The National Review
May 9, 2002
Why Don’t I Care About the Palestinians?
The options, as I see them.
By John Derbyshire
http://www.nationalreview.com/derbyshire/derbyshire050902.asp
Why don't I care about the Palestinians? It is, of course, wrong of me not to care. It can't be much fun being a Palestinian. You, or your parents, or your grandparents, ran for their lives in the 1948 war. You — and/or they, plus a couple of generations of uncles, aunts, siblings, and cousins — have been huddled in some squalid refugee camp ever since, living off UNRWA handouts. ("UNRWA," by the way, stands for "U.S. taxpayer." But you knew that!) There is no economy worth participating in. Your leaders won a fragmented, halfway sort of autonomy for you at Oslo; but it didn't work, you're not sure why. Nothing really got any better, and now the Israelis have smashed it all up anyway. The other Arabs all hate you (a little-known factor of Middle East political life, but one attested by my colleague David Pryce-Jones, who knows the Arabs better than anyone). Things look bad, and you are sunk in despair. Shouldn't I feel sorry for you?
Sure, I personally favor Israel in this conflict. That's my right as a freethinking person. I'm a Christian, though, aren't I? Shouldn't I have some Christian compassion to spare for the poor suffering Palestinians? Ask not for whom the bell tolls, etc., etc.
Well, I suppose I should, but to be honest about it, I don't. Why not? Why don't I care about the Palestinians? The answer is NOT any of the following.
I like taking showers with Jews.
Palestinians have dark skin and I'm a racist.
My name was originally Derbstein.
My British blood is boiling with shame over the lost empire.
I am a lackey of, or am trying to ingratiate myself with, the Jews who run the U.S. media.
I am a cruel, hard-hearted bigot.
The answer isn't exactly compassion fatigue, either. That's pretty close, though. I am aware of a certain level of compassion fatigue in regard to the world at large, and it spills over into the Palestinian issue.
The other day I had the depressing experience of reading, one right after the other, Stephen Kotkin's wonderfully titled "Trashcanistan" in the April 15th New Republic, then Helen Epstein's "Mozambique: In Search of the Hidden Cause of AIDS" in the May 9th New York Review of Books. The first of these was a long portmanteau review of six books about the fates of various components of the old U.S.S.R. in the years since the thing fell apart. The second tries to discover why a sleepy rural area of Mozambique, populated by courteous folk practicing a traditional way of life, has high levels of AIDS.