Paths Not Chosen
Maybe it is that the story is well written and thus poignant. Maybe it is that I fear that the more potential there is for women to become suicide bombers will inevitably bring about more children deciding capriciously to kill themselves for a cause they cannot possibly understand. Or perhaps it is simply that I am tired of it. I am tired for the Israeli people who deal with these attacks on a constant basis. I am weary for Palestinians who do not realize that there will be no path for them that crosses through the rubble of destroyed Israeli lives, and that the only way they have a legitimate case to press is if they foreswear terrorism. I am exhausted from having to argue with friends and colleagues about the best way to combat those who want to kill us. I am weary for our soldiers who fight under a plan so haphazardly thrown together it looks almost willfully incompetent. I am weary of so much of this. But then I realize that maybe that is what they want. They want for us to be tired. They want for us to decide that it is not worth it. They want for us to have that moment of doubt. And we cannot. Tired feet must march onward.
One of the ironies attendant in the resolution of this grim snapshot of Israel’s daily confrontation is that once that woman was discovered to have been strapped with explosives, she was lucky to have been stopped by soldiers from the country she so viscerally hates as to want to kill its citizens in its hospitals. Had she been discovered in Syria or Iran or Yemen or any other of dozens of countries in the world, she would have been shot. If she was lucky. Perhaps she would have been stoned to death after being gang-raped. The fate of her family would have been just as bad, perhaps worse. And we would know nothing of it. There would have been no free press to cover it. There would be no court proceedings to follow. The soldiers would not have had clear rules of engagement that meant that even after the woman tried to set off deadly explosives intended to kill them they still were to try to subdue her if at all possible and only use deadly force if it became absolutely necessary.
All of this is ironic because were the Palestinians to have given up violence, the intifada, the uprisings, they would be closer to a state for their own people. Had Palestinians finally understood that Israel is not going to succumb to obliteration, and that while the Palestinians are not going to get everything they ask for they can get so much more than they have now, they would have much of that for which they fight. And had they been able to develop a non-violent struggle against those civil rights and human rights violations that do occur in their troubled land they would have garnered the sympathy of people like me, for whom the talk of rights is almost innately hardwired into our system. People like me could have said “Israel, our ally, is a good state. It must be a better state. Israel is a country based on justice and democracy and liberalism. It must be more just, more democratic, more liberal.” And perhaps we could have said similar things about a Palestinian state that would be inevitably flawed, but also hopeful and, yes, democratic and liberal, just and good. But we do not have these options. A country that sees its citizens die in clubs and restaurants and cafes and buses and hospitals cannot hear cries for civil rights in the midst of such uncivil wrongs. And those of us who support Israel cannot ask it to make concessions to murder. If only that young woman at the border crossing had realized this. If only so many hundreds, thousands, of others had realized this, things might be different now.