The View from Ramallah

I'm back from a short visit with some friends of mine who live in Ramallah, the West Bank's cultural capital and current seat of the PA government. They're both employed by a private high school as a college counselor and an English teacher, and are finishing their second year living in the WB. (And, to my surprise, considering a third.)

I first visited Jeff and Glenn (names changed for my personal amusement) late last year, when they were fresh from summer break. We had a great time, and I felt immensely lucky for the chance to see the West Bank from the inside. We went to a hip-hop show at Ramallah's new(ish) convention center, poked around some of the expat/foreign-worker community's favorite bars, and drove across the city and surrounding villages, taking stock of the restricted roads and settlement development. It was a pleasant visit that largely reinforced my own notions of how the peace process could and should proceed, and a great opportunity to catch up with some friends I've known for years.

Going back was different. There was the usual hospitality. The tours of upper- and lower-crusts in the city. But during dinner, our talk turned to the political, as it often does, and I was shocked by the tenor. Where only five or six months ago we seemed to be on the same ideological page, at some point Jeff and Glenn and I seemed to have seriously parted ways in our understanding of the conflict.

I'm still trying to deal with the overall experience of the conversation, but I think I have to describe our opinions as having 'radicalized' (with all the baggage that term brings.) In particular Jeff, who always enjoys asking me blunt political questions, (our relationship goes all the way back to high school, where I was the outspoken editor of the school paper -- a role from which I don't think he's ever quite separated me, years later) was eager to get my take on Gaza.

As readers of this blog know, I was an early supporter of the Gaza operation, offering a spirited defense that has been, to date, the only thing anyone seemed interested in reading about around these parts. But even this cold human brain has a heart beating somewhere below, and as the death toll mounted I, too, felt some doubt about the moral status of the operation.

Suddenly, sitting in a restaurant surrounded by Palestinians, waited on by Palestinians, being quizzed by an American friend who had lived amongst and felt intense sympathy for Palestinians, my own defenses for the Gaza war seemed at best academic -- at worst, glib and even unfeeling.

Jeff, for his part, was prepared to believe that IDF claims of having targeted militants were essentially lies. Although he repeatedly claimed he felt no ill-will toward individual Israeli soldiers, nonetheless it was his impression that they operated within a system that compelled them to fire indiscriminately and lie about their targets. (That there might be incentive on the Palestinian side to engage in the same behavior seemed to him irrelevant.) Operating from that first principle, it's no surprise that Jeff understood the war as an essentially criminal enterprise, devoid of morality, utility, and oftentimes even sense. He bitterly recounted anecdotal stories of aid trucks not being allowed into the territory.

To my ears, even the sympathy that Jeff expressed for the suffering of rocketed Israelis sounded perfunctory. But I was in any case beginning to doubt my ears, as well as my voice.

What had happened to us in the space of only a few months? Again and again, Jeff came back to his theme for the evening -- that the Gaza war had exponentially swelled Gazan bitterness toward Israel, underwriting violent resistance for years, perhaps decades, to come.

Looking at the two of us -- same age, same nationality, same friends, same home town -- I had to agree. We seemed to have been taking stock of two entirely different wars. For Jeff, 1300 mostly innocent people had lost their lives in a plot hatched by Israel six months ago. 25 kilometers away, I saw civilians caught in the midst of a pitched battle between a fundamentalist Muslim regime and a state that had been targeted by such regimes for decades.

Jeff spent the war immersed in the images and rhetoric of the Palestinian cause -- I spent it in brooding over a worldwide outburst of anti-Semitism and hypocritical international rhetoric.

Which of us was right? Or were we both unable to see the big picture? I prided myself on having a "realistic" outlook on the conflict -- a fact-driven analysis that shunned ideology in favor of policy solutions. Now I doubt myself. My "realistic" outlook allowed me to accept massive civilian death. Do I want to subscribe to an analysis that makes such compromises? Is there any way in which that kind of acceptance is not, ultimately, driven by ideology? And isn't it incredibly dangerous to treat one's own terms as those of "reality," in opposition to objections like Jeff's? Presumably, Jeff believes his outlook to also be based on reality, or he would find another outlook to have.

Tomorrow I'm headed to Jordan for a few days to meet another old friend studying in Aqabah. I'm still wrestling with this conversation and I'll have more to say when I return later this week.