Using the word “genocide” is a quick and effective way to get people’s attention. But it is a word with a very specific meaning, and it seems that the situation in Syria, while it may conceivably become a genocide, is not exactly that. The situation is more of a civil war – albeit a very lopsided civil war in terms of fire-power, and one with a sectarian element.

Assad’s regime represents the Alawite minority, whereas the majority of the country is Sunni; Genocide Watch warns of genocide “[if] the Alawite government […] it is about to lose all power in a zero-sum, winner take all revolution”. But there are Sunnis loyal to the Assad regime, as well as Alawites amongst the rebels: the divide is not mainly ethnic/sectarian, but more between Assad loyalists and various dissenting groups.

The possible implications of using “genocide” for an ideological conflict scare me. It might insinuate, to some, that the victims of genocide are killed for holding and/or fighting for certain beliefs. This would mean that the victims have a choice in the matter. And you know what? When it’s genocide, the victims really don’t have much of a choice, except to try to run for their lives.

Dissenting points of view are welcome, in comments below (unlike under Assad.)

Footnotes

1. This link may not work forever, but some are here: “Share It if You Care”
2. As of this writing, Genocide Watch have a page with a detailed update from February, but there is no permanent link available to the specific update.

I can understand this sentiment quite well. Some five years ago, Y. gave me a ride in his car; his self-definition as a male was new to me at the time, and indeed I had never had to deal with this situation before. I knew that Y. wished to be seen and treated as a man, and wanted to respect that, but it took me a lot of effort to start using the male gender for him.¹ I remember sitting in the passenger seat, struggling with awkward silences, and trying to figure out how to speak to him, until I finally got a male “you” out of my mouth.

Today I have only minimal difficulty respecting the self-definition of the transgenders. I also expect other people to respect their self-definition, as I expect people to respect self-definition in other aspects of identity. How is the case of Y. different from my self-definition as an Israeli? After all, just as Y’s biological gender contradicts his self-definition as male, so does my American citizenship (from birth, via my mother) contradict my self-definition as Israeli.

There’s something incredibly arrogant, even obnoxious, about refusing to respect another person’s self-definition. People seem to recognize this more easily when it’s an entire group’s self-definition that is in question – Israelis take offense at someone denying our view of Israel, or Jews, as a community with a distinct identity; Palestinians take offense at someone denying their self-definition as a nation. The examples of groups getting furious about others denying their group identity are endless (Basques, Afrikaner, and French Muslims come to mind). Yet the same is also true in reverse – it is awful to be persecuted for belonging to a group you do not identify with, as some Europeans with Jewish ancestors discovered under the yoke of Nazi fascism.

As anyone who has ever had a crisis of identity will know, changing your self-definition is not an easy thing, and few people are able to do it on a whim. If a person whose genetic heritage says “female” or “Jew” decides they are “male” or “Muslim”, you can bet on it being important to them, and you can count on them having come, in some way, to the conclusion that the new label is more appropriate to them as a person. Ultimately, as an outsider, you cannot know better than them which label fits, and presuming to do so – even with excellent evidence – is insulting and degrading. It is to say that their self-knowledge and self-determination is of less importance than your knowledge of their background.

Again, I understand that it’s difficult to adjust to changes in the self-definition of others, even when you don’t know them (as in the case of my acquaintences’ comments about Y.) It is especially difficult regarding transgendered individuals, probably because being openly transgendered is a relatively new thing in Western societies, and because the conventional, ancient view of gender is as a completely inborn, unchangeable property. The idea that gender labels are entirely a social construct – albeit one influenced by a basic biological fact – is a very difficult idea to swallow. I find it counter-intuitive. But I also consider it intellectually undeniable – though I lack the ability to explain it properly and convince you it is so.

Be that as it may, gender labels are just one example, and my main point remains: hard as it is, respecting an individual’s self-definition is just basic decency, and refusing to respect it is indecent and offensive. I have to stress that I am not writing this to condemn or attack anybody. I acknowledge the difficulty involved, and only want to argue for the importance of making the effort to observe this basic, though unconventional, decency. Comments are open if you wish to dissuade me from or berate me for my deviant view of decency – discussion is welcome, as always.

