I Am Gaza-ed Out

Today (7/15/14) I wrote the following letter to National Public Radio.  NPR a big window into the news for me since I listen to it in the studio; but sometimes they just piss me off:

I have put “Morning Edition” on my “contact a show” box, but the fact is that I have a rhetorical question that applies to all your news programs.  Why is it that when you report on the number of deaths in Palestine, you always characterize them as being “civilian deaths” without explaining (and it should be every time you report on it) that these deaths are civilian precisely because the Gaza launch sites are embedded among the civilian population, the women and children you always talk about?  The launch sites are planted among the homes and institutions of daily life in the densely urbanized Gaza strip; and no matter how targeted the Israeli attacks are, they will hit civilians in order to try to curb the Palestinian attacks against its own people.  In failing to report this, and to reiterate it, your reporting is incomplete and biased.  I understand the nature of this bias; Israel is a rich and powerful country (though it certainly did not get there through entitlement, even though the world likes to forget why Israel was created in the first place and how it made itself into what it is, so unlike all its neighbors) and the tendency in civilized nations is to root for the underdog; and the Palestinians look like the underdog; but that’s not good reporting or analysis. 

I don't think Israel is right in all its actions; but your news always makes it sound like they are always wrong.  I think I am finally truly done giving to my local NPR station; I’ll just freeload.

I am seriously sick and tired of listening to one-sided reports about Israeli action every time “those people over there” get into skirmishes.  And, sad and horrible deaths or not, that’s what this latest Hamas offensive is “one more again”.  It's their usual MO of lobbing rockets at Israel and getting a bunch of their own people killed to get back under the limelight of the press in order to get more monetary and political support from the people who back them up.  And on and on it goes.  It’s all very sad for everybody; and, no Mr. Kerry, there will never be peace in the Middle East. 

This being said (as well as, sad), I was thinking about my letter and asked myself why precisely it is that we feel compelled to root for the underdog?   I concluded that we do so because we can’t see past ourselves.  In the end we assume (or want) “the other” to be just like us; just a disadvantaged self.   We want to help them because we assume that their wants and needs are just like ours; and being empathetic, we feel a need to equalize the playing field, however we might do that.  This urge of ours is commendable but often leads to mistaken actions.  This particular other does not want the same things we want; and that’s the root cause of a  whole lot of wishful thinking that never gets fulfilled.

My final, and repetitive, thoughts, on this here day of “no cease fire”, have to do with the fact that no matter how badly Jews are treated, and no matter how much of a minority they ALWAYS are, in terms of numbers anyway, they are never seen as the underdog.  That might have something to do with the fact that no matter how many pogroms there have been in attempts to stomp them down and out, they seem to, not only survive, but also to thrive.  It might have something to do with the fact that instead of vying for handouts, they go out and build things; and it might have something to do with the line of thinking elaborated upon here by Richard Fernandez.  Whatever it is, on bad days, I find it unfair.

Once upon a time, Israel was a piece of land carved by the Brits and given to a bunch of bedraggled Jews after a war that had eliminated half of their world population (in the millions, not hundreds).  A place voluntarily settled by some crazy (yes, crazy, for who else would want to go there of their own accord?) Jews wanting to go back to the second temple and make a new home for themselves, plus a lot of others in boatloads turned away from “bastions of humanism” like England and America.  Boatloads of refugees turned away to fend for themselves among enemies.  I bet the Brits and whoever came up with that cockamamie plan didn't even count on their survival, as a nation, or anything else.  Carving up “an Israel” in the middle of "nowhere" was expedient .  It got rid of the pesky problem of assimilating millions of sick and starving refugees from the unthinkable conditions of the German Camps; a Jewish population that nobody wanted, in a world torn by war.  Setting them free, out there in the desert, sounded like the easy solution.  And not even then were we (yeah, we, for my name is Cohen and I can’t hide) thought of as the underdog. 

Well, those bedraggled Jews, they survived.  And they made that god-forsaken desert grow; not through entitlements, not through handouts, and not by lobbing rockets at their enemies from within their settlements, but by working at it.  

When it comes to the Middle East, I mostly keep a level head and an altruistic attitude, I even often root for the "greater in numbers underdog" and thus excuse too many wrongs; but today I am just pissed off,  I've had it: I’m Gaza-ed out.