Race and the Middle East

Race plays a central role in the way that America has come to understand the current Middle East crisis. But the role that race plays is often hard to see. It can be hard work to uncover these ideas, but it is important that we do so because we cannot let these ideas distort our perception of conflicts in other parts of the world.

When the current crisis began several weeks ago, the host of ABC's talk show "Politically Incorrect," Bill Maher, suggested that Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and Arabs throughout the Middle East had only themselves to blame for their predicament. After all, he said, there are 22 Arab states, and the Palestinians could just go to one of them instead of laying claim to Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank.

The thought that Palestinians should just find some other country to live in reminds me of those who said that African-Americans should go "back to Africa." There is a certain idea about race behind both suggestions. "Back to Africa" fails to recognize that Africans in Africa and the United States belong to distinct peoples each with their own history, culture and institutions. There is no reason to think that African-Americans belong or fit in better in Africa than they do right here in America. Similarly, "back to Arabia" misses the fact that, like the Africans, the 200 million Arabs in the Middle East belong to distinct nations, each with their own history, culture and institutions.

The millions of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and Jordan face hardship and exclusion precisely because they don't fit in there. They have been powerfully shaped by 50 years of statelessness and no one else in the Arab world has experienced this. What's more, countries like Lebanon and Jordan have their own interior lives, with a delicate balance of interests that allows their various classes and religious groups to live together. You can't introduce millions of foreigners into a tiny nation like Lebanon and not expect to upset the internal balance. You can't, that is, unless you think of the people in such a dehumanized way that nothing differentiates them from one another.

Another argument that I have heard in the past few weeks suggests that Israel has made every effort to appease the Arabs. Israel has returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt, withdrawn its army from south Lebanon, and was even willing to return the Golan Heights to Syria in exchange for peace. The claims of the Palestinians seem like yet more demands on an endless list of claims.

Now whatever you might think about these concessions to Egypt, Lebanon and Syria, perhaps this much is clear: these are not concessions to the Palestinians. Each of these countries represents a distinct people with a distinct set of claims against Israel. To see their claims as one long list of "what the Arabs want" reflects a certain way of thinking about the people involved, namely that they are all the same--concessions to some are concessions to the others. But any real measure of Israeli concessions to the Palestinians should focus on the central claims of the Palestinians--sovereignty over the Occupied Territories including East Jerusalem, the right of return for millions of Palestinian refugees, and the removal of Israeli settlements from the West Bank--not on some list of demands supposedly made by the Arab race.

Our habit of thinking of the Middle East in terms of a conflict between races pervades the media even more than ordinary discussions. When an American destroyer was bombed in Yemen and two Israeli soldiers were killed in Ramallah several weeks ago, ABC News interspersed images of these two events as if the same faceless mob were behind both of them. No on watching had the sense that Yemen is over a thousand miles from Ramallah over the Arabian desert and that few Palestinians have ever even seen Yemen. (By contrast, British news agencies like the BBC and ITN were very careful to treat these news items as distinct events from different regions of the Middle East.)

This habit of thinking about the Middle East leads to a dangerous lack of empathy for particular groups in the Arab world. Over the last few weeks, I have heard people blame the Palestinians for the Israeli crackdown, saying that Palestinian protesters are the ones throwing the rocks, so they should suffer the consequences. Consequences maybe, but what kind of consequences? How far can a nation go in putting down an uprising?

Imagine that there were riots in Los Angeles right now just like the ones that we saw after the Rodney King verdict. Suppose that in the face of what people saw as a travesty of justice, they took to the streets and smashed stores and offices and attacked the police (which they did in L.A.). Now imagine that in response, the United States called in the army to restore order, firing on civilians with live ammunition, and using Apache helicopters and anti-tank missiles to destroy neighborhoods. Would anyone think this was reasonable? Would anyone blame the rioters for the government's reaction? Would we see 120 dead rioters as bearing the blame for what happened to them?

Stripped of its association with the Arab race, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is an independence struggle between a stateless people and a vastly superior occupying army--not unlike the conflict between Tibet and China. Palestinians are frustrated because they are too weak to win back their freedom. Yet for the most part Americans don't understand why the Palestinians lash out at the Israelis. The reason that Americans don't understand is that they see the Palestinians as part of a hostile mob of Arabs that vastly outnumbers the Israelis. This gives them a distorted picture of who has the power in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict (which we sometimes call the "Arab-Israeli conflict") and leaves them confused as to the source of the hostility.

When it comes to race, Americans have a history. We allowed race to blind us to the real goals of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and we continue to allow race to blind us to the goals of the Palestinians. But we are not powerless against these habits. By thinking about them and criticizing them, we can rid ourselves of this distorted lens and gain true insight into the aims and aspirations of people in the Middle East.

Waheed Hussain is a student in philosophy at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.