This article starts out with a discussion of some extremely abstract concepts and then moves to a discussion of a very concrete political situation in the world today. Hopefully the reason for making the connection will be made apparent as the discussion within my article proceeds.
The world in which we live is a very complicated place, and, as a result, people have developed different cognitive tools to help them to sort out the different phenomena that they find within it. These tools are particularly important in terms of helping people to establish relationships between phenomena. These cognitive relationships act as a substitute for the flowing blendable continual organic relationships that are more naturally to be found in the external world in traditional natural living environments. Cognitive relationships act to bind the world together when the world primarily consists of an experiential vacuum filled with free floating figures that sometimes knock against one another. That is the way it is in a modern technological society. One of these cognitive relationships that is particularly helpful in explaining the world today is that of the analogy. An analogy shows the connection between two phenomena, by showing the commonality in the way they function in the world. In particular, the analogy is used so that one of the phenomena, in creating a comparison between it and another phenomenon, adds an intuitive level of understanding to the second phenomenon that didn’t exist before.
Now some analogies are better than others. Take, for instance, the analogy that African-American people are always making between themselves and the Palestinians. The analogy states that just as African-Americans have been continuously oppressed by white people, so the Palestinians have been continuously oppressed by the Israelis. Nice and simple isn’t it. Except that, whereas African-Americans were enslaved by white people for centuries and were harassed, persecuted, and kept down economically by whites even after they were emancipated, Palestinians have been given the opportunity to live as equals by the Israelis since the inception of the Jewish state. As Israelis kept winning wars against the various Arab states that considered themselves the protectors of the Palestinians as well as against the different radical Palestinian groups fighting on their own behalf, they found themselves after the wars in control of an increasingly hostile population of Palestinians against whom they were forced to assume an aggressive stance in order to survive and feel alive. In the case of the African-Americans, they were only interested in becoming an equal partner to white Americans. They were not interested in pushing out the whites and keeping the U.S. exclusively for black people. On the other hand, the Palestinians have this motto of “From the river to the sea.” Not only is the territory comprising Israel and Palestine to be exclusively for the Palestinians to rule, but it is also supposed to be exclusively for the Palestinians to settle. In other words, Jews are not to be allowed to live there anymore.
Now, unfortunately, a certain transformation took place in some Israelis, primarily right-wing nationalists and Orthodox Jews, as the years past after all the conflicts with the Arab states and the different Palestinian terrorist groups. The violent Arab groups began to mirror some of the Israelis who began to absorb the irrational violence of the Palestinians and who began to absorb pieces of Palestinian lands for the purpose of creating settlements. Even though, on one level, it was wrong to do, on another level, it was understandable, because it became very difficult for the Israelis to be caretakers indefinitely of land that had such hostile inhabitants. Yes, for the Orthodox Jews, it became a way of absorbing sites that were holy to the Jewish people. But more important, it became a way of filling up this hostile abrasive territory with some patches of flowing blendable continual organic grounded friendly territory. Apart from filling up the West Bank with friendly grounded settlements, the Orthodox Jews and Jewish nationalists have taken the mirroring in another direction, mimicking the physical attacks that Arabs have been carrying out on Jews since the Jews took over the West Bank.
On the other hand, day to day life for the Palestinians in Israel proper has been quite acceptable for them. In a poll taken of Israeli Arabs (the Palestinians living in Israel), the majority of them preferred living under Israeli rule to the Palestinian Authority or Hamas. Somehow, I don’t think this would be the case if the Israeli Arabs felt oppressed by the Israelis. Finally, before the Israel – Hamas War, it was common for Israeli hospitals to take Gazan patients that Gazan hospitals were unable to handle.
To summarize, the relationship between the Israelis and the Palestinians is quite complicated, but certainly could not be characterized as one of oppression by Israel. And the analogy of white oppression of African-Americans, on the one hand, and supposed Israeli oppression of Palestinians, on the other, is totally fallacious. It has been created as a vehicle for antisemitism and nothing more.
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