I have this problem. I'm a nice guy. It's cost me money. It's cost me friends. It's sure-as-hell cost me some self-respect. And no, you smarmy little muck-rakers, I'm not going to give you all the messy details. You've lived long enough to know them all anyway. I'm the nice kind of guy who sympathizes with the misfortunes of other nice people .
Some were like the nice couple who said they were stranded in Victoria and just needed $20 to get their car out of the impound lot so they could get home to feed their pets. Others are like the innocent children being starved to death or blown apart in the hellhole of Gaza.
Did you know that you can get 10 years in an Israeli prison for throwing rocks at a tank? You can get longer, if you even live to have your case come up in a law court, for shooting Israeli teenagers at a concert or firing rockets into residential areas of Israeli cities. Now it's a little harder to think of the shooters and rocket launchers as nice guys isn't it. Kids get understanding; Hamas (or any other) killers, no.
That is a problem for so many of us "nice guys" (and you all are). We want to give our sympathy, our letters of support, our signatures on petitions, our money to real victims and the causes that support them. How can I protest a Canadian firm shipping components for bomb sights through the Quebec branch of its US corporation and not also protest the female sexual mutilation and forced domestic slavery of so many women (girls really) in what are predominantly Muslim countries?
There are so many "nice people' who have different ways of being from me. Wael was a wonderful guide on our trip in Egypt, and I got into a conversation about the number of women I saw with such different clothing styles. On the streets there were women in everything from western skirts and niquabs to full eyeslit-only burkhas. He spoke about the liberal attitudes prevalent in Egyptian society, but when I pressed a bit about the escorts for the burkha-clad, he replied that women were cherished and protected. He went further to say that sex before or outside of marriage was illegal - not just frowned-upon, but illegal - and carried legal consequences. In some countries those legal consequences even today are death.
Now, how do I pull apart the threads of compassion and rage in this quilt of human suffering? One by one. It's the only way I've ever been able to do it. This long-haired guy long ago gave this big important speech on a hill in Palestine and finished by saying, "Listen up, you turkeys; I don't wanna have to repeat myself. Here's the whole balla wax from the prophets on down to the Dead Sea scrolls: Love your neighbour like they're you and don't do any bad shit to them you wouldn't want comin' back atcha." His listeners responded with "Jesus Christ, you're askin' a lot of us there, Bubba. Those Romans are real badasses."
So, easier said than done, I know. Here's one person who worked on the same problem; namely how can you sympathize only with the obvious victims when they are part of a larger enterprise that may have some elements you don't like or understand? Mohammed El-Kurd wrote Perfect Victims and I'm reading the kindle version now. I started by reading Jackie Wang's book review "The Sympathy Trap" of Mohammed's text.
As an aside here, some book reviews are as good as reading the target book, at least that's what I tell myself when I'm too intellectually lazy preoccupied or cheap skinflint thrifty to buy the original. Chris in Ottawa introduced me to the London Review of Books and that has given me many morning hours of informative summaries of great writers. Ms Wang wrote her review for this year's Jewish Currents edition of June 17. I was hooked by this part:
By emphasizing victimhood as the condition for sympathy, he argues, this strategy grants the moral authority of those in power—those who preside over the world structured by colonial brutality—and requires Palestinians to maintain a posture of pitiable powerlessness. Indeed, the perfect Palestinian victim cannot express rage—not toward their Israeli occupiers, nor the soldiers killing their people en masse, nor the Western powers that send funds and arms to their murderers. Even in the context of occupation and genocide, they must exhibit only passive suffering and a desire for reconciliation; any other affect or expression threatens to eject them from the narrow role of sympathetic object.
… El-Kurd invokes the parallels between Palestinians living under Israeli occupation and Black Americans murdered by police. “We hamper them with innocence,” .… “‘They were artists’ or ‘They were mentally ill’ or ‘They were unarmed.’ (It is as if condemning the state for sanctioning the death of a Black person is permissible only if the slain person is a sterile model of American citizenry.)” A similar logic, he notes, operates for victims of sexual assault.
Regarding that last sentence, I read of an old lawyer consoling a junior upon the young man's losing a conviction,"Ya wanna pursue a rape case against these guys? Ya better be sure your client's a nun - with knife wounds." He thought it was funny. Ask a rape victim. Better still, ask a sex trade worker who has been raped and notice the flavour of your sympathy.
