By David K. Shipler
At the end
of an interview I did several years ago with Palestinian high school students
in Ramallah, the West Bank, the teenagers asked for my opinion about the
conflict. I said, in part, that on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I thought the
Palestinians were right; on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday I thought the
Israelis were right, and on Sunday I thought they both deserved each other. (Their
Palestinian teacher was outraged that I’d consider the Israelis right on any
day.)
Now I’d add the United States to
that mix, because it’s become a party that’s both right and wrong and deserves
all the praise and criticism it’s getting for moving its embassy to the
disputed city of Jerusalem.
Logically,
yes, a country gets to pick its capital, and Israel chose Jerusalem both in
ancient and modern times. As President Trump declared in a videotaped message, “For
many years, we have failed to acknowledge the obvious, plain reality that the
[Israeli] capital is Jerusalem.” But logic does not rule there. If it did, the clash
of Israeli and Palestinian nationalisms, and their overlapping territorial
claims, would have been resolved long ago. No, what Trump and his smiling
acolytes at the embassy’s opening ceremony do not get is the power of symbols to
trigger zealotry in that weary land, where Israel, the Palestinians, and now
the United States indulge in fantasies.
It’s easy
to see this by simply asking which image from that event represents reality:
the jubilant Israeli and American officials, well-coifed in a clean, safe pageant
of platitudes about peace, or the billowing black smoke, teargas, and bloody
bodies of Palestinians who were raging toward Israel’s border with Gaza. Their
demand? To return to villages that they had never seen, that mostly no longer
exist, that had been emptied of their ancestors during Israel’s 1948 war of
independence, which Palestinians call “Nakba,”
Arabic for catastrophe.
Neither the
embassy ceremony nor the Gaza protest is remotely realistic. Palestinian kids
have been indoctrinated to dream angrily of a return after 70 years to their
grandparents’ lands inside Israel proper, where the orange groves and vineyards
were rarely as lush and idyllic as in their imagination. For both security and
political reasons, Israel is not about to permit a largescale return, and that
demand by Hamas, which rules Gaza, simply reinforces Israeli fears that Palestinians
want the obliteration of the Jewish state.
