Bodies on the telly; Palestinians in little more than rags, their expressions contorted in the sadness of seeing their families freshly killed, their homes freshly bulldozed, of watching as their sons and daughters bled and starved to death. These are poor people. And overhead there’s a U.S.-made Apache helicopter, strafing civilians, their bullets tearing families apart, making wounds that never heal. When you watch your brother die, whether you’re a Palestinian the powers-that-be have forgotten today or a Jew in a concentration camp in the 1940s, it’s easy to be bitter for the rest of your life, to see the group(s) you think responsible as an enemy whose power’s abuse can nobly be equaled only by its selfless destruction, new bodies notwithstanding.

This is more than a rant than a formal essay. Most of it was written in early April, as the Israeli invasion of Palestinian areas was all over the news, as were people continuing to defend the Israelis, as is the American agenda, and what seemed a newfound ability in mainstream American news to question Israeli policies, or at least cover them. It activated my already-existing thoughts on the matter, and an essay seemed a challenging prospect but a timely one. As I wrote and wrote and wrote, nothing coalescing but much brilliance came along the way. I kept waiting for things to come together, but I have come to realize that this represents the situation in Palestine: what we have is a collection of tragedies, a collection of various perspectives that need acknowledging. And so this essay is appropriately a collection of observations, still timely as the siege in Bethlehem and the Church of the Nativity, where Israeli soldiers killed a purported gunman just today (29 April), is now one month old.

In fact, Christian witnesses, neutral in the conflict, who were inside the Church of the Nativity said days before that the Israelis detonated a door to enter and shot a Palestinian within the church itself.

The Israeli military deliberately rammed a CNN truck and, according to CNN (hardly pro-Palestinian), as of 8 April 2002, has shot at a minimum of 20 journalists in the present offensive, then 11 days old.

Palestinian ambulances without foreigners on board were routinely shot by the Israelis.

The United Nations has complained, in its attempt to provide food to the Palestinians -- who are effectively under house arrest, afraid to go into the streets for fear of being shot or detained for months under terrible conditions like the others, who have been reduced to collecting rain water to drink -- have complained that they are being shut out from simply distributing food.

The Israelis are going into the refugee camps. The Jenin camp is getting particular attention. They are shooting civilians as they break the curfew to go get water for their starving families. I’ve seen footage of the bodies, piled in their homes where they were executed. I’ve seen the buildings. They look like Dresden. Everything’s a white-grey, large holes in most buildings, water pipes broken and pouring life into the street while families collect rain water, too afraid to venture outside. And there are thousands, thousands of detainees, people who won’t be returning anytime soon -- if ever -- if the long history of Israeli detentions of Palestinians without charges or evidence is any sign whatsoever. I’ve seen the refrigerator trucks the Israelis have in these camps. They say the trucks are there to haul away the bodies to prevent these impoverished, starving refugees from putting their dead loved ones into the street and claiming that there’s been a “massacre.” It is a massacre. The Israelis are presently claiming that everyone killed in these camps numbers about 100 -- and that those were all combatants. This is ridiculous. To believe this you have to be racist, you have to believe that these refugees’ testimony is nothing but lies, that every report outside of that by a government known for exactly these kinds of tactics is a lie. And, as to the numbers, reporters have seen more than 100 bodies -- in very limited areas in these camps -- bodies with no guns, no sign of having been in combat -- and these bodies don’t include those already trucked away, nor buried under rubble, nor those detained and killed elsewhere.

There is only one reasonable conclusion: that Israel has committed war crimes, told people to stay in their homes and to starve there, then shot anyone who came outside and tons of civilians who were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, then demolished the infrastructure, bulldozed buildings, destroyed water and electricity, destroyed schools and mosques, detained thousands without cause, and then carted off the bodies to prevent the world from seeing the massacres that went on.