In 2020, a black American, George Floyd was murdered by a white police officer. Protests exploded around the globe, along with some social media postings claiming that Mr Floyd was a criminal who "was high on meth" and had appeared on Judge Judy's show. Snopes fact-checked the allegations and found:
While a George Floyd did appear on the Judge Judy show in an episode confirmed to have aired in 2010 by CBS, the 17-year-old who appears in the video would be 27 years old today; George Floyd was 46 when he died on May 25.
Imagine, two people having the same name. Try Googling your own name some time. I found out I'm alternately a rock 'n roller and a biologist. But I died a few years ago. Here's another Snopes posting by Kevin O Cokley, a psychology professor at the University of Texas on the practice of discrediting victims to justify their deaths:
It fits into what psychologists have called the just-world hypothesis, which is a cognitive bias where people believe that the world is just and orderly, and people get what they deserve. It is difficult for people to believe that bad things can happen to good people or to people who don't deserve it. This is because if people know that these things do happen, they have to decide whether they want to do something about it or sit by silently knowing that there is injustice happening around them.
Back to Palestine today and our throwness to "sit by silently knowing that there is injustice happening". Or we could go back to 1929 as I did upon the advice of a friend of a friend, a Canadian Jew sympathetic to the Israeli case for its war in Gaza. I read his suggested Ghosts of a Holy War: the 1929 Massacre in Palestine that Ignited the Arab-Israeli Conflict written by Yardena Schwartz. It makes for unpleasant reading concerned as it is with the bloody bit of business its subtitle references when Palestinians in Jerusalem killed a number of their Jewish neighbours.
The book was one of many suggested titles on sites relevant to Zionist Israeli expansionist ideology. That was a mouthful even for me but all the terms were necessary. Many Jews are against the Zionist ideas of founder Theodor Herzl and have a profound distaste for the murderous incursions of settlers in West Bank Palestinian communities. But, I come back repeatedly to the caution of a Jewish visiting professor from Israel that "I can and do criticize the injustices that my government enacts on Palestinian people. If you do it, you'll be labelled an antisemitic holocaust denier."
She knew there is a definition of antisemitism adopted by many jurisdictions now which conflates criticism of Zionism with antisemitic behaviour and it can cost you your job if you run afoul of it, and if some organizations like the B'nai Brith or Simon Weisenthal Cntr. find out. I'm sliding off-course a bit here, so let's get back to our sympathies for victims.
The most famous and articulate writer I have found on Middle Eastern issues has been Edward Said. He coined an expression to describe his Zionist neighbours' behaviour in their new nation of Israel. He said, "The victims have become the victimizers". Sounds about right to me. The grandchildren of Holocaust survivors or victims now have no problem dropping bombs from drones over hospitals in Gaza and shooting children.
Surgeons for Doctors Without Borders say "No toddler gets shot twice by mistake by the world's best snipers". United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres questions the legitimacy of the newly-formed (some might say "opportunistically newly-formed") US Gaza Humanitarian Relief Foundation that requires supplicants to line up between barbed wire channels to receive food parcels and into which Israeli soldiers have said they were ordered to shoot. I want to be sympathetic, but towards whom - the kids shot in the food line or the soldiers testifying (anonymously) about their orders?
One by one. One by one. Some acts are obviously cruel and deserve our censure; others can be tricky and it's not easy to do all the checking. Here's the final word for today before I go back to my new book. It's by Nicky Barber and I took it from a FB post (even though I promised myself to stay away from that site first thing in the morning). But this is one to stick on your fridge or wherever you'll see it frequently. And then go join a protest.
YOU CAN SUPPORT GAZA WITHOUT SUPPORTING HAMAS; CRITICISE ISRAEL WITHOUT BEING ANTISEMITIC. GRIEVE FOR IRAN WITHOUT ENDORSING EXTREMISM. FEEL FOR INNOCENT ISRAELIS WITHOUT BACKING THE ISRAELI STATE.
EMPATHY ISN'T ALLEGIANCE, IT'S HUMANITY. THESE POSITIONS AREN'T BINARY OR MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE, YOU CAN HOLD COMPLEXITY. CONSCIENCE AND COMPASSION ALL AT ONCE.
- NICKY BARBER