Fred Moolton decries one-sidedness and calls for balance.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is approximately a century old.   What does it mean to view this conflict objectively?  What constitutes a balanced perspective on what is happening in the land of which Great Britain took paternal charge under the Palestine Mandate, and which now contains the state of Israel and its ever-expanding colonies?

One may choose to focus on the many battles in this war, and on the conduct of the different sides and parties in the battles.  On both sides, we have seen many clear violations of norms regarding the acceptable use of force and legitimate behavior in the conduct of war, norms on which both international legal canons and the moral traditions of most nations would concur.  We all know how to evoke the litanies of atrocious acts that have occurred by the hands of both Israelis and Palestinians, and their various sponsors, over the long decades of the conflict.

But what must not be missed in these rehearsals of the many wrongs pertaining to the battles comprising the conflict over Palestine is the broad nature of the conflict itself, the whole of which the battles are parts, and which is by no means a tale of tragic and counterbalanced moral parity.  When we step back several lengths from the up-close contemplation of the morally gnarled and ambiguous instances, and contemplate in broad generality the sweep of the entire conflict, we see a smooth and unambiguous progress of blatant, aggressive dispossession.

On one side you have a people who are taking the land upon which others have long lived, plied their livelihoods and made their homes; on the other side you have the people who are fighting, with increasing desperation and little prospect of ultimate success, to prevent that land and those possessions from being taken from them.  This is not ambiguous: it is manifest criminality confronted with manifest resistance to criminality.  We see across the century a long violent tidal movement that has scoured homes, farms, villages, and people from the land, and even abraded away the centuries-old names of places, and deposited in the place of what once existed an invading people and their works, and a new language with new names.   The movement is not some subtle and natural effect of gradual migrations and political evolution.  The conquest is forceful.  It has been carried out deliberately by it perpetrators and suffered unwillingly and with resistance by its victims.

The movement to take this land was begun long ago, by 19th-century European nationalists living in distant European cantons, most of whom had never once stepped foot upon the land in question, yet who dreamt strange, chauvinistic fantasies of redeeming the land of their dreamscape from its presumed captivity.  The dreamers were utterly neglectful and often contemptuous of the real inhabitants of the real land.  Their dream was given unfortunate life by European imperial powers whose habituated, racist arrogance made them feel entirely at liberty to promise and deliver land which did not belong to them to other people to whom the land also didn't belong.  From the beginning the project was concocted of a mixture of bigoted presumption and mercenary reasons of state, sprinkled with daubs of irrational religious legends and fanaticism, or with metaphysically dreamy secular political doctrines that were the superstitious descendants of the older religious doctrines.

Eventually the barbarity of the Nazi holocaust, and the worthy instinct among the people of the western powers to atone for their collective guilt in that holocaust, gave to the project of conquest and colonialism in Palestine the radiant allure of a noble cause.   But it is barely necessary now to point out how morally dubious and comically unsatisfactory were the means taken for the atonement.   For one person to make amends for his crimes against a second person by awarding damages out of the property of a third person is transparently perverse.

This chauvinistic movement of conquest has been spectacularly successful, although it required the mid-century handoff from one western imperial power to another, and the conquest continues to this day, dunam by dunam, with each new Israeli settler domicile erected on the West Bank and with each act of military intimidation, subjugation and humiliation.  The conquest has been accomplished predominantly through the use of sheer force, with the occasional and timely diplomatic intervention of those same western imperial powers.  At each stage in the conflict, the colonial settlers now known as Israelis have worked energetically, through governments of the left and the right, in peace and in war, to fill the foreground of debate with extensive and diversionary talk: with endless excuses, rationalizations, importunings, complaints, sophistries, fulminations, menaces, pulings and bellyaches, while in the background they worked incessantly to press, push, kick, bomb and shoot the Palestinian Arabs off the lands still coveted by Israelis.   The bad faith has been rank and impenetrable.   It is hard to summon any more patience for this behavior, or to care any longer about how criticism will be received by Israelis.  Anyone who has paid attention to the conflict for any length of time is already quite aware of the fact that Israelis will certainly and always continue to regard both the claim that they are the aggressors in the long war, and the disposition to deliver more criticism to the aggressors than to those aggressed against, as evidence of gross unfairness.  So, alas, responding intelligently to the conflict cannot depend on being overly-concerned to frame messages that are appealing to Israelis.

There have been unjust, aggressive and brutal movements all over the world during the past century, some substantially more brutal than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and yes, Americans manage to ignore most of them.  But Americans can't ignore this conflict because they are deeply implicated in it.  Unlike almost all of those other wars of aggression, America contains many people today who send money, resources and people to Israel to fuel the conflict and drive the ongoing aggressive seizure of land   Some Americans agitate incessantly on behalf of the aggressive party in the conflict, and have very successfully enlisted the American government as an ally in the conquest, to the extent that neither Americans nor others around the world can any longer tell where American action ends and Israeli action begins.  As a result, the security of all Americans has been put at extreme hazard.  There are many conceivable and plausible contingencies that, should they occur, might easily spark the expansion of the conflict beyond Israel and Palestine.  Such an expansion would likely draw the United States into a major war in a vital region, and draw in others as well.  There is a depressing sense of inevitability hanging over America's obsessive and confused march toward the edge of  the precipice.  Many Americans will lose their lives though a fatally misguided alliance and sentimental attachment to a rogue, expansionist state, the bastard offspring of racist colonialism of the past and the vestigial organ of racist colonialism in the present.