the editor-in-chief at The New Republic
spews more hateful racism, ignorance and misinformation...http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030929&s=diarist092903I didn't travel all the way around the world to deride Thomas Friedman. I can do that at home. But it was here that I read a column datelined Tel Aviv, published in The New York Times on September 11, in which he observed, "Suicide bombing is becoming so routine here that it risks becoming embedded in contemporary culture." It is important to understand why such a sentence is so silly. Yes, the Israelis have been living with their own Al Qaeda-like enormities once or twice a week now for more than two years--and only a little more sporadically before that, which is really ever since Yasir Arafat and his henchmen took over the Palestinian movement nearly 40 years ago. And, yes, Israelis are remarkably resilient. Ultra-Orthodox volunteers, acting in accordance with Jewish law, painstakingly pick up the severed limbs and shreds of skin scattered on the sidewalks. The survivors pick up their lives and move on.
But all this does not mean that the massacres are becoming routine for Israelis. They may be commonplace for the monstrous organizations that plan and perpetrate them, but for Israelis every bomb feels almost like the first bomb. Israelis are being murdered, but they are not being deadened. And, if suicide-bombing risks becoming embedded in contemporary culture, it is the culture of one people, not two. What is routine among the Arabs of Palestine is the joy that more Jewish blood has been shed, that their revenge has once again been visited on a liberal society that is not entirely indifferent to moral thinking about its deadly enemies. (Even the reviled settler movement doesn't go around killing Arabs.) You can see it in photographs on the telltale faces of Palestinian children, ecstatic over the deaths visited by Hamas twice in one day. There is no cultural prestige to killing Palestinians among the Israelis. But the cultural prestige of killing Jews suffuses the culture of the Palestinians. Recall for a moment the lynching of two Israeli soldiers gone astray into Ramallah early in the intifada. They were taken to the police station, and there they were lynched by policemen--one of whom placed his bloodied palms on the windows--and the mob below cheered. It is through such mobs that Palestinian political culture now speaks, and routinely.
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