In the comments sections below Cafe featured columns discussing the Arab-Jewish or Israel-Palestine conflict (call it what you will), is often at least one complaint about the lack of Arab or Palestinian voices in our mix of featured columnists.  Since it is not as if there are no Arab- and Palestinian-American writing and publishing, I must agree that it seems a strange and unnatural lack of representation in a forum so widely read, respected and cited as TPMCafe.  Meanwhile, two pieces have just showed up on a casual run among my own regualr station stops along the Information Superhighway this morning.  Both, I am proud to say, come from my native Chicago:

Hesham Hassaballa,

I believe the vast majority of American Muslims and Arab Americans feel the same way I do about this conflict. They are terribly hurt by the suffering of innocent Palestinians who have nowhere to run from the Gaza onslaught, but they do not think that the appropriate response is to hurl more death and destruction at Israeli civilians in a twisted form of revenge. Like our Jewish counterparts, we also think that "there has to be another way of doing this."

...

President-elect Barack Obama, who, distressingly, long remained silent about the latest crisis, is set to take office in two weeks. He must strive for this "middle way" and work with all of us in the United States - American Jews, American Arabs and Muslims, and many others - who are pro-peace, pro-Israel and pro-Palestine....

 

Ray Hanania,

Have we deteriorated so much as a people, Jews and Arabs, that we can simply turn away from the suffering of the other, and even justify it when confronted by pointing to the deaths on our sides?

Uglier than the massacres and bloodied scenes filled with body parts are the crowds of people who easily come together in anger and blame the other side while never assuming any blame themselves.

...

As a Palestinian Arab, I'm a willing to stand with any Jew or Israeli who has the courage to stop blaming the other side. Stop defending violence of any kind. Stop the justification. Stop the killing. Stop the violence.

Stand together and focus on one answer. Peace. Respect for life.

We can recognize this is difficult. We can accept we have different views of history. We can accept that peace is not easy. But can we accept that not acting means more death? Can we accept that by pointing fingers of blame at each other, we are accomplices to the hatred that drives the carnage?

 

Speculation runs rampant over what can possibly account for this.  I only slightly regret that the grim idea that crosses mine is that such voices as these cannot drive enough conflict to generate the hitcounts of some of the Cafe's more regular, provacative featured writers.