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How Not to Think about the Conflict

(Sapir Journal) Dr. Einat Wilf - When visiting Belfast several years ago, the Protestant areas were flying Israeli flags and the Catholic areas had Palestinian flags, creating an eerie feeling that the Northern Irish conflict, supposedly ended in 1998, was still simmering. Catholics and Protestants alike described the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with intense emotion, which I realized had nothing to do with our conflict and everything to do with their own. My colleague Igal Ram once termed this a "Disneyland of Hate": For those outside the actual Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it was a safe - Disneyland - way of experiencing the intense emotions missing from their post-peace lives. In a world that is actually more peaceful than ever, and where negative, violence-related emotions, such as hatred of groups, are less legitimate than ever, the continuing acceptance of hatred for Israel endures. In the U.S., the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is cast as a mirror of race relations in America. Jews are bizarrely cast as "white," and Zionism as a movement of "white supremacy," while Arabs, who look exactly like Jews, are cast as "people of color." Since these analogies have nothing to do with Israel and everything to do with projections of domestic issues and animosities, the best response is simply to refuse to give them the respect of treating them as honest arguments. The writer, a former IDF intelligence officer and Knesset member, is the co-author of The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace (2020).
2021-06-17 00:00:00
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