Footnotes

1. It’s important to note that in Hebrew, there are two different forms of singular “you” – one for males, another for females. The same applies to other pronouns, like “your”, as well as to verbs, like “like” – so I can inflect the sentence “Do you like hamburgers” one way for addressing a male (ata ohev hamburgerim?) and another for addressing a female (at ohevet hamburgerim?), but I have no way of leaving the sentence neutral as it would be in English.

I really didn’t expect to be posting anything today, certainly not this, but it seems to be quite urgent, so here I am. Google is planning to (finally) give Google Reader an overhaul. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been looking forward to that for a long time. But what I didn’t expect is that instead of integrating gReader’s social functions with G+, they’re replacing the former with the latter. No more “people you follow” feed, no more “comments view”, no more of my little clutch of gReader buddies, formed around the mutual opinion that each of the others shares interesting stuff. These people have introduced me to some of the most interesting pieces of reading I’ve come across, many of which have ended up linked to on this blog or influencing my thinking and writing.

Here are some of the posts about the shuttering that have come up (in “people you follow”, of course):

• TechCrunch (October 20)
• Forbes (October 21)
• Here is a thing. (October 21)
• Google Reader help (October 21)

This is one of those things which I kind of knew about but never gave all that much thought. On the one hand, it’s pretty useful that I don’t have to manually sift through things I’m not interested in. On the other hand, an algorithm can’t always tell what I’m interested in, and even if it could, I like to think my interests change and I’d like to be able to see more of what’s going on and choose for myself.

Hmm.

What do you think?

Remember Eden Abergil, the young Israeli woman who became an instant Internet meme after posting photos from her army days in which she poses with bound and blindfolded Palestinian detainees? (If not, Google her.)

Ido Kenan over at Room 404 brings us some news from the famous Facebook profile. The Itamar massacre has prompted her to re-post one of the most memorable photos from, as the album was called, “the most beautiful time in her life” and spew some fresh unreflected racist hatred into the net.

Seen on the right, we have, from top to bottom, a video of (reportedly) soldiers abusing bound detainees, with the charming caption “death to the Arabssssssss”; then the picture that made Abergil famous with the caption of, roughly, “fuck you, stinking Arabs!!!”; and finally a video of images from the murder of the Fogel family in Itamar with the caption “let’ssssss do a Holocaust for the Arabs nowwww and immediatelyyyy!!!!!!!!!!!”.

Kenan reports that when a friend half-jokingly warned Abergil this all might wind up on TV, she replied “Death to the Arabsssss!!!! Let it show up!!!”

It’s worth noting that back after her “beautiful” pictures originally surfaced, she apologized.

H/t to Itamar Sha’altiel. This post is not a direct translation of Ido Kenan’s post, but still  mainly reproduces the information he posted, in English. Credit is due to him, I just thought this worth sharing in a way accessible to non Hebrew-speakers.

Many of the things I want to share I want to share because I want to help make them public and spread. Since I’ve started using Twitter a lot lately, I guess Twitter is a good venue for this; links reach more people and can spread through Twitter’s huge, globe-spanning network. Of course, like all things Twitter, they easily get drowned out in the never-ending feed.

Of course there’s this blog of mine right here, but it’s too much work to blog all those links. I have to explain what it is I’m posting and why, and I read more than I could do that for.

But I might set up a separate feed for links, using Tumblr or something. Would anyone reading this be interested in that? Would anyone follow it?

Any other ideas?

I sometimes write here, and often post links on Facebook, in criticism of Israel’s government or military. I know what response to expect from most fellow Israelis. Very often, like the other day (when I posted this link), discussion almost immediately includes some old friend throwing in a personal attack on me, either in lieu of an actual argument or in addition to it.

This last attack on Facebook is a true classic; to summarize the gist of my friend’s argument: “you didn’t serve in the army so you can’t judge those who do; you haven’t experienced what they have”. This stuff gets me worked up, but rarely hurts me anymore. The comments are predictable and repetitive and repetitive, and every time I post, I quietly brace myself for them. Saying something bad about the IDF is spitting on a holy cow, as far as almost all Israelis are concerned, and criticism of the government is often taken as an attack on the existence of the state.