After a full week went without a suicide bombing despite a bloody Israeli invasion it called a "war," CNN and other news outlets asked, on 9 April 2002, whether Sharon’s policy was working. In other words, a war criminal invades the impoverished, “problem” people of his country, massacring over a hundred civilians over a small number of days, and when, after world pressure to stop the resistance and in favor of peace, those people stop striking back, bolding being the first to stop the fighting, the world proceeds to give the war criminal and his massacres a thumbs up. It’s like England invading Ireland with tanks and killing hundreds, then being complimented on its policy of warfare when, after demonstrating that they still can, the Irish take the first move toward peace and stop the bombings. This is incredibly, incredibly offensive stuff. If one wants peace, one cannot compliment one side’s military aggression because the other side stopped their participation in violence. To do otherwise is truly despicable.

It's like saying Arafat is winning because five years ago the Palestinians died 10-to-1 in comparison with the Israelis and now are dying almost 3-to-1. I actually heard such a statement on an American news broadcast. It presumes that Palestinians don't count, that they die in droves like animals and don't mourn, don't care for their families and friends and lovers as we do. This is horrible, racist shit.

I want to make it clear, however, that my heart mourns, automatically and involuntarily, with those who suffer, Israeli or Jew, American or not. Let us presume that we all have souls. Let us not take sides, however tempting, so much that we grow cold to the deaths of the parties we think more in the wrong, oppose, or even call enemy. I am not in favor of kamikaze attacks on civilians, however much I understand it. I would like a Palestinian Martin Luther King, dedicated to change through disruption, without deaths -- such a figure would draw sympathy the world over. But there are real differences between the two sides: one is a government with the power to detain, to execute, to launch cruise missles and run tanks through homes. If the twentieth century taught us nothing, it should have been the dangers of such governments and the horror of systemic violence, of organized state oppression. And that, beyond the vast disparity in suffering between the two parties, is a qualitative difference with poignant and haunting resonance.

If there is, as some fear, a new wave of anti-Semitism in the wake of the present violence. Let everyone, Jews and gentiles, know and remember that any anti-Semitist attacks at this time, though still condemnable, was spurred by Israeli aggression -- not by Jews, but by Israel. If Israel cared about Jews the world over, they wouldn’t do what they are doing. They wouldn’t provoke anti-Semitism around the world, putting European Jews in jeopardy. But Israel is not a Jewish state except in theory, and it cares everything for national politics and supporting its bizarre, past-looking, theocratic government -- and little for Jews. Jews across the world must stop supporting Israel; they must speak out, saying that "Israel does not speak for me; do not believe these murderers when they identify Jews with their regime." If they do not, there is going to be more anti-Semitism, more violence and hatred against Jews; Jews, like all thinking individuals, must not in the false name of "solidarity" support a state's institutionalized violence, apartheid, and policies of encroachment, illegal detainment, and harassment. And Americans must speak out, as I am doing, saying that our government in its long support of Israel, in its looking the other way at attrocities, does not speak for me; Americans must learn what Palestine is like and must condemn what Israel, shamefully empowered by our nation, is doing.

Talking with one of my Jewish friends, she offered a powerful insight into Israel’s policies, an insight all the more brave because she seems to feel, as a Jew, that she has to support Israel, her arguments like many American Jews, who don’t know Israeli history except from a biased perspective. She said that it was not just the legacy of Nazism but the horror of so many Jews going calmly to their deaths. Identifying with people who stood in line so that the Germans could economize on bullets. And you can say “never again” so strongly, a first clenched tight, a heart closed, that you overreact defensively, no matter how much more power you have.

The spectre that hangs over Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians is, of course, Nazism. Palestinian anti-Semitism may remind many of Nazi anti-Semitism; both killed Jews, though in very different numbers. Most crucially, however, European Jews were not the ones in power -- nor did they kill roughly three times as many Germans as Germans were killing Jews. Ironically, this lack of power or violence on the part of Jews is exactly what makes the Jewish Holocaust so sympathetic. The reality is that, in any responsible comparison to Nazi Germany, it is Israel that is a state which is murdering people based on their ethnicity, a state known for aggression against its neighbors, and an authoritarian state that defines itself racially and ethnically. The horrible irony is that those who support Israel cannot as vociferously condemn the Jewish Holocaust. No, the Palestinians who are armed and are killing Jews are hardly the pacifistic Jews who died in the Holocaust; yes, Palestine is also racially and ethnically defined. But they are not a state killing its own residents with overpowering force and weaponry.

