semitism.net

Let’s face the questions in as plain a way as we can: How many Palestinian lives balance the loss of an Israeli life? How many destroyed synagogues balance the destroyed lives of those fanning the flames? How many demolished homes, how many hours at a checkpoint, how many years spent stateless balance the loss of Israelis ruthlessly killed by terrorists, or the years Israelis have lived in fear for their individual and national existence? How many more years of occupation, of control of another people, of having and using all means necessary to defend Israel will balance centuries of anti-Semitism, of millions of Jews killed just for being Jews, of leaving the fate of the Jewish people to the rest of the world, only to watch most of the world turn away? The bottom line questions — how much does a tear weigh?  And are all tears created equal?  Maybe when we know those answers, we will have some idea of how many tears on one side will balance the tears of the other.

All of these questions address the mythical notion of Balance that dogs advocates of any aspect of any issue within the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Take a stand, present a set of facts, advocate for a specific policy and you can be sure, much like the Miracle of the Circle, that the Demand for Balance will soon follow. For, if your stand, your facts, your policy position do not align with those of someone in the audience, then it is very likely the disagreement will be couched, not on the possibility that you are wrong, or need to develop a new policy stand, but rather in the notion that you lack a sense of Balance.

But what does Balance mean, when what is being balanced is not weights or scientific conclusions, but lives, tragedies, tears? When the questions are so weighty, so difficult, so individually insoluble, is Balance even worth seeking, or possible to find?

Alan Dershowitz believes it does. Last week, in the Times Online, Dershowitz responded to the recent call by leaders of the British Muslim community to change Holocaust Memorial Day, commemorated since 2001, to a more general Genocide Day, by pointing out the absence of Balance between the Holocaust and the various tragedies suffered by Muslim communities throughout the world, including Palestine.

Of course, the Muslim leaders who advocated for the change began the Clash of Balances. According to one unnamed leader, having solely a Holocaust Memorial Day "sends out the wrong signals: that the lives of one people are to be remembered more than others. It’s a grievance that extremists are able to exploit." So rather than advocate for another day for commemoration of the tragedies suffered by Muslims, the proposed solution was to do away with Holocaust Memorial Day and create a Genocide Day that would remember all of the victims of genocide (but especially the Muslim victims). But in so doing, they would implicitly seek to Balance the victims of the Holocaust against the Muslims killed in Bosnia, in Chechnya, in Palestine.

But in responding to this, Dershowitz did not challenge the premise straight on, did not explain that Balance is not always possible, that not every taking of a life can, or should, be balanced against another. That there may be a way to commemorate both the Holocaust and Muslim victims of genocide and other tragedies on different days, or in different formats, but without necessarily undermining or limiting the meaning of any of them. Instead, Dershowitz simply reverted to his own Demand for Balance. And in his doing so, we see the two main fallacies of the Demand for Balance.

The first is ascribing evil intent to the assertion, or at least to the identity of the person making the assertion, that you believe is unbalanced. For Dershowitz, it looks like this:

First, I can understand why commemoration of the Holocaust should be offensive to those Muslims and others who supported Nazi victory over Britain and Nazi genocide against the Jews and others.

And there were many such Muslims, led by the leader then of the Palestinian people Haj Amin al-Husseini, who urged Hitler to extend the final solution beyond Europe’s borders to Jewish refugees who had reached Palestine.

Now, I admit that I have not read everything there is to read about this situation, but I have seen nothing indicating that the specific Muslim leaders in the U.K. who advocated for the change from Holocaust Memorial Day to Genocide Day were doing so because they "supported" the Nazis and the Final Solution. If anything, their argument is the opposite: that the killing of Muslims should not be ignored, like the killing of Jews was during the Holocaust, and for years after. Yet, because some Muslims supported Hitler, now every Muslim may potentially be stained by this evil if they dare tread near the issue of the Holocaust.

Once you have undermined the assertion, the second aspect of the Demand for Balance is the justification of the unjustifiable because, though perhaps sad, those tragedies just do not "measure" up. Or worse, that the people who are claming to suffer have actually had it pretty good. Dershowitz again:

Secondly, there has been no genocide against the Palestinian people. When Palestinian bombers target Israeli civilians, Israel refrains from targeting Palestinian civilians in turn. Many Palestinian civilians have died during the many Arab-Israeli wars and intifadas of the past several decades. But that number is dwarfed by the number of Palestinians and Arabs killed by Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Iran during the same period.

During its occupation Israel provided social security, built and supported schools, and maintained vehicle, water and electrical infrastructures for residents of the West Bank and Gaza. The Egyptian and Jordanian occupations that preceded Israel were far less benign, but of course no one accused those Arab countries of genocide.

This is not to justify Israel’s occupation. Even though it was the Arab offensive in 1967 that created the Israeli occupation, when the Six-day War ended I argued in favour of Muslim self-determination and partition of Israel and Palestine. Opposition, though, should be grounded in facts and tempered by fair-mindedness.

It would take several more pages to respond to each of Dershowitz’s sentences and individual claims: to his distinction between the "targeting" and "killing" of civilians, to his implication that Israeli killing of Palestinians is somehow excusable because the governments of Syria, Iraq and Iran have killed other Arabs, to his claim that occupation isn’t that bad because of how many wonderful things Israel actually did for the Palestinians. His throw-away line of "not justifying" the occupation does precisely that — justify occupation — when viewed against the rest of his argument.

The bottom line is that the reasonable basis Dershowitz has in criticizing and/or opposing the elimination of Holocaust Memorial Day is undermined by his resort to the Demand for Balance, and the callousness the Demand requires in dismissing the tragedies suffered by the Palestinians, by Muslims. In order to justify the need for Holocaust Memorial Day, is it necessary to take away or demean all other tragedies? Doesn’t Dershowitz’s use of the Demand for Balance show that, in some ways, he himself has lost at least part of the message of Holocaust Memorial Day?

I purposely chose an example of the Demand for Balance that was tangential to, but not directly from within, the conflict, as a means of stepping away for a moment, to see how we all resort to the Demand for Balance at times. How we may whitewash the killing of innocent Palestinians and of innocent Israelis, how we may justify the unjustifiable conditions in which Palestinians and Israelis live – conditions that are not equal or equally Balanced, but are equally unjustifiable. How we have forsaken the victims of tragedies by trying to weigh and Balance their tears.

It is time for all of us to put aside our own fears, our own failures, our own biases and listen to and face the harsh questions and facts that this conflict present us and respond not with justifications, not with rationales, not with ways we can try to Balance one unbalance-able tragedy against another, but with emotional and intellectual honesty, and with ideas and solutions. As we approach the High Holidays, when we remember and recall so many of the tragedies we have faced as a people, now is perhaps the best time of all.