The Abbreviated Read (2)

The Murakami thing drives me crazy and highlights the way that Israel is treated differently than any other country. Murakami writes “I sense a very strong patriotic approach when I talk to Israelis. The schools instill it in them through the official history”. What a load of bull shit. First of all, Israelis are not particularly patriotic in world terms. Second, does Murakami have any idea of how Israeli children are taught in school? He spent what, a couple of days in Israel and he feels like he can understand the deep complexities of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict? This idea that people feel that they can drop in on Israel and tell Israelis what is wrong with their society because they have read some internet articles or books is deeply offensive. It’d be like me (if I were a famous writer) showing up in Japan and telling them they don’t understand how much their refusal to stop visiting the shrines of war criminals offends the Chinese. How the Japanese are all xenophobic and it’s bred into them and they just don’t know it. Murakami really has no idea of what he speaks but like everyone else when it comes to Israel, feels it is within his rights to lecture Israelis.

“All this talk about how the conflict is oh, so complex, is nothing but you being piqued that somebody criticizes you.”

I call bullshit on this too. The conflict, like virtually every conflict in the world, IS complex and lacking in simple solutions and this one is more complex than most. There are many things Israel can and should do to ease the lives of Palestinians, but there is nothing that they could do that would suddenly result in peace. It’s not that it’s criticism, it’s that it’s the same tired cliches of the black and white criticism. He says that Israel conducts “a policy that denies the refugees’ right to return to their land in order to protect the interests of the Jewish people; this is unjust”. Can you get any more facile than this? He says this as if “Jewish interests” are like an interest in coal or farm products, devoid of the basic historical (and current) reason for the need for Zionism. He writes that he heard a taxi driver say that the wall is “to keep the animals out” which he construes as racist. It’s possible, maybe even probable that it was racist, and referring to Palestinians in general, but it is also possible that the cabbie was calling suicide bombers animals. Even if it was a racist statementm to infer, as Maruakami does, that Israelis are racist because a taxi driver said something racist, is insanity. Is racism against Arabs a problem in Israel. Definitely. (although even that is not black and white) But racism is a huge problem in Japan as well. It’s an even bigger problem in Russia. It’s a massive problem in a good chunk of the world.

Your examples are also faulty. Forget that Russia is a major world power with imperial interests in scores of countries and Israel is a tiny country with almost no international reach. When was the last time a writer with very little knowledge of Russia, wrote an article condemning Russia for their far more brutal occupation of Chechnya?

Israel deserves a lot of criticism, but it does not deserve by far and way the most criticism in the world. In my entire life in Canada, I have never once seen a writer come here and criticize our horrific treatment of Natives or our illegal and discriminatory education system. Most of all, I’m sick of the way everyone thinks the causes and solutions to the conflict. There is no easy solution. Palestinians have every right to think that Israelis want nothing more than to take all of their land and Israelis are just as right to think that Palestinians want nothing except to destroy Israel.

Also, you massively underestimate the effects of those shrine visits on Asian countries. Think if Germany never acknowledged the Holocaust and then every year their leaders went to go pray at the graves of senior Nazi figures who were publicly revered.