aroonwithaview

As a teen, I was used to seeing the Israel-Palestine conflict regularly going in and out of prominence. Being restricted to news from actual papers of news (and that too, early on, mostly ToI, which did not carry the “ToI-let” moniker lightly), and also being restricted to what can only be termed a teen’s worldview, I don’t think I delved much deeper than the surface of the contemporary conflict. Thankfully, the conflict went out of sight for most of my adulthood, but Hamas’s recent assault and massacres have brought it painfully back into conscious consideration.

The more I think about, the harder it becomes to take sides in this conflict. And I believe the primary reason for this is that I have misgivings about the objectiveness of my humanity. I know that as I am today, with all the good that I have experienced so far and continue to experience, I am strongly inclined towards a set of principles that accord and preserve such experiences for everybody. I want violence to be extremely sparing, and I want conflict to touch as few people as possible. But would I feel the same way as an Israeli or a Palestinian with their particular histories and experiences? If I had been a Jew with millennia of extreme persecution attached to my identity, would I have given up the chance to create a secure Jewish land at the first instance when violence became necessary to accomplish it? If I were a stifled Palestinian, living in a ghetto for decades without absolutely no possibility of any improvement whatsoever, would I have the same views I do now on the sanctity of civilian life? Unfortunately I do not have clear-cut answers to these questions.

Specific actions, like the massacre of infants and the bombing of mosques and hospitals, are easily condemned, but takes away from the larger perspective of the possible endgames for the conflict as a whole. The combatants are stuck in their own contextual humanities, and the goal of international observers should be to help them break free of those shackles. Of course, I have no idea how this can be achieved, but maybe acknowledging it is the first step towards achieving it.