Settlers Bear Brunt of Violence, Anti-Semitism

With the exception of the coldest, most sadistic psychopaths, most people find extreme violence emotionally wrenching and cognitively dissonant. Those charged with administering violence on a massive scale--military leaders--recognize this, and war strategy has always included dehumanization of the enemy with pejorative labeling.

Labeling also is a staple of the racist’s arsenal. Stringing up someone we call by a dehumanizing epithet is a lot more palatable to the lynch mob participant, who considers himself basically a decent fellow, than is the notion of murdering Joe Smith.

In the Middle East, where language is parsed to sub-atomic levels and connotation often dictates policy, strategic labeling has long been employed. Now, it is being leveled against several thousand Israeli Jews who have chosen to live on land captured during the Six-Day War of 1967: so-called settlers, the scapegoats du jour for the tragically escalating violence in the region.

Peace will come only, the argument goes, if “settlements” are disbanded and “settlers” banished.

Once upon a time, the word settler was used to describe an intrepid homesteader who embodied the pioneer spirit. In the post-colonial era, settlers were recast as light-skinned European invaders who robbed indigenous people of their land and culture. The problem with applying this concept to the Middle East is that it just ain’t so.

Israelis, far from being Anglo invaders, are a rare example of an indigenous people returning to its land. The areas where settlements have been established possess profound emotional valence for Jews. Hebron, where a long-standing Jewish populace was exterminated by Arab rioters in 1929; Nablus; Gaza; and Bethlehem (Hebrew for “House of Bread”) all are sites of ancient Jewish communities. Recently, Palestinian rioters destroyed one of the world’s oldest synagogues, a 1,200-year-old architectural beauty in Jericho where original Hebrew lettering was still legible on the mosaic tile floor. Palestinian strategy includes the denial of Jewish roots in the Holy Land as well as obliteration of the evidence.

Strip away the label “settlers” and substitute “Jews” and the pronouncements of ostensibly right-thinking people degrade to: Peace will come to the region only if Jews are expelled from areas where their presence inflames Palestinians. In other words, ethnic cleansing.

One of Hitler’s first acts as fuehrer was to set into the law the concept of Judenrein --Jew-free areas that paved the way for ghettos and extermination. The call to dismantle settlements amounts to rehabilitation of that odious policy.

If the presence of Jews near Ramallah and Gaza and Hebron enrages many Palestinians, shouldn’t that be considered the Palestinians’ problem? The first black face in a white suburb didn’t elicit smiles and the welcome wagon, but the moral solution wasn’t exclusion or segregation.

Ironically, the call for a new Judenrein poses grave danger for its Palestinian advocates, for if Jews are banned from majority-Arab areas, why not dictate the same for Arabs in predominantly Jewish areas? This would translate to the expulsion of about 1 million Arabs living within Israel’s pre-1967 borders and the creation of an Arab-free zone in Jerusalem, a city with a historic Jewish majority.

In addition to its essential racism, the demonization of Jewish tenancy obstructs peace. Every single Israeli settlement could disappear overnight and the Middle East would be no closer to harmony, because the crux of the problem isn’t a suburb here or there, but the rivalry of two peoples--cousins, as it were--for the same geographic pie.

It is interesting to note that Israelis have never come up with a denigrating label for their Arab disputants. Israelis have, in fact, acceded to Arab appropriation of “Palestinian,” a designation that once applied to both Arabs and Jews living in the region.

The Palestinians, in contrast, continue to harp on “settlements” and to embrace, increasingly, the lexicon of anti-Semitism. Peace will never come until they and their supporters accept the rejuvenation of an ancient Jewish birthright on ancestral homeland.