I

I haven’t always been this vocal. After I moved away (2007), for over a year I avoided reading any news from Israel and, even more, avoided making any comment on the situation there. At the time it seemed nothing ever changed, and reading about it would be painful and useless.

My attitude changed in a process of reflection. I thought a lot: about why I told the IDF I didn’t want to be a soldier¹ and later left, about my attitude towards Israel, and about the way I expressed that attitude on the rare occasions that I did. It became clear to me that although I left for mostly childish and wrong reasons, the small part of me that left in protest was kind of right. Things in Israel actually are changing, for the worse, and the many people I love who live there are affected by it.

At the same time, I came to appreciate what an amazing country Israel is, and what a great place to live. I really don’t blame anyone who lives there for loving it so and refusing to let go. I want to live there again as well. Unfortunately, to really enjoy it to the fullest, one has to keep their eyes and ears selectively shut, and one had best check their concern for human rights and justice at the airport. There are government-issued narratives to soothe the conscience, for those who can swallow them.

Sadly, I’m really bad at those things.

Nonetheless, and despite always having felt a little odd and out of place growing up in Israel, it also became clear to me that I am Israeli. Really, really Israeli. Even though in Israel I often felt kind of American and was called American or German by my peers, out in Germany I realized that those were just labels. I may not be considered normal in Israel, but it’s where I was born, where I grew up, where I was formed. Israel is the fabric from which I am cut, and an inseparable part of who I am.

And so the feelings behind my concern for, and criticism of Israel, are mixed. I’m a little embarrassed that I actually left. I feel a bit lost outside of the society I come from. I am terrified of what my homeland is becoming. I long to return. I am dismayed at seeing my country doing unto others what we so lament others having done unto our ancestors.² I am alarmed at how many Israelis are not alarmed. I am disgusted at the zealous militarism, which makes almost any honest discussion of policy in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem pointless, if not impossible. And I know that if I moved back, I would be consumed by arguments and by fighting over these issues (and I doubt that would be good for me).

II

It’s sadly common in Israel to label any dissent as foreign influence, as if asking questions and examining things weren’t a part of our cultural history (oh, that Abraham, such a good ol’ conformist! Ah, Einstein, paragon of traditional thinking!) But my dissent has little to do with foreign influence. I rarely read or watch any foreign coverage of Israel, I’ve almost never watched German television, and by way of conversation most Germans are more interested in hearing from an Israeli than expressing some opinion about the conflict. My strong feelings and opinions on these matters are a combination of the values I learned from my parents and my schools and information and opinions I’ve read on Israeli blogs and news sources. They are also tempered by living in a country in which people really pay attention to human and civil rights and the environment (in recent decades, that is).

III

Growing up in Israel, existential threats were just a part of life. It was especially scary when the second Intifada started, but I’ve always been aware that my country faces real danger. I also understand completely why people eagerly go to the army to protect the country and defend everything they know, and I think it’s basically noble of them.

Although I think there was some miscalculation involved in the way the state of Israel was founded, I do not for a second think that Israel should not exist as a state today. The past is the past, our families live there now, we’ve established quite a country and it’s not going to go away. We have the right to lead our lives in the country we consider our home, and we also happen to have the military might to defend that right.

I don’t talk about these things much because they seem to me basic, banal, uninteresting. Actually, no; I stay away from these lines of argument because they have been commandeered by Hasbara to excuse the disgusting things our government does, and even the disgusting and illegal things that our citizens do and the state and society let slide. And while Hamas may spit on our right to live in our homeland, and that’s infuriating and scary, it seems almost insignificant compared to how Israel has actively and systematically, over decades, been denying the exact same right  of the Palestinians and sometimes even the Bedouins (the latter being tax-paying Israeli citizens, some of whom serve voluntarily in the military).³

I know that if it weren’t for the IDF, I probably would never exist. I know if the IDF were to somehow disappear, people I love would be in grave danger. People remind me of this all the time although I’ve never forgotten it. I have no problem with the existence of the IDF, just with a big portion of what it does and how it does it. I was brought up on the claims that the IDF is a supremely humane and moral army that has always been the defender, never the aggressor. I would honestly like the IDF to be that way, rather than spending so much of the national budget on making sure the Palestinians continue to hate our guts for generations to come. We are a sophisticated society. We should be able to handle our security needs in a way that is as respectful and moral as possible towards our neighbors (few of whom have ever actively been involved in terrorism.)

