LUDIC LOG

The daily festival of blood goes on in Israel, as regular as the Main Street Electrical Parade at Disneyland and, increasingly, about as meaningful. Predictable as clockwork runs the script: bombing, reprisal, revenge for the reprisal in the form of bombing, a brief calm, tentative diplomacy shattered by another bombing, another reprisal, charges of intransigence on both sides. Meanwhile, the corpses keep piling up and neither actor is any closer to a resolution than when the whole drama started. As I write this, a new wave of what are now termed by the guardians of moral rectitude "homicide bombings" and "terror attacks" has broken on the shores of the Dead Sea; my local tabloid (which buried the story of seven Palestinians murdered by Israeli tanks) trotted out megapoint banner headline type reading "SLAUGHTER" to describe the death of three of God's chosen at the hands of three of Allah's chosen. And the dance goes on and on, and everyone pretends to care.

It would be presumptous -- well, let's come right out and say it: it would be arrogant, bordering on egomaniacal, of me to claim that I have anything like a solution. Additionally, I am blatantly pro-Palestinian, insofar as this enervating bloody mess is concerned; I am unreservedly an anarchist, and would no more support the government in this sort of situation than I would a slave owner over his chattel; and to top it all off, I am no friend of Israel. So, take this for what it's worth (that is to say, absolutely nothing), but I've been thinking a lot about it, and I know what Israel has to do to win this "war", as pundits who can't grasp that the notion of war is rather outdated insist on calling it.

Unfortunately, my idea (I won't call it a solution; merely the by no means permanent conclusion to a lengthy process of thought) involved Israel giving more than it gets. And men of power tend to think of giving more than they get as a weak, feminine, cowardly thing, the purview of weaklings and prostitutes. But I've been thinking about history a lot lately -- not my history, nor again the history I would prefer to hear, but the history that receives official sanction, and I've come to only one conclusion: Israel must raise the Palestinians to their level, they must give them everything they have and possibly even more, in order to win. Because I'm not advocating surrender here: I'm advocating victory, albeit a victory of normatization rather than a victory of arms.

Consider, briefly, the life of the average Palestinian. His very name is something of a mockery, for there is no such thing as Palestine; he is a man without a country in a quite literal sense. He has no homeland of his own, and he is not a citizen of the place where he lives. Even if he is fortunate enough to have his own house, his relatives may live in refugee camps; or they may live in other countries entirely, and they have no legal right to come home to the place where they were born. What's more, his house can be knocked over or destroyed at any moment, and there is no recourse under law if this takes place. He cannot educate his children. He cannot travel freely. He is subject to incredibly restrictive policies regarding his movement. He has likely lost his job more than once, since the only work is in Israeli areas, and he has probably been fired when travel restrictions or curfews made him late for work. He certainly has friends or relatives in jail; he more than likely has had friends or relatives killed by the Israeli army. He cannot live under his own people's law, or even the civil law of Israel; if he commits a crime, he will be tried by the Israeli military. He cannot vote in Israeli elections -- that is, he has no say in the selection of the people who will control every aspect of his life -- and while he is allowed, to a certain extent, to elect people within his community, they have no real power or influence, and what's more, the government has made it perfectly clear that they will only allow certain people to be elected.

Now, say what you will about this theoretical, but by no means imaginary, man. Say he is an anti-Semite; say he is a fanatic; say he is a murderer. All of these things are true about at least some of the distant, faceless specifics who make up the abstract. But one thing you absolutely cannot say about him is that he has no real, comprehensible greivance. He is living under a system of oppression no less intolerable and severe than that of blacks under apartheid. And as long as these conditions continue -- as long as Israel remains steadfast in its commitment to keeping Palestinians stateless, lawless, homeless, hopeless, occupied and without recourse -- there will be a substantial number of people, of which I count myself one, who will be less than condemnatory, and perhaps even supportive, when one of the oppressed straps dynamite to his body and detonates himself in the middle of a crowd.

Now, what if Israel "gives in"? What if they do everything they can do, just short of Palestinian statehood, for their enemies? What if, over the next few months, steps are taken to guarantee the right of return to exiles; to disband the refugee camps; to free political prisoners; to lift restrictions on travel, movement and education; to extend the franchise and the protection of civil law to the Palestinians? What if, in short, the people of Palestine are made equal to Jews in the Jewish homeland? Will the bombings and violence cease? No. They will continue. They will continue even if Palestine is granted statehood, conditional or otherwise, because for the time being, terrorism is now part of the culture of the region. But -- and this is where all the difference lies -- the bombings take on a different semiological meaning. They will lose their cultural relevance. The planks of philosophy that support them will fall away. They will, in short, become incomprehensible.

In many other Westernized "democracies" (which we are assured Israel is), there have been terror bombings and attacks: by Quebec separatists in Canada, by Basque militants in Spain, by leftists in Italy and Greece, by anarchists in Germany, and here in America by everyone from the leftist Weathermen to the rightist militias. But they never became the norm, as they did in Israel and its only legitimate analogue, Ireland, for one reason: they were considered incomprehensible. The greivances of the bombers were considered frivolous, deranged or simply unfathomable. In all these circumstances, the stated motivations and goals of the bombers seemed to most people absurd, ridiculous, untenable. Italy and Germany and the U.S. did not oppress their minorities in any immediately obvious way, they had no restrictions on travel or education, they did not build refugee camps or segregate their populations, everyone could vote and everyone was subject to the law, and most importantly, there was no military occupation. Therefore, the actions of the Baader-Meinhofs, the Red Brigades, and the Order seemed baffling and utterly abnormal to the public -- acts of savage violence predicated on nothing more than a philosophical abstraction.

Of course, this doesn't mean they were wrong. There are still people, myself included, who think that a philosophical abstraction is worth killing people over. (Shout out to my FBI case handlers! What up, Mitch and Vince? I'm only joking, guys.) However, in the main, the public has never supported, condoned, or tolerated terrorism that is not, on some level, comprehensible to them. They will allow an IRA or a PLO to survive, even thrive, because their struggle is all too obviously motivated and real. They will not allow a September 17 Movement to survive, because what spurs them is too murky, too unreal, too based in the realms of thought instead of the vital tedium of everyday life. The question "what are these people killing for?", rightly or wrongly, is seen as quite relevant to a terror act in Switzerland; it is not even asked about a terror act in Israel.

If Israel is to win, it must win by turning the Palestinians into a people with something to lose. It must transform them from impoverished, desperate people with nothing to live for and everything to gain into people with places to live, money to spend, comforts to enjoy and a stake in law and society that will make them hesistant to flaunt that law or destroy that society. If this happens, the killing will still continue -- for a while. But it will start to be seen -- by the Palestinian people and those who support them, as well as by others -- as increasingly foolish, pointless, arbitrary and, most of all, incomprehensible. And support for it will begin to dwindle way, as everyone begins to think of coexistence as normative and terrorism as disruptive. That is how the Israelis can win. Unfortunately, my fear is that they will consider this a coward's victory, the triumph of the lamb. And so the festival of blood will go on and on.