PALESTINIANS: NOT RELIGIOUS LUNATICS

From Rascally Rob Salkowitz over at Emphasis Added, a comparison of traditional Southern cultural and political attitudes in post Civil War America with those of Palestinians in the occupied territories:

The Dixiecrats of Gaza

Despite losing on the battlefield, Southern culture did not accept defeat and embrace the modern values of its conqueror, as Palestinians today are being urged to do under similar circumstances. Instead, they turned to terrorism (in the form of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1870s and 80s), which was ultimately successful in exhausting the reformist will of the North and restoring some measure of autonomy and the reactionary status quo.

Throughout the late 19th and early 20th century, the profound cultural, economic and political degeneracy of the Southern states was a subject of constant concern in the rest of the country. Opposition to every modern reform (women’s suffrage, labor unionism, teaching of evolution) and support for every reactionary program (Prohibition, isolationism) found its strongest base in the former Confederacy.

Even within the nominal framework of self-government, the enfranchised citizens of the South made a conscious and deliberate choice of corrupt one-party rule (first Democrats, then Republicans), legalized discrimination against minorities, severe limits to their own economic, educational and cultural potential, and the most narrow and doctrinaire forms of religious fundamentalism, because to do otherwise, their leaders convinced them, would be to surrender to the alien values of the despised interloper. Like the Palestinians, most white Southerners chose to stand by their closed and backward system even when it clearly benefited only a few at the very top, because they valued their pride and honor above their material self-interest.

Click here for the rest.

Of course, I think Salkowitz's analysis misses some pretty hefty mitigating circumstances influencing Palestinian behavior, such as Israel's severe brutality when dealing with Palestinian civilians and politicians, the IDF enforced medieval conditions in many parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and the fact that peace proposals for the last decade or so have been about creating an independent "state" which is non-contiguous, and without any political influence or economic viability, unacceptable Bantustans, when you get right down to it. But I think he's onto something here: it is extraordinarily difficult to force an entire culture to become something it is not without severe repercussions. The Palestinian sense of profound resentment rising from their utter and total defeat at the hands of mighty Israel is a palpable, real thing: this decades old conflict, despite the conventional wisdom here in the US, is most decidedly not being driven by Islamic religious lunacy, although that certainly plays a role; rather, legitimate grievances about the way their conqueror has treated them, as well as a deep cultural fear of non-existence as a people, motivate Palestine.

Until the West starts addressing these issues, expect the conflict to continue as is for decades to come.

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