Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Does the Israeli-Palestinian conflict still matter? [PDF]

Shibley Telhami, Brookings, June, 2008

In 2006, for the first time since we began polling, Arabs were asked what step taken by Washington would most improve their views of the United States. They were asked to choose two steps among the following: Pushing for the spread of democracy in the Middle East even more; providing more economic assistance to the region, stopping economic and military aid to Israel; withdrawing American forces from Iraq; withdrawing American forces from the Arabian peninsula; and brokering comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace. More than 60% of respondents chose brokering Arab-Israeli peace as the number one answer, followed by withdrawal from Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula…

In 2008, 50% of the public identified brokering Arab-Israeli peace based on the 1967 border as the single most important step to improving their views of the United States-still the number one issue. Notable was the increase in the number of people who want to see an American withdrawal from Iraq (from 33% in 2006 to 44% in 2008) and the Arabian Peninsula (from 22% in 2006 to 46% in 2008), as more people were expressing less confidence in America’s ability to broker peace.

Richard Silverstein, Failing the Lynch Test, Proudly | Tikun Olam. July 5, 2008

In May, Akiva Eldar wrote in The Nation about a felicitous encounter he had with an Egyptian cab driver who picked him up in New York City. The man followed Eldar’s reporting religiously and praised it effusively. In the course of the article, Eldar notes an important column that Israel’s most popular daily columnist wrote criticizing Haaretz’s commentators for their attitude toward Palestinian terror:

…Nahum Barnea wrote in November 2000 (in a publication of the Israel Democracy Institute) that “there are Israeli reporters who do not pass the ‘lynch test.’” These, he wrote, are journalists who could not bring themselves to criticize the Arabs even when two Israelis were savagely murdered by a mob in Ramallah. Barnea…went on to argue that our [the journalists’] support for the Palestinian position is absolute. He concluded, “They have a mission.” I was honored to be mentioned as one of those journalists, alongside my fine colleagues Gideon Levy and Amira Hass.

I admit to being guilty as charged.

Me too. You see, I resent the fact that there is a “test” that you must pass in order to be considered truly supportive of Israel when it suffers a terror attack; that you must be prepared to bray for blood vengeance or else be insufficiently patriotic or pro-Israel or whatever term you’d like to use. Similarly, I’d like to think, in fact I know, there are Palestinians who don’t scream for vengeance whenever the Baruch Goldsteins, Natan-Zendas, or the IDF perpetrates a ritual act of bloodletting. There must be those on both sides who understand that the acts of individual terrorists do not mean that an entire people have hatred of the other inscribed in their DNA; or even that the horrific acts of a national army represents a destiny of perpetual war for both peoples.