An Alternate Witness

While I know that Rashid Khalidi is a controversial figure in the West, and his friendship with Barack Obama was portrayed by many of Israel's supporters as highly undesirable, I think he makes some very valid points in this New York Times Op Ed, and I can't help but find his conclusion compelling:

This war on the people of Gaza isn’t really about rockets. Nor is it about “restoring Israel’s deterrence,” as the Israeli press might have you believe. Far more revealing are the words of Moshe Yaalon, then the Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff, in 2002: “The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.”

Rashid Khalidi, a professor of Arab studies at Columbia, is the author of the forthcoming “Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East."

However, I find his title, "What You Don't Know About Gaza," to be presumptive. It's a common thread for academics and those of us expats who are living in the Middle East to assume that Americans are largely ignorant of the truth of things here. Perhaps the most famous example is the Website If Americans Knew. Certainly the conversation we had over Skype the other night with my roommate's friends back in Michigan suggests that Americans are largely ignorant of the reality on the ground here.

On the other hand, the very incidence of that conversation indicated that Americans are searching for answers. This was what impressed me most about Americans when I returned from Jordan the first time in 2005. In the case of my roommate's friends, perhaps these questions were not surprising, coming from students of political science asking about governance and peacemaking issues in the Palestinian Territories. In 2005, I expected my father and my college friends to ask me hard questions about the Arab World, and they have never disappointed that expectation. What shocked me was that everyone had questions about the Arab World, Islam, and the Middle East. I was fielding questions from gas station clerks, from housewives, from friends and family friends who had hardly ever been more than 100 miles from home and had definitely never left the US of A. Not only did they have hundreds of questions, but they really listened to my answers, and didn't assume that they knew what was really going on in the Middle East.

There was then and, I believe, continues to now be a strong sense in the United States that we need to learn more about the Middle East and Islam, that it is an increasingly important influence on our lives. Yes, progress is slow, and yes, the current economic woes in the US will probably slow it further. There are many issues in the world, both domestic and international, and while the Middle East is high on my agenda, I recognize that for many people, there are other priorities. But I think it may be disingenuous to suggest that Americans are ignorant of what Gaza is really like.

Then again, I have my own set of blinders. I'm reminded of the night in November 2000 when my family sat around the dinner table in bewilderment. "I don't know anyone who voted for Bush. Do you known anyone who voted for Bush?"
"No. I don't know anyone who voted for Bush. Do you know anyone who supported Bush?"
And so it went, around the dinner table. We didn't know anyone who wanted a Bush regime. Until finally someone said, "Maybe we just don't know the right people!"