F…ing Things Up.

TWO DAYS AGO, two brothers, Israeli settlers on the occupied West Bank of the River Jordan were murdered by Palestinian gunmen. Hardly news, one might say. Over the past months upwards of 60 Palestinians and more than a dozen Israelis have died in a series of brutal confrontations in the occupied territories.

What elevated this latest incident above the commonplace, however, was the response of the Jewish inhabitants of the settlement from which the murdered brothers came. In the most shocking instance of communal violence since 2000, scores of enraged and armed settlers descended upon the Palestinian village of Zaatara and set it ablaze. Thirty houses and dozens of cars were torched, and at least one Palestinian villager was murdered.

Naturally, Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, publicly deplored the violence and urged both sides to refrain from taking the law into their own hands. Within his coalition government (the most right-wing in Israeli history) however, other voices were raised which were very far from being conciliatory. One far-right MP declared that if Palestinians come to murder Israelis, then their homes should burn – “metaphorically-speaking”. No one on either side believed she was speaking metaphorically.

This latest example of political stimulus and response from the troubled land of Israel/Palestine is merely the most shocking demonstration of a process that is gathering strength all over the planet. Angry minorities, many of them justifiably angry about their treatment at the hands of hostile majorities, move from remonstrance to protest, protest to overt threats and, ultimately, from overt threats to actual violence.

Often, this process of escalation is given added impetus by individuals, organisations, nation states, and even international bodies, expressing their support for these aggrieved minorities. Such moral approbation produces two, often deadly, effects. First, it contributes to these minorities’ conviction that their cause is just, rendering their actions – no matter how heinous – morally unassailable. Second, it enrages the “oppressive” majority and inspires them to embark on their own grim journey of escalation.

One aspect, in particular, of this alleged “encouragement” of minority extremism infuriates the majority: the extraordinary double-standard which excuses or (much worse) celebrates the violence of “freedom-fighters”. The majority’s sense of grievance is only intensified when their administrative and/or military responses to extremism are not only condemned, but also presented as the reason for the minority’s “understandable” resort to extreme tactics. Rightly or wrongly, the impression is conveyed to the majority that their values, their institutions, even their lives, are worth less than those of the minority.

The anger generated by this misrepresentation of the majority’s side of the story is often overlooked by those standing in solidarity with the “oppressed” minority. Being in “the wrong”, the majority’s feelings are dismissed as irrelevant by the minority’s defenders. This is a particularly short-sighted response on the part of those who believe themselves to be engaged in bending the arc of history towards justice. It encourages those dismissed as “deplorables” to discount altogether the moral arguments of their detractors as “fake news”.

A particularly moving analysis of this phenomenon was penned by the Chilean socialist and author Ariel Dorfman. Looking back at the conduct of himself and his comrades in the heady days of Salvador Allende’s radically left-wing Popular Unity Coalition Government (1970-73) this is what he wrote:

“It was difficult, it would take years to understand that what was so exhilarating to us was menacing to those who felt excluded from our vision of paradise. We evaporated them from meaning, we imagined them away in the future, we offered them no alternative but to join us in our pilgrimage or disappear forever, and that vision fuelled, I believe, the primal fear of the men and women who opposed us … [T]he people we called momios, mummies, because they were so conservative, prehistoric, bygone, passé … [W]e ended up including in that definition millions of Chileans who … were on our side, who should have been with us on our journey to the new land and who, instead, came to fear for their safety and their future.”

Those are sentiments that the Pasifika poet, Tusiata Avia, might want to take to heart. Her poetry collection, The Savage Coloniser Book features a poem entitled “250th anniversary of James Cook’s arrival in New Zealand”. Having celebrated Cook’s murder and cannibalisation, Avia fantasises about doing something similar to those who came after him:

These days

we’re driving round

in SUVs

looking for ya

or white men like you

who might be thieves

or rapists

or kidnappers

or murderers

yeah, or any of your descendants

or any of your incarnations

cos, you know

ay, bitch?

We’re gonna F… YOU UP.

Poetic hyperbole? An entirely justifiable symbolic rendering of the colonial experience from the point of view of the colonised? Maybe. It is equally arguable, however, that sentiments such as these, were they to become widely repeated, could very easily cause millions of New Zealanders to “fear for their safety and their future.”

It is worth remembering that it was the momios, those millions of Chileans who lived in “primal fear” of the Left’s programme, who gave General Pinochet the social licence he needed to overthrow Allende and his Popular Unity Coalition. Momios, too, this time wearing military uniforms, who shot him down in Chile’s Presidential Palace.

It is easy to believe that you are on the side of the angels when everybody who matters to you is cheering you on. No doubt the Palestinian gunmen who opened-up on those two Israeli settlers as they drove by in their car, believed themselves to be fighting for their people’s freedom against Zionist colonisation.

But, that is not how the two brothers’ family, friends and neighbours saw it. That’s why they headed for Zaatara with their guns and their cans of petrol. That’s why the Israeli soldiers stood aside and let them pass.

So they could really F… THEM UP.