Jenin 2: Return of the Hypocrites
With the Hollywood Writer’s strike in full bloom it seems that some writers, producers and directors may be moonlighting scripts in Gaza.
FADE IN: The villainous Israel (replete with Der Sturmer hooked nose and shifty eyes with a grubby hand in Uncle Sam’s pocket ) is continually making life miserable for the innocent, beleaguered Palestinian shepherd boy who just wants to roam the steppes of the Holy Land in peace. It’s David vs. Goliath, the Yankees v. the Cubs, and Godzilla v. Bambi.
But haven’t we seen this flick before? Do I not recall, a few years back, a “massacre” in Jenin where brutal Israelis, for no apparent reason, laid siege to an innocent hamlet... Or Muhammad Al-Dura, the tragedy involving the Palestinian boy caught in the crossfire and hastily and erroneously blamed on the Israelis.
And just like Jenin and the Al-Dura case, the usual suspects are swallowing this storyline hook line and sinker. The Presbyterians are outraged. The UN is up in arms. The Methodists threaten to divest. Peace Now calls again on Israel to “avoid actions that constitute collective punishment or cause disproportionate suffering or casualties among civilians.”
Where is their collective outrage about the 4,200 bombs that have fallen on the people of Sderot and the Northern Negev since Israel, under the specter of civil war, pulled out of Gaza? Where is the outrage that Israel disengaged from the Gaza Strip in order to promote a peaceful solution yet in return received daily terror for close to 18 months?
Where is the outrage that civilian populations are targeted specifically at the times when parents are driving their kids to school? Where is the outrage when Lebanese troops aerially bombard similar “uprisings” in “refugee camps”? Where is the outrage over a constant flow of arms into Gaza to fight an “Occupation” army that left a year and a half ago?
When the lights faded on Gaza – a situation scripted and directed entirely by Hamas as the flow of electricity from Israel never ceased – why can’t the outraged see that the storyline simply illustratesthe cynical use of Gaza's residents by their own leadership? In fact, Israel has absolutely no interest in creating of a humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
None of this to say that life in Gaza is a picnic. But neither has life been a picnic is Sderot for the past 18 months after the disengagement. Remember the notion of two nations living side by side in peace? Israel has shown, time and again, it is capable of compromise.
It is time for the audience to realize that the problem is that the movie is based on a false premise. Namely, that the Occupation is not —or has never been—the sole cause of everything that has ever been wrong in the Middle East. Now, I’m hardly a pro-Occupation guy but I am definitively not pro-Obfuscation. If the Obfuscation is allowed to perpetually cloud our vision of what goes on in the Middle East then all the well-meaning people are, in fact, part of the problem and living off and perpetuating the violence they claim to abhor. And if you are part of the problem you don’t get to incessantly portray Israel as the bad guys.
Is the audience so blinded by its own-sided view not see its own hypocrisy? Do they not see the patronizing “noblesse oblige” attitude when they can not place any blame on the Palestinians who “are from a different culture”? Not a very compelling character—kind of like a stick figure. As a people, isn’t it time the Palestinian Arabs start ponying up some collective responsibility? Or is self-reflection solely the province of Westerners? But nobody seems to want to buy tickets to that particular movie. It would put them out of their job of perpetually feeling bad about the Palestinians.
Hey. What about this plotline? Egypt takes back Gaza—which is won in a defensive war— and lets Cairo control Gaza’s borders, supplies them lights, jobs, health insurance, whatever. If the rockets continue this is a causus belli with a known address.
Or maybe this one: The IDF aerially bombards the Gaza Strip as did the Allies in Dresden. Oops. Sorry. Not a movie that will play well on CNN but you get the picture.
But for the avid fans of the Palestinian narrative to have their guy be anything other than beleaguered underdog, would require an admission too painful to accept. The inconvenient sub-plot here might just be that the perpetual Hollywood ending of a two-state solution might NOT actually be what the Palestinian leadership wants because, in the short term, it makes no strategic sense. For a successful de-militarized Palestinian state would never have the ability or the economic means to defeat Israel all by itself.
A successful Palestinian state would need a functioning government with roads that work, sewers that are not cannibalized for rockets directed at Israeli civilians, and actual twenty-first century jobs for the millions of people supposedly lined up to return back to Palestine. A successful Palestinian state would no longer be the media darling it has become accustomed to being. “I will NOT be ignored,” pronounced a jilted, manipulative Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction.
This, however, would imbue our main character with traits other than that of perpetual underdog and would require the audience to accept some very different character motivations. It would need to own up to a Palestinian hero who is a cagey geo-political manipulator waiting for time and demographics to play out in his favor, or a serial bungler, or an irredentist fanatic waiting for the right moment to claim back all of what he considers rightfully his—namely all of current Israel. Not exactly redeeming character traits for the guy in the white hat.