IV

I’m also well-aware of the self-sacrifice and the terrible price paid by combat soldiers. During the invasion of Gaza, my childhood best friend was sent in, and that was probably the only time anything in the conflict actually hit close enough to home that for days I lost sleep and couldn’t concentrate on classes. It was a huge relief when I got word he was back home safely.

But I don’t think missing the experience of active combat duty — or miraculously not losing anyone to the conflict so far — disqualifies me (or anyone else) from making statements about the army’s conduct or the conflict in general. Perhaps it’s even the other way around. Can we expect people who have personal experience of this conflict — soldiers who saw their friends wounded or killed, Palestinian farmers who have been attacked by settlers or seen soldiers build a wall through their land, shopkeepers or home-owners who’ve seen their stuff destroyed by a terrorist attack or military operation — to be level-headed and think clearly about the greater situation? It seems to me the whole problem with this conflict is that on both sides it’s those with real first-hand experience, trauma, and cause for grievance who are making decisions that perpetuate the violence. Since at this point most Israelis and Palestinians have such experience, well, no wonder things are going so badly. Our policies and decisions are made with hate and rage in the heat of the moment, but they long outlive the emotion that brought them to be.

Someone has to be thinking about this conflict without clinging to personal trauma, pride and hate. Nobody is neutral, of course, but it’s going to take all kinds of thinking to find a way out of the hole we’ve dug ourselves into. Very soon, the international community will likely begin recognizing the Palestinian state. This will place Israel in the position of having to make very hard decisions and concessions.

V

For now, I’m going to continue expressing and propagating criticism until I get sick of it or lose hope. After all, I’m only expressing my opinion on the stuff that every citizen of a democratic state should be concerned about and involved in — the merits and effects of our government’s policy and decisions, including the use of military force.

People always disagree about these things. That’s why democracy exists. I can’t speak for others, but when I share something critical, I’m inviting everyone who sees it to disagree. There’s very little I’m sure of, and I welcome disagreement because it helps test and shape my world-view. It’s how I learn. And there are traditionally two ways to show someone they are wrong. One way is to present a (logical) argument that contradicts their conclusions; the other way is to present evidence that contradict their assumptions. Personally, I also like well thought-out comparisons with historical situations when they can demonstrate moral value.

On the other hand, personal attacks are just jerkish behavior. They never change anyone’s mind about their opinion. In my case, they only cause me to get annoyed and type really fast. It’s a deep and dangerous anti-democratic trend in Israeli culture that certain groups (non-Jews, avoiders of military service, etc.) are not welcome to criticize Israeli policy and actions. To many in Israel, it may just seem natural, but when you tell someone they’re not one to comment, it’s nothing but a useless personal attack.

Footnotes

1. As a result, they decided that I’m mentally unfit to serve due to lack of motivation, which seems like a reasonable assessment since I would have made an awful soldier. I then volunteered for civilian service and spent a year in the reception/recovery area of a large hospital’s main operating room complex.
2. My father always told me, don’t do to others that which you hate to have done to you. (Heb. מה ששנוא עליך, אל תעשה לחבריך)
3. I am aware that some people claim that the Bedouins and even the Palestinians somehow snuck in after the War of Independence (=the nakba). This is a convenient claim, tied with the Zionist fiction of “a land without a people for a people without a land”. Of course, the Mandate of Palestine was hardly an empty land before ’47, nor was it empty of non-Jews after ’48. If you seriously believe that it was, please refer me to some serious source of evidence. For now, I’ll continue to assume the simple truth that our people, under the auspices of the UN, came to a land that was home to other people at the time, and tried to claim it for its own. (I know the Zionists at the time were fine with the UN partition plan, but apparently the other people living there were not, and I don’t think this should have surprised anyone. Besides, it was a plan, not a mutual agreement, and it does nothing to justify the action that Palestinians to this day consider to be their great national catastrophe.)