Finding common ground over Gaza

AS an American Jew, an artist and a Holocaust, race-hate and genocide educator, I find the current support for the Israeli response to years of rocket attacks from Hamas in Gaza seriously misguided, against Israel's short, intermediate and long-term interests and outright foolish.

The war is a human-rights catastrophe. While Israel's Jewish population, including the left, has reportedly given a green light to the war, for the Israelis to think they can destroy the Hamas infrastructure, as has been reported, is as foolish and blind as was their campaign to destroy Hezbollah with a short war during the summer of 2006.

That war was a military catastrophe for Israel — if amazingly not a catastrophe for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. More importantly, it was a human-rights catastrophe for Lebanese civilians, with Israel's heavy bombardment of Lebanese cities, towns and villages.

This is not to say Israelis didn't suffer, as they did. Jewish, Muslim, Druze and Christian Israelis alike experienced heat, pain, blood and death from Hezbollah rockets landing in northern Israel. Two weeks before the war began, I had made my first visit to Haifa; and before I flew home to Seattle July 3, the country was in a state of catharsis over the kidnapping of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

While a Jewish Israeli taxi driver whose cab I rode in Jerusalem that week described the Arabs as "animals," another taxi driver, a Muslim Israeli, told me his car had been attacked by rock-throwing Israeli Jews; he sadly told me all he wants is to provide rides to people needing to go places while earning his livelihood.

In the world of war-caused human suffering, pain is not relative. Contrary to the views of peoples on both sides of this conflict — and to their overseas supporters, respectively — pain and suffering exist on both sides of the conflict. But few, other than human-rights organizations and their supporters, want to hear this.

Another critical point in the current war, aside from the civilian catastrophe in Gaza, is that the war is fantastically increasing the likelihood that the few moderate (if dictatorial) regimes in the region — Egypt, Jordan, Syria, et al — will be toppled and replaced by hard-line Islamic fundamentalist regimes. If Israel is worried about Iran, what will they think when their neighbors, two of whom they made peace with in years past, are but a memory?

If you want to be truly pro-Israel, urge your political representatives to press the U.S., Israel and Hamas to seek an immediate and total cease-fire. That's the desperately needed first step. It must be followed by the heretofore unthinkable: Israel, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority must sit down face-to-face and hammer out a two- or three-state solution.

If the last apartheid regime in South Africa could sit down with their hated enemy, the African National Congress, which the ruling government viewed as terrorist, then Israel can sit down with Hamas. Peace did not come easily in Northern Ireland. The armed militant Protestants and Catholics who caused so much civilian suffering over years have not learned to love each other but they have managed to live side by side with each other.

The current war is not only not accomplishing a thing beyond massive suffering and misery, hundreds of deaths, thousands of people physically and emotionally maimed. It is only worsening an already desperate situation for Gazan Palestinians and for the millions in nearby Arab countries. It will not bring greater peace and stop rocket attacks to Israel from Gaza. Any Israeli who believes it will is delusional at best and dreaming at worst.

To support the Israeli military campaign is to be anti-Israel and anti-Palestinian alike. Unless one is pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian, one is neither. Ditto those who, in their condemnation of Israel as "imperialist" and a "colonial aggressor," give unqualified support to the endless barrage of rockets from Hamas into Israel and the concurrent campaigns to strap bombs on children, youth and women, who blow themselves up while murdering Israeli civilians and/or soldiers.

As a military tactic, suicide bombings are not only a misnomer, as they are murder-suicide bombings, but they are a war crime. We in the West, who support Israel and the quest for a national homeland for Palestinians and their descendants displaced since 1948, can do better.