Reply #22: Excellent Points, My Friend [View All]

[The Magistrate]

Though much of my view regarding the regretable violence in this matter falls broadly within your description, you are certainly right to say there is a real perspective from which such arguments are empty quibbles. It makes no difference to the dead and maimed, and those near and dear to them, if they were deliberately targeted or unfortunate bystanders; it does not alter the suffering endured by them one whit.

In addressing the Gahndi heir's comments, it seems to me he makes them from a deep historical perspective, and there is little doubt in my mind that had such a policy been adopted by the Arab Nationalists of Palestine at about the same time the Mahatma essayed it in India, the result would have been incomperably better for the people of Arab Palestine, and their lot in the present day would be much different, and much better, than it has become.

At the root of much difficulty in the present day is that it is the struggle itself that a great many Arab Palestinians look to to give meaning and purpose to their lives. This is a thing that does incomperable and inexorable psychic violence to persons who fall into the trap of living for the fight itself, a mental and moral equivalent of what befalls those who, as the phrase goes, live to eat instead of eating to live.

The chicken or egg nature of the situation you correctly point out is why it seems to me that in the final analysis, a solution that is imposed from without on both parties to the conflict is the only thing that has any real hope of peace, and that failing that, whatever anyone's preferences might be, a peace of victory, in which peace is defined as a great dimunition in the rate of killing, and no more, is the only likely end to this matter. As a "peace" of this latter form is almost certain to be one imposed by Israel, and constitute a situation greatly disadvantageous to the people to Arab Palestine, it does seem to me that, even at this late date, and with a greatly diminished hope of success in the endeavor, it would still be the wisest, and the best available policy, for that people to relenquish violence, which has gained them nothing, after all, in all the decades it has been employed in hope of furthering their cause.