Home Sweet Home

Between last week's deadly raid on ships bound to Gaza and Helen Thomas' recent remarks, Israel is once again dominating the headlines. And as usual, most opinions offered betray fundamental ignorance of the matter at hand.

Ms. Thomas' comments that Israelis should "get the hell out of Palestine and go home" were swiftly and justly condemned. Most of the coverage of the event, however, focused on who would get Ms. Thomas' freshly-vacated seat in the White House press room rather than on the factual and ethical merits of her statement.

Most analyses of Israel, regardless of their speaker or author, fail to acknowledge 2 inescapable facts. Firstly, there was a moral imperative to give Jews a defensible homeland after the Holocaust. Secondly, the Palestinians were punished for the crimes of the Europeans when their homeland was taken from them.

Both of those facts are as true as anything could ever be. Why then are most people incapable of agreeing with both of these facts? Because most people have an agenda, and whatever their preconceived notions may be, they will inevitably ignore one of these two facts.

Israel-haters act as if the Holocaust never happened. Israel-lovers act as if nobody lived in Palestine before 1947.

But the Holocaust did happen. And when Helen Thomas said that Israelis should "go home", she was asked where that home was. The first two words out of her mouth were "Germany" and "Poland".

The picture above gives the reader a glimpse into how the Jews (including women and children) were treated at "home".

Since Germany is where the Holocaust was conceived and Poland is where it was largely carried out, this goes beyond tone-deafness. I would try to come up with an absurdist analogy for such ignorance, but there simply isn't one.

Germany and Poland was indeed home for millions of Jews 70 years ago. But then the Germans and the Poles murdered nearly three-quarters of them. Is that a "home" that a survivor should have pined for in the death camps? Were Jews in Auschwitz thinking, "oh, if I only I could go home to Poland"? No. Because Auschwitz was in Poland.

So the surviving Jews clearly needed a home in which they were not a perpetual minority subjected not just too run-of-the-mill discrimination, but to physical extermination. And here's where it gets messy.

In any just universe, the Jewish homeland would have been carved out of Germany. Or Poland. Or somewhere else where they had lived for centuries. If the Europeans were truly interested in paying their blood-debt, they would have surrendered some of their own territory to the Jews.

But they didn't. Instead, the chose Palestine. Why? Two reasons. Reason the first: the Palestinians had no means to resist. The Europeans took this approach: why pay for our own crimes when we can force a defenseless third party to pay the debt for us? Reason the second: anti-Semitism did not end with the Holocaust, and although the Europeans stopped exterminating Jews, they still, deep down, wanted them gone.

And so Israel was created. "A land without a people for a people without a land", the saying went. A touching sentiment. Except, of course, for the fact that Palestine in 1947 was NOT a land without a people. There were people in Palestine. Specifically, Palestinians.

"Palestinian" is not a race. It is not an ethnic group, although most Palestinians are ethnic Arabs. It simply describes a person who lives in Palestine. It's like saying "Rhode Islander".

When Israel was created, most Palestinians were Arab, but there was a sizable Jewish minority. Even among the Arabs, there were large numbers of Christians. Palestine was very mixed and relatively peaceable. And then came Israel.

It is a matter of fact that hundreds of thousands of people were driven from their homes into squalid refugee camps for the sin of not being Jewish.

And that is precisely why this issue is so impossible; the Jews cannot be blamed for killing and dying for a defensible homeland in the aftermath of the Holocaust. The Palestinian Arabs cannot be blamed for violently resisting the seizure of their lands. The only appropriate blame here belongs to the Europeans.

Yet it is the Europeans, and the Americans, who act holier-than-thou when it comes to this issue. They casually castigate one side or the other, with no reflection upon their own role in creating this disaster.

I doubt that any meaningful peace in Israel / Palestine will be realized in my lifetime. If Jesus didn't live to see it, I doubt I will.

Partly this is the fault of the people who live there. But it is also the fault of people like Helen Thomas and countless others, who indulge the extremists on one side or the other by trafficking in the fantasy that one side or the other should just "get over it" or "go home".

The fact is, both sides are home already. They are the equivalent of two mortal enemies consigned by the gods to live for eternity together in a ten by ten foot cell. And just like prisoners, "going home" is not an option.