Thinking over Professor Sari Nusseibeh's ridiculous analogy about the Israeli-built wall that obstructs Palestinian access to Israel (see my previous blog
post ), quoted with approval in David Hare's "Wall: A Monologue,"
published in
The New York Review of Books , I realized that I had one additional comment on Nusseibeh's analysis. As Nusseibeh writes:
[The wall is like] like sticking someone in a cage and then when he
starts screaming, as any normal person would, using his violent temper
as justification for putting him in the cage in the first place. The
wall is the perfect crime because it creates the violence it was
ostensibly built to prevent. (p. 8.) The last sentence contains some deeply sloppy and irresponsible reasoning and argument. The wall doesn't "create" violence. The wall creates unfair, unjust and inhumane conditions to which people respond.
How people respond to unfairness, injustice, and inhumanity is a choice. In their exercise of that choice, people demonstrate their character and, indeed, their humanity.
Even acknowledging the justifiable, probably hard-wired human need for revenge, choosing violence as a response is not inevitable. The "
Red Orchestra " chose non-violent resistance to the Nazis; Indians chose non-violent resistance to British colonialism; Black Americans chose non-violent resistance to racial segregation. Having spent the last five years living in China, India and Africa, I've watched most of the people around me choose non-violent resistance to the myriad and genuine injustices, unfairnesses and inhumane actions to which they've been subjected.
The wall is an instrument of oppression - truly a wailing wall - but it doesn't absolve those Palestinians who chose violence in response of responsibility for their choice. By eliminating Palestinian choice and responsibility in his analogy (the provocation of the wall = the violence of the response), Nusseibeh denies Palestinian humanity as certainly as does some Israeli policy.
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