I’ve been reading The New York Times just about every day for the last 35 years, paying special attention to their coverage of Palestinian-Israeli issues, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen coverage like this, below. I don’t know what took so long, but this article, for once, captures the lived reality of Palestinian experience in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Better late than never.

This post is a follow-up to part 1, about the fire at Nassar Farm, and was originally posted on Facebook, August 14, 2019, just after my visit there. I guess I was painfully right about “uncertain” outcomes.

What you see below are photos of the Nassar Farm, or the Tent of Nations, on a hill near the Palestinian village of Nahalin, surrounded by four settlements of the Gush Etzion settlement bloc (Neve Daniel, Betar Illit, Alon Shvut, and Elazar).* The Nassar Farm lies on a hill toward which all four settlements are slowly expanding. Each expansion involves what the Nassar family regards as an encroachment on or violation of their property boundary, which they trace a century back to Ottoman times.

The Tent of Nations (aka “Nassar’s Farm”) is, or perhaps was, a small produce farm located southwest of Bethlehem, Palestine, and has been the subject of a decades-long property dispute with a set of Israeli settlers. I visited the farm back in August 2019, and had intended to return some day to do volunteer work there.

Given recent news of the farm’s tragic destruction by fire, very likely arson (see below), I now wonder whether a return to Nassar’s Farm is possible. I post the Facebook announcement below as an indication of what everyday life is like for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories–the undiscussed and unacknowledged injustices and tragedies that make up their everyday lives.

This piece by Jonathan Cook offers a straightforward defense of moral responsibility with respect to Israel (or, in principle, anything else): if you defend what it does, you share moral responsibility for what it does. Because “the West” collectively defends Israel so uncritically (particularly “Western” governments