Israel feels that it is surrounded by Muslim enemies wishing its destruction. While most Muslim states have endorsed Israel's right to exist, they're certainly not fans. And some, like Iraq, give money to the families of suicide bombers. Generally speaking, these nations will give money and weapons for militant Palestinians. But they, including oil-rich regimes, won't give food or give real refuge to the refugees. On the other hand, Israel is militarily the strongest party in the mid-East by far. It faces a difficult and murderous problem, but it cannot be considered the victim and the Palestinians the aggressors. Both sides have victims. Both sides have aggressors. But the Palestinians have had, in the last decade, three to ten times the number of victims. And the Israelis have sophisticated tanks and helicopters with which to strike against a poor, indigenous population that uses jury-rigged bombs -- not delivered from the sky by multi-million-dollar aircraft, but in person through kamikazes. No side smells like roses here. But let no one say it's an equal fight or a stand-off. It is a fact that, at least in so far as size, Israel is the Goliath and the Palestinians are David in this conflict.

A supporter of the Palestinians justifying suicide bombings can say that "suicide bombings are the only option we have, militarily, without Israel's four-billion-dollar annual donation from the U.S. that buys armored tanks and kevlar for soldiers who shoot Palestinians coming near them and who thus can’t be hurt -- the Israelis' militarism forces us to target civilians." A supporter of Israel can say: "we're desperate." And there are good reasons for this desperation. But it's a meek defense.

Let's not call them "suicide bombers." Or our present President Bush's "homicide bombers" -- a revision for political effect, but one that certainly seems redundant. Let's call them kamikazes; that alone describes their tactics, though I've heard no one else say so. The Japanese kamikazes had (more traditionally construed) military targets, however, but the term alone describes what these Palestinian "suicide bombers" do. Because, while homicide is redundant, suicide isn't right either.

You have to admire kamikazes -- or "suicide bombers." It’s simply not accurate to call it "cowardly." I mean, you can’t get more selfless than dying for a cause. We celebrate this in our own fictions, our own cultural myths: didn’t Christ die for his cause? Didn’t the hero of this war movie, that cultural epic? But this mistake is not only ours: since history began, most people have seen their enemies’ sacrifices as bad and their allies' as good. Some have known differently, admired their foes’ bravery even as they strive to extinguish it. But this honorable and itself admirable consciousness is rarely shared by Americans.

The fact is that the terrorists who used our own planes as weapons, physical and cultural, in the 11 September attacks, were brave people. I cried for those they hurt; I still do, caught off-guard by a thought or a turn in conversation, suddenly overwhelmed by empathy for the pain of those on the planes, of those who jumped from rooms aflame, of those whose lover, whose father, had his workplace turned into an inferno, years of love and strife and striving for a relationship in a world without much real closeness torn apart in a moment’s collision of steel into steel. I was -- and am -- traumatized by my own thoughts, my own empathy, by the fact that I can imagine the horror of the victims. But I can realize not only the brave sacrifice of the terrorists but the fact that they did not strike us out of jealousy. No, people do not work that way. If people killed those with more than them, with more freedoms and possessions, no C.E.O. would be alive in America today, receiving multi-million-dollar severance packages while their workers barely earn a living wage. If the popular, simplistic views of terrorists’ motives, espoused by no less than our President, were true, this nation that presently features the largest culture-wide disparity between the richest and the poorest in history would have the blood of the rich repaving the streets -- and not sitting, safely in the arteries and veins, of a rich man with scant credentials who resides in the White House. This is not even a condemnation of our current President, who is no less petty than many men, no less qualified than many of history’s cherished great men, no stranger in taking great power offered up to him than King David or George Washington; neither am I praising him. My point is solely factual: our popular explanations for terrorism have nothing to do with accuracy and everything to do with our own psychological need not to question ourselves or our values, not to have sympathy with a group to whom we have instinctually classified as the Devil.

