Both Sides Now

I've received a lot of emails asking for copies of Stuart Richards' November 19th Valley News Forum letter, so I've scanned it. You should be able to access a PDF version of it HERE.

I've also submitted a letter to the Valley News Forum myself in response to Stuart's letter which I preview (unedited) below:


To the Editor:

Stuart Richards' November 19th Forum letter exemplifies the intractability of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Like so many on both sides of the conflict, Richards engages in broad brush bigotry cloaked within a litany of selective facts. He draws upon the most extreme examples of Palestinian belligerence to conclude the Palestinian people, as a whole, are unworthy interlocutors for peaceful settlement, surmising "[t]hey'd rather celebrate and dance in the streets, as they did after 9/11, or (sic) celebrate the murder of innocent Israeli women, children and men, while idolizing their own suicide bombers."

Of course, similar screeds pop up among the Op-Eds in the Arab press, extrapolating proof of Jewish sub-humanity from similarly extreme examples of Israeli belligerence. For every Hamas adherent vowing to wipe out the Occupier there is a settler movement true believer advocating Greater Israel. Back and forth these verbal salvos fly, enraging one another while enlightening no one.

Certainly one lesson of these past sixty-five years must be the fact neither extreme has the means to wipe out the other; however much they may wish otherwise. Instead, as is more typical of stalemated conflicts, these extremes will continue to provoke and outrage one another until the wider population grows exhausted by the carnage and destruction. Eventual peace emerges from compromises which are only possible once the toll and pointlessness of continued conflict have become unbearable -- once war has transitioned from appearing to offer a solution to being recognized as the problem itself.

In the meantime, the anguish and despair elicited by this conflict prompts rants such as Richards has indulged in here. Yet, however much one may share the anguish and despair for lives torn apart by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it seems to me an intolerable indulgence to paint one's enemy as less than human. This indifference towards their anguish gives license to the awful bombings of civilian targets in Israel; the massacres in Qana, Sabra and Shatila; the Christmas bombings of Hanoi; the London Blitz; and too many other civilian bloodlettings to comprehend.

Despite a widespread, adolescent, desire to believe otherwise, neither Arab nor Jew holds a monopoly on righteousness in this conflict. Good people, Jew and Arab alike, are being destroyed by the day. Many are traumatized, maimed, or killed in the violence. Others are rotted out by hatred; at best blinded to the shared humanity of their adversaries. At worst, they perpetrate retaliatory violence hoping to inflict such suffering that their enemies will yield or their own anguish will abate. Barring a thorough genocide by one people or the other, Israelis and Palestinians will continue to live in close proximity for generations to come. No one can say when they will finally be convinced of the futility in continued conflict. For now, it seems to me our duty to challenge the bigotry that fuels this war and to resist the temptation to dehumanize either party to what is, after all, a thorough-going disaster which will appear an incomprehensible footnote in the history books.

Watt Alexander
Norwich, VT