Shielded From Reality

Recently a group of Bay Area “human shields” flew to Israel with the intention of standing between the Israeli and Palestinian forces in order to stop the fighting. One of them is a friend of mine, a longtime pacifist, now outraged that the Israeli authorities shipped the human shields back to San Francisco before they could carry out their mission.

They had planned to go to Ramallah and Jenin, wherever the Israeli army was battling Palestinians. My friend believed the Israelis would not have shot them because, as she put it, “It would be bad publicity.”

How many of you human shields, I asked, were heading for Jaffa Road in Jerusalem, where there have been four suicide bomb attacks? Or to the nearly deserted cafes, restaurants, pizzerias and shopping malls of Haifa, Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities to protect Israeli children and other civilians against gunmen and suicide bombers? She looked surprised. “None,” she said.

I asked if this was because the suicide bombers would not be deterred by the sight of Americans and the prospect of bad publicity. Irked, she offered the first answer that occurred to her: “So I suppose you think it was perfectly OK to bomb Afghanistan and Iraq? I happen to have been told on good authority there are still American soldiers fighting in Iraq.”

In the clashing of gears between us, she seemed to notice that several items here had not meshed.

She must have heard what I said after all. She remarked that she wished she had thought of raising the issue of the protection of Israeli civilians, although she doubted the human shield tour group would have supported such an idea. The trip was sponsored by the Iman Network, a pro-Palestinian group. So the idealistic American human shields were acting on behalf of the intifada.

A few months ago, in a hotel bar in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, I was watching a CNN report on the war in Afghanistan intercut with footage of the World Trade Center collapsing. The man on the bar stool next to mine burst out: “Osama didn’t do it.” (He was evidently on first-name terms.)

I turned to him and asked: “Then who did?”

He explained that he was an independent thinker; he knew who had arranged the flights into the twin towers. “Who?” I asked.

His eyes on mine, narrowed, challenging, full of resentments, telegraphed the rest of our conversation. “A foreign intelligence service.”

“OK,” I said, not really needing much more explanation, “how did Mossad convince 19 Arabs, 15 of them Saudis, to commit suicide?”

The answer was clipped and familiar: “Money,” he said.

I shared this anecdote about paranoia with my pacifist human shield friend and asked her what people should do when attacked by their enemies. “Sit down,” she suggested--although we were already sitting--”and try to figure out why everybody hates us. Why don’t we just sit down and ask ourselves what was in the minds of the people who commandeered those planes?”

I assured her that many before us had already sat down and wondered. Yes, they hate America, they hate Jews, they hate all infidels--Christians, Hindus, even modern-minded followers of Islam with their own objections to murder. So now that we have sat and we have pondered, can we stand up and respond?

Later, when I telephoned my friend to apologize for upsetting her, and to tell her that I saw the hurt in her eyes, and to share with her the hope that people could stop killing each other, she said she appreciated my peacemaking efforts. She added: “I wish I had asked the group why we didn’t offer to be human shields for the Israelis too. I wish I had thought of that.”

Evidently Israel needs to provide for its own defense, without the help of human shields. The herd of independent minds, some of them believing that the American army is still in Iraq, some of them convinced that the wily Israelis know how to pay Arabs to create havoc in America, don’t have a solution to the tragic quarrel among two peoples with justice in both their causes.

In the meantime, human shields who only protect one side provoke only dismay. Although the trip my friend joined was financed by Palestinian activists, the pain in her past and present is nonsectarian.