Failure to Understand

In his 4/19/06 NY Times op-ed, Toby Judt quotes columnist David Aaronovitch stating " there has been a cock-eyed failure in the U.S. to understand the plight of the Palestinians." Of course, this failure results from the Israeli Lobby-dominated U.S. media which always represents the Israelis as the victims, rarely mentioning the oppressive occupation. To better understand the Palestinians' plight, one might imagine what our life would be like if we had lost World War II and had been living under Nazi occupation ever since. Imagine millions of Americans driven out of the country by Nazi terrorists and stranded as unwanted refugees in foreign lands for decades. Imagine German cities springing up all over America, especially around water resources and the places most valued by us. Imagine the Germans finally deciding "magnanimously" to remove their settlements from Rhode Island, after fencing massive numbers of Americans in that state like hopeless inmates in a concentration camp. Imagine being told that if we gave up all resistance to the occupation we might get some of our land back but never all of it, that the large German cities would remain, and that none of the American refugees could ever return home. Now try to imagine what our reaction would be.