were questioned by an official she may not have been viewing him with a diseased hatred, rather with healthy skepticism. When a soldier stole his laptop he, within a few pages, transforms the act from one done by a single unsavory individual (may I add that if he were caught the soldier would have been treated as a criminal) to an IDF operation to steal his computer. There are a number of instances in which the writer expresses impressions based on cursory knowledge of the conflict. Contrary to what he writes in the article, Israelis, almost to a rule, realize that there are significant civilian deaths in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. The difference between the Israeli actions and those of the Palestinians has been and remains the intended target. The IDF has many times called off attacks that would have killed or nabbed high-level leaders of those attacking Israel and her civilians due to the danger to Palestinian civilians. The Palestinian side, with Hezbollah in the same mold, sees no difference between civilian and military infidels. Considering how often the Palestinian and Lebanese militia members hide their gunmen and arms among the civilian population one can question if they see a difference between any form of civilian from military, infidel or otherwise.
There are a number of passing comments strewn about the article with the seeming design of giving equal criticism to each side of the conflict and yet when one gathers background information one sees that one would need to be a tourist to this conflict to view it as evenly as this. One example of this is the quick comment that mentioned a former Jewish settlement that was razed as the Jews left. True that these settlements were bulldozed as the IDF emptied the settlements yet it left intact the infrastructure so the Gazan’s could build up from them. Over the largest of these settlements, Neve Dekalim, the Gazan’s have built a university. He mentions the one million refugees of “the Disaster” and fails to add that only 20% of them were alive at the time of the war being mentioned. One wonders how they can be refugees considering how much money the UN has poured into developing housing and viable towns. Considering that the UN classifies a Palestinian refugee as someone who left homes that are in Israel’s borders, even if they lived there for only two years (or left voluntarily, or left in aid to the enemy, or never showed proof they lived on these lands and could get others to vouch for their being neighbors), one would find it difficult to explain how these same people remain refugees in lands they settled nearly 60 years ago. Mr. Elliott lays blame evenly on the US, Israel, the Arab nations and the UN for the welfare state that the Gazan’s live in today and gives the Palestinians equal measure of fault to these other groups. He fails to mention that Israel built for the Palestinians infrastructure and homes on which to base self-reliance and to this day they refuse these living spaces because it would mean renouncing the term refugee and their unjustifiable “right of return”. He fails to mention that Israel took in 2 million refugees from Arab and Persian countries (communities they occupied for hundreds of years), and settled them in refugee camps while they were taught the skills for surviving in a modern state. They were then set up in modest homes and found work. Today the children of these refugees are fully integrated into Israel society. None of these people today plead for a right of return and no one offers to compensate them for the property stolen from them as they left. There are countless examples from WWII in which millions of people never returned to communities they inhabited for hundreds of years. They were expected to settle in new homes. Millions of Germans were expected to find new homes in Germany although they and their family had been in Poland, Checkeslovakia or France for generations. Somehow only the Palestinians were first refused by their Arab brothers after the 1940’s (with the assumption that the Arabs would eventually kill the Jews and put the refugees back in their previous village) and again in 1967 for similar reasons. Mr. Elliott assumed he is bound to extract insight of conflict, seemingly all conflict, by touring extreme conditions. His eventual thesis was that everyone is equally at fault. His thesis is wrong in this case.
Mr. Elliott’s insight is no different then that of someone who has visited Chinatown, USA and decided to better grasp the PRC by making a hit and run study of the Great Wall, Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City and the warriors in Xian. The saturated state of actual archeologists and anthropologists making study of these Chinese monuments, coupled with the dense catalogue of passing travelers making their brand of view known, requires a unique perspective of these sites (unlikely to be provided by a tourist) in order to make a new work worth the read. How are we to glean any insight from Mr. Elliott’s tourism if he is telling us nothing new? Like Qutb he arrives on the scene with uninformed suppositions. Elliott further mimics Qutb by reinforcing his thesis (Elliott’s on conflict, Qutb’s on American culture’s inferiority to Arabian culture) while all but ignoring relevant background. This is the definition of bigotry. He simply reaffirms the stupid and reflexive thinking of those who can only respond as idiotically as the noon-goon who happened on the schoolyard brawl. Conflict and war, as far as this article is concerned, is the fault of both sides. In this, his tourist’s lack of meaningful contact and his individual lack of research are fully revealed to be the passing polemics of a well indoctrinated yet uninformed tourist.
