The desire for symmetry doesn't mean it exists

Elder of Ziyon
12 July '10

James Carroll, in the Boston Globe, defines the Palestinian Arab/Israeli conflict neatly symmetrical terms that are very elegant, and very false.

Against the usual perception, the Israeli and Palestinian stories are not contradictory but parallel. Jews and Arabs did not dig the ditch that keeps them apart.

To shift the analogy, Israelis and Palestinians are trapped in a corner. But the walls of that corner were constructed by someone else — an unacknowledged third party. Those walls are anti-Semitism and colonialism, each of which is thought to be well understood. But their recombination begets something new — a lethal feedback loop, as the historic hatred of Jews mixes explosively with the contempt for native peoples that defined imperial expansion.

Now Europe, together with its legacy culture America, sends representatives, such as Mitchell and Blair, claiming to offer disinterested “help” to the stubbornly warring parties. Yet that broader culture is fully complicit as the source of the two momentous animosities. Because that complicity is never reckoned with, energetic diplomatic interventions, going back past Jimmy Carter and Henry Kissinger to successive British “white papers,” have come to nothing....

The return to the land of Israel was momentous for people who had prayed for most of two millennia, “Next year in Jerusalem.” From the Arab point of view, however, Zionism could only be taken as a manifestation of the colonialism that native Palestinians had by then every reason to detest. Just as it is wrong to take Zionism as colonialism, it is wrong to take Palestinian hatred of Jewish arrival — and, even more pointedly, of Israeli occupation — as anti-Semitism....

Carroll seems to be a nice guy, and he is not the first to think he has come up with a unique perspective that could help break the impasse.

Creating false equivalences does not help to solve the problem, though.

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