LONDON'Down the street from our flat, somewhat beleaguered and hemmed in by cement barricades, sits the Israeli Embassy. The job police and officials have done of riot-proofing their surroundings still looks crude and out-of-place on its elegant, embassy-lined street. Unless you happen to pass by on a weekend, though, it remains easy to miss.
Every weekend since my arrival in London last January, the embassy has grown to resemble a besieged bunker just a little bit more. Groups of pro-Palestinian statehood demonstrators'small at first, but now regularly numbering in the hundreds'form weekly across the street. Standing between them and the embassy is a line of police and a constant stream of confused pedestrians and tourists.
I have watched the rhetoric and style of the demonstrators change over the last three months. From hand-held signs, pamphlets outlining the history of conflict and college-aged individuals offering polite explanations to passersby, the weekly ritual has evolved into something much more heated. It is less organized, more spontaneous. Not physically violent, but still noticeably dark-edged. The old references to (and hopes for) peace have been overshadowed by growing indignation. Instead, Nazi symbols are invoked. Swastikas are equated with the Star of David, Sharon's picture juxtaposed beside Hitler's. Coherent explanations have been, to a considerable degree, replaced by mass chanting. The crowds have swelled angrily, hardened by this last month of Israeli aggression.
There is an element in these latest protests of the aggressive irrationality that has come to characterize hard-liners on both sides. Unlike the United States, where the Palestinians' complaint was given surprisingly little serious thought until recently, most of the world has supported Palestinian statehood for years. But the tone and scope of this support has changed considerably in recent months, becoming increasingly provocative and too often inappropriate.
Most distressing, much of its anger is being directed at Jews rather than the right-wing hard-liners on both sides that are principally responsible for elevating and perpetuating violence against civilians. The equation of the Star of David with the swastika makes a broad anti-Semitic statement far more offensive and unjustified than supporting the creation of a Palestinian state. It is irrational and inappropriate, and the fact that it is only the most recent irrational and inappropriate reaction in a long history of such reactions does not make it less so. The sense that uncompromising, even irrational, anger is somehow justified has spread far here. This Saturday, an Oxford poet was quoted in a major London paper as writing, \all U.S. Jews should be shot."" Guests on a Saturday morning talk show justified him, presumably out of sympathy. That same afternoon, roughly 15,000 people participated in a pro-Palestinian demonstration in London. Most simply wanted to see an end to the carnage, but the Nazi references and uncompromising demands were there as well.
Sharon, despicable though his actions may be, grounds this most recent military action in response to the suicide bombing of a Passover Seder, then the last in a bloody spate of suicidal terrorist attack'terrorist attacks which were themselves in reaction to increasingly hard-line Israeli policy towards Palestinians. Policy in response to a particularly violent intifada, in response to earlier policy'and so on until each party's complaint becomes so coated in blood and dirt and blame and time that it is hard to keep one incident straight from the next, much less assign some moral high ground.
The situation in Israel seems past the threshold of compromise. Leaders on both sides of the conflict have proved more prone to vengeance than justice, and more likely to lapse into cynical short-term cease-fires than peace. But if the rest of the world aspires to see an end to the seemingly endless violence, it cannot play the same game.
If demonstrators really want to see the Palestinian saga end, which undoubtedly most do, they must move away from the polarizing language and attitudes that seem to have infected the dialogue. If observers elsewhere in the world cannot discuss the terms of Palestinian statehood with basic sense and respect, it is absurd to expect Israelis and Palestinians who have lived under its violent shadow for years to manage it at all. It magnifies the hopelessness of the situation exponentially, simply accepting degeneration into violence as an acceptable outcome. And if that is true, the entire conversation about human rights on which the claims of both sides are based is hollow and vain and cynical anyway.
