semitism.net

Today, this old cartoon hit my Inbox. The caption on the left reads “Soldier of Palestine” (a curious term in and of itself, almost certainly not the appropriate one, but since it’s what they use, I will stick with it) and shows the soldier pointing his gun while kneeling behind a baby carriage. The caption on the right reads “Soldier of Israel” and shows the soldier pointing his gun while kneeling in front of a baby carriage. The difference today was that the cartoon came along with a message that said “If you are unable to distinguish a moral difference between the two images below, then you have something obscuring your vision. Ideology perhaps?”

As I said in my reply to the email I got, I think this is a disturbing, but very fascinating, even very important cartoon, made even moreso by the new quote. And it is even more interesting that it should resurface now, as many in the pro-war camp seem eager to conflate Lebanon and Palestine, at least vis-a-vis Hamas and Hizballah.

The first, most obvious, most important point to me is that the only thing in our vision in this cartoon should be that babies are growing up in a warzone, and our only moral response, our only ideology, should be to do what we must to make that stop.

But moving beyond that, my real question about this cartoon is another side of the “morality” question, and it’s the one that I have been troubled by since I first saw this, as I don’t think it meets the “ideology” of the artist. And that is, if you look at the images together rather than separately, then what you see is that the Israeli soldier is pointing his gun, most immediately, at the Palestinian baby carriage. And how we deal with that is a question we cannot leave unanswered.

This is obviously a symbolic attempt to show how the artist believes the 2 sides fight, but the literal image shows me that an Israeli soldier will be firing most directly at a Palestinian baby carriage. Of course, the soldier will really be firing at the Palestinian soldier but, in so doing, will be firing first at a baby carriage that is in his line of fire. (Let’s put aside, at least for purposes of this post, the factual issues underlying the claims that Palestinians fight in this manner, or the perniciousness of trying to use the current claims about Hizballah’s actions to go back and apply it to the Palestinians.)

That image, the Israeli firing at the carriage, plain and simple, provides the framework for so many of the moral questions I have, that so many of us have, about the situation, and they are precisely the moral questions that have been troubling me now for the 9 years since I spent 2 summers in the West Bank, when, as I have written about before on this site, I once found myself in the position of the baby carriage, an innocent civilian, among other American and Palestinian innocent civilians, facing Israeli rubber bullets.

For the artist, of course, there may be a number of extra-cartoon explanations of what the Israeli soldier will do about the carriage in his way, like all of the talk we hear about how “Israeli soldiers care more about Lebanese civilians than anyone else” (which you hear if you listen to this NPR story from last Sunday) but the problem I have always had is that the artist and the mainstream Jewish community that traffics in these beliefs do not see the Palestinian baby carriage at all. Or, if they see it, they don’t think about it, about the Palestinian baby inside, and they don’t see that as a moral question they have to face.

All they see is the Israeli soldier defending the baby carriage behind him. And for them, the moral question ends there, and the answer to it is easy. There is no choice. Ever.

But as I see it, in order to get to the easy answer, then I still have to make some assumptions. And once you start asking me to make assumptions, to take some facts or ideas into consideration from outside the cartoon about what you think the Israeli soldier will do about that carriage, well then, all of our ideologies, all of our sources of information come into play. And we have to ask more questions.

And so, for example, what about when there are 5 baby carriages, maybe a whole town, and 1 Palestinian soldier, even a terrorist or a cell of them? Or when it turns out it the baby carriage is not in front of the terrorist, but just nearby? Or that the Palestinian is being mistaken for a terrorist? Or what if we read the cartoon as if in Hebrew or Arabic — that is, with the Israeli firing first? Or what the Israeli soldier is standing in front of is a settlement, not a baby carriage? And in order to think about the reality underlying these questions, I would think we would need to take a look at least at this B’tselem report, and some of their others.

In the end, the morality of the Palestinian firing with the carriage in front of him may well be far more troubling than any of what I posed above. And the issue of the extent Israel may, or needs to, go to for its own self-defense, and in defending the Jewish people, is not simple, and different Jewish texts can take us in different direction. But these are not just issues we need to press the mainstream on, these are not points we can simlpy get away with saying “No, that is not right” — they are also issues that we on the left, at least the American Jewish left, we who oppose what the Israeli soldier is doing, have to deal with. As I said in my last post, we have to face those difficult questions, in both Palestine and Lebanon, and must respond to the innocent Israeli babies killed by the other sides just as we do to the innocent babies killed by the Israelis.

And as time goes on, dealing with those questions may bring us to new answers to the question of “what Israel must do” on the ground in either place, may make us face the task of answering our views on “self-defense,” on when that innocent baby carriage may need to be fired upon.

No matter how hard we might try — and I know I often do the same kind of over-simplifying — the conflict with the Palestinians, and now as the conflict has gone on in Lebanon, is not so easy, not so morally clear, for either side. And the longer we spend trying to make it so, then the longer it will continue, because we will have no idea how to make the difficult and real decisions involving the real people on both sides that need to be made in order to solve it for the long term.

As I said above, the only thing in our vision in this cartoon should be that babies are growing up in a warzone, and our only moral response, our only ideology, should be to make it stop.

The more time we focus on the current soldiers and the terrorists, on why they exist, on defending or decrying them, on analyzing every move they do, and not on the babies in those carriages — in both of the carriages — and on building them a real future, then the surer we can be that the babies in those carriages will just grow up to take the places of the soldier and the terrorist.

Brad Brooks-Rubin