The Palestinians are a strong people. They are a brave people. They live with Israeli tanks on their streets, with men regularly are imprisoned at length without cause, whose houses have been riddled with bullets, whose friends have died crossing the street for food. They are either second-class citizens or not even citizens at all. They are not radicals; they do not want war any more than any family does. But they will not surrender. They may not take to the streets in conflict, but they will not roll onto their backs and be raped as peasants by the industrial, U.S.-supported, missle- and helicopter-rich nation that has oppressed them. We cannot pretend to be surprised that they are not proud, as well as saddened, when their friend or relative dies to strike a blow against the killers of their people or those who supply their killers weapons and money to keep it up. They will not be dictated to, no matter their poverty, by a U.S. that turns a blind eye to their suffering or by the tanks and machine guns in their streets, preventing their travel to their work, preventing their recruitment of food. If you want to beat them, you cannot just bulldoze their homes, take over their land, repossess the neighborhoods in which they’ve grown up.

Jews are 51% and Arabs 49% when Gaza and the lands Israel conquered are included. But the Arab Israeli birth rate is 4.2 compared to the Jewish birth rate of 2.6 -- and Palestinian Arabs have a birth rate of 6.0. It’s only in this context that Israel is even considering withdrawing to its pre-invasion borders, which would rid this democracy of overwhelmingly Arab areas, thus ensuring that an Arab isn’t elected. This is undeniable racism of the worst sort. It’s like the U.S. being willing to let the Southwest, from California to Texas, leave the Union -- to ensure that a Hispanic isn’t elected President.

1.2 million of the 3.9 million refugees from Israel during the 1940s, and their descendants, now live in refugee camps in neighboring nations, where they live in abject poverty, not as citizens of the Arab nations that shelter them but as non-citizen prisoners who were exiled from their homes in Palestine. For Palestinians, this is one of the major reasons for conflict: these are people, and the descendants of people, who have lost their homes and livelihoods and who are literal prisoners of poverty. Israeli Prime Minister Sharon has said that they cannot be accepted back into their homes because this would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state -- which it was never intended to be. In other words, Israel cannot repair, at the most basic level, the crime it committed against these people because the extent of that crime, and of the time that has passed without restitution, would radically alter the demographics of Israel, making Arabs the majority -- a fact which will happen anyway within a generation.

$123 million for these camps come from the United States.

It’s a bad sign when the main critique of a candidate for prime minister is that he’s a war criminal. Not only has Sharon been indicted on war crimes charges, but he invaded Lebanon. He was elected on his record of military aggression, of killing Palestinians. Arafat’s a terrorist, and that’s a horror, but he wasn’t elected to be one.

The fact is that governments have to deal with rebellions, with militant groups within their borders and hostile groups without. This comes with the territory. Israel has it bad, certainly. But a theocracy doesn’t help. And you don’t -- you don’t -- go in and trash the cities, killing civilians, wrecking their homes. A government, however reactionary based upon its tragic past, cannot justify this.

YOUR ASSIGNMENT THIS WEEK

"W - a - l - d - e - n," a large number of words by "T - h - o - r - e - a - u" has been corrected; I realized, to my horror, that just over half of it had been cut off through my accidentally posting a version I'd only half reformatted for the web before I'd abandoned it and continued on anoher of my computers. I appologize and reinvite you to look at what is a memorable essay. In addition, a PersianCaesar Usage page has been added.

This column was running three days late. Now it's running two days early.

Read Joe Sacco's Palestine, a brilliant non-fiction comic book -- one far better than Spiegelman's oft-touted Maus. And remember to spread the word about Free Comics Day -- Saturday, 4 May, at comic book stores near you.