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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Valley&State Backpage O&E Sports Archives Classifieds Faith&Beliefs Obituaries Revels June 26, 2004 Thinking about Palestine vital Kenneth Wilson's latest letter (6/12) defending Ariel Sharon's ethnic cleansing of Palestine cries out for rebuttal. In fact, it cries out for a complete rethinking, for an infusion of empathetic understanding, for an intimation of humanity. Given the task, however, and the limits here, I cannot hope to deal with more than a couple of examples of this writer's moral numbness and his appalling double standards. Wilson argues that the atrocities endured by Palestinians at the hands of their Israeli occupiers are, essentially, no big deal. Compared to world-class slaughter, such as in Cambodia or Rwanda, they just don't measure up. So what's all the fuss about? "The truth," he says, "is that the Palestinian experience is on the level of a bad hair day compared to these other events." These words, apparently intended to shock and awe, succeed: They might have come from another planet, from another species. They cruelly trivialize the half-century of agony and sorrow of a people deprived, through no fault of their own, of most of their ancestral homeland. Can any individual believe that human suffering does not occur at an individual level? That suffering among individuals in small populations in the process of being decimated is not as searing, as heartbreaking, as unendurable as that among larger? That the pain, abuse, degradation, humiliation and countless other outrages inflicted upon the helpless by the powerful is not felt individually - that they register only during record-breaking massacres? A great irony often remarked upon these days is that Sharon's Israel, sponsored by that great champion of freedom, our own nation, has gone into the Holocaust business, the descendants of that infamous atrocity now becoming efficient oppressors. No gas chambers have been reported yet, but midnight bombings of crowded neighborhoods, helter-skelter assaults by helicopter gunships and Caterpillar bulldozers (made in Peoria, Ill.) ramming through occupied homes create enough terror and havoc and death and homelessness to elevate Israel to big-time butchery, a contender in the slaughterstakes. Wilson professes to believe that Palestinian suicide bombers are "uniquely depraved" because they've been "taught hatred and violence." It seems not to have occurred to him that hatred and violence have been taught to the Palestinians - for generations - by the occupiers and confiscators of their homes and land. I wonder if even Wilson might not be subject to at least a twinge of hatred if he lived in a country transformed by a foreign occupier into a concentration camp that denied him every right most people take for granted and kept him totally disarmed, totally hopeless, totally desperate. Lacking all other options, suicide bombing, to me at least, would seem a plausible option, since desperate times call for desperate measures. And as we've known since our own Civil War and in countless wars since, there are no innocent parties in modern warfare. The people sitting in a Tel Aviv restaurant suddenly transformed into bits of flying flesh are complicit - however unaware personally - in the Great Theft, and should not have considered themselves immune to the violence they've helped - however indirectly - to create. This truth is now dawning upon many of our countrymen faced with the "blowback" violence of 50 years of American imperial adventuring. To paraphrase Shakespeare's Shylock: Hath not a Palestinian eyes, hands, organs, senses, affections, passions? If you prick him, does he not bleed? If you poison him, does he not die? And if you wrong him, shall he not revenge? Isaac Walker Ashland DailyTidings.com Home Page Valley&State | Backpage | O&E | Sports | Archives | Weather | Classifieds Columnists | Faith&Beliefs | Obituaries | Revels | Subscribe | Contact Us Copyright 2004 Ashland Daily Tidings and Ottaway Newspapers All Rights Reserved Click Here Site Search: .:Advertisements:. RESOURCES - Mail Tribune News - ODOT Road Cams