On Tuesday afternoon, I was regrettably introduced to an article written by The Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens, a column so repugnant it left a nausea in me that has yet to go away.
What upset me the most wasn’t the article itself, so much as the fact it was shared — with resounding agreement — by people whom I love and respect, friends whom I know to be rational, thoughtful and genuinely exemplary human beings. What could possibly motivate them to place on a pedestal the work of a man who applauds torture by our government and sincerely views the incineration of some 100,000 civilians by nuclear holocaust as a gift from God?
Well, understandably, we find ourselves witnessing the birth pangs of a potential third Intifada, a new escalation of violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without end. Like the effect of the sun’s gravity on light, this eternal war tends to warp the sensibilities of whomever it comes into contact with.
We could list examples of violence on both sides, of which each has a favorite they like to point to. I’m not going to do that. However, I must put Stephens’ piece in context: Terrorists from Palestine have stabbed several Israelis in the last month, acts which have been encouraged by several Gazan and Islamic leaders.
I shouldn’t have to preface my opinion by saying, as a pacifist, an anti-racist and a philo-Semite, these events anguish me. Remorse for loss of life shouldn’t be a political statement.
If Stephens is to be believed, then my tendency to view this conflict with nuance (where victimhood and blame can be found on both sides of that 430-mile-long wall) makes me an accessory to murder.
Stephens’ column is reprehensible for a number of reasons — too many to go into here. But there are several that stand out as particularly abhorrent. For one, his comparison of the stabbings to white supremacist violence in the U.S. is an infuriating false equivalency. Analogies are never a great tool for explaining events accurately, but this one holds up to even less scrutiny than most. It’s not just a cheap and shameless attempt to co-opt a struggle the black community faces daily at the hands of white supremacy and police forces that use tactics perfected by the Israel Defense Forces to suppress protests. It’s a dishonest portrayal that obliterates the context of the conflict, projecting an image of Israel as a blameless victim of insane racism with no hand in the conflict’s escalation or its origin. But let’s play Stephens’ analogy game: Let’s reduce the situation to its most basic, un-ideological components: innocent citizens of a colonial state encounter violent, desperate attacks from the native population, which itself is routinely subjected to collective punishment and annihilation by the colonial government. That looks a great deal less like white-on-black racism and more like the conflicts between Native Americans and white settlers during a less savory point in our nation’s history.
This isn’t to discount the responsibility of ethnic hatred in these knife attacks, which again I unequivocally condemn. But Stephens explains them as a function of racism alone, while projecting that very sort of ethnic essentialism onto Palestinians as a whole, as if every last Arab inhabitant of Palestine is anxiously waiting to plunge a knife into an Israeli throat. It’s quite evident in his language when he refers to supposed Palestinian "communal bloodlust," or how he never once differentiates between terrorists and civilians. For him, the culprits and Palestinians are one, guilty because of their ethnicity. It doesn’t take a genius to see where that logic leads — certainly not toward fewer deaths.
At the end of his lamentation that media covers both sides of the conflict, Stephens states those who disagree with him are "accomplices" in these acts of terrorism. Mild criticism of Israeli policy makes one responsible for the murder of Jewish people; Bret Stephens makes me sick.
Alec Carver is a UF history junior. His column appears on Fridays.
