The Root Causes of Tragedy: The Ethical and Legal Challenges Facing Palestine

Today we hear a lot about legal challenges mounted against the wall in the West Bank. I would like to reflect upon a different wall, a metaphorical wall, the wall which remains ethically and legally unchallenged and whose foundations are actually, albeit unwittingly, being fortified by many of the very people who legally challenge the real, physical wall. The heart of the matter is what we might call the "wall within", the psychic wall of unquestioned identification and uncritically accepted conventions about historiography which confines Israeli Jews, a wall that does not allow them to see the suffering and humiliation inflicted on others. (I refer to Israeli Jews, rather than Israelis, because it is necessary, in this context, to distinguish between the mind-set of the Jewish citizens of the state and that of its non-Jewish minority.) I would like to call for ethical and legal challenges which, even if not successful immediately, would have the effect of destabilizing this metaphorical wall. I must add at the outset, however, that any external challenges to the metaphorical wall will not, by themselves, be enough; their success must be measured by the extent to which they awaken the primordial challenge to this wall which comes from within Israeli Jewish society.

How deep does the legal challenge that faces Palestine go? I do not say the legal challenge that Israel faces but rather the legal challenge facing Palestine, because such a challenge embraces both oppressors and oppressed, both righteous and dispossessed, who, I presume would, at heart, like to find some form of hate-free togetherness in this land. Both will have to break the cycle of victimhood and hatred through the process of self re-interpretation and re-evaluation. What is the legal challenge that Palestine faces today given the fact that it is an important place for so many people of so many ethnic and religious orientations? What is the legal challenge that faces Palestine given that such a globally precious and beautiful land is governed by a state whose very self-definition prioritizes one ethnic group and religion? How is it, and is it legally significant, that such multiple longing and belonging, which could, and should, have been the place of mutual existence of so many groups ends up as a Jewish state and as a Jewish state which came to be, and is maintained only by inflicting harm of others by not treating them as equals?

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