South Africa/ Palestine: Is Gaza the Middle East's Soweto?
TNR/Manhattan Institute's John McWhorter and Boston University's Glenn Loury resume their series of blogging heads conversations, talking about Israel's recent attack on the blockade bursting, Gaza-bound aid flotilla, that ended with the deaths of 9 civilians - Aljazeera compiles the footage here. Losing some of his affable cool, Loury, clarifying that Zionism isn't Apartheid, goes on to provide a damn good basis for comparing Gaza to Soweto under Apartheid:
Money quote:
...in its time, the 60s, 70s and 80s, the South Western township of Johannesburg came to play a profound, metaphorical, symbolical, moral and political role in global politics. It represented something. And the thing that it represented is a historical force playing itself out at the Southern tip of the continent of Africa came in the fullness of time to be something that was not acceptable to the bulk of mankind.... something has been created, it's called Gaza. In the 21st century it looms in my imagination not unlike the way Soweto loomed in my imagination in the 20th century...That's one side. Granted Gaza is so outside this blog's purview, yet a cinematic take on ongoing detente between the Israelis and the Palestinians that comes to mind is from Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai's Free Zone (2007). Specifically the scene in which 3 women: a half Jewish American (Natalie Portman), a Palestine-Arab (Hiam Abbass) and an Israeli taxi driver (Hana Laszlo), while driving past a portion of wall or fence or border indicating the separation of people, go on to lose themselves in the music coming from the car radio; lose themselves to some patch of common ground that, for a moment, breaks down the mental version of those walls, fences or borders that have separated them:
But in reality we have to ask ourselves what grievances are reinforcing some of those mental walls and why are they so formidable? Noah Millman's post today over at the American Scene takes Israel's "horrific" actions out of the Krauthammer-TNR fact-bending blackhole and puts it in some irrationality explaining context:
Overwhelmingly, the sentiment among people I know in Israel was in favor of the Gaza war, in favor of the embargo and blockade, in favor of a policy of collective punishment against the people of Gaza. The reason is simple. From the perspective not only of the Israeli center but of people who consider themselves basically on the left, though not the far left, when Israel unilaterally left Gaza that meant the Gazans “got what they wanted” and left no basis for continued hostilities. The fact that, after the withdrawal, Hamas rained mortars and rockets down on Israeli territory, proved that Hamas had no “legitimate” political goals but was simply interested in destroying Israel and killing Jews. After that, whatever Gaza got, from their perspective, they had coming to them, and there’s nothing more to say. Israel’s policy-making no longer seems to me to be particularly related to concrete policy objectives at all. Neither the Lebanon war nor the Gaza war had actual military goals. Both were essentially wars for domestic consumption. Hezbollah and Hamas were firing rockets at Israel, and Israelis were understandably furious. “Something” had to be done about that, to let the Israeli public know that their leadership felt their fury. So the government did “something.” Outsiders criticized the disproportion of the response, but the point of the response was its disproportion – not because the only thing the enemy understood was force, but because, in the absence of any way to actually solve the problem, the only thing that would convince a domestic audience that the government felt the way they did about the situation was to respond with a fury proportionate to that of the electorate.Reading Millman's piece I recalled what eminent Israeli filmmaker, Amos Gitai, said in this Senses of Cinema interview about the Israel's public domestic barometer, and while that barometer is stuck at endless war, what a free zone really means:Yeah, I think that obviously the Middle East has had very short periods of reasonable thinking or moderation on both sides. Either one side or the other has managed to destabilize their options, consistently. When you had the moderate Israeli government, [Yitzhak] Rabin was shot and there was a series of suicide attacks in the city which moved the public to the right. And when you had openness on the Palestinian side, you had assertive and pretty forceful Israeli attitudes to that, so I think this Free Zone – the real one [a sprawling, tax-free marketplace in eastern Jordan where Jews and Arabs from neighbouring countries like Syria, Israel and Saudi Arabia hawk used cars] and the metaphorical one – are fragile. They are [both] about the day-to-day, about people trying to build relations that are not just warlike. I think the very fact that the two sides will agree to disagree without shooting each other – for me, that’s a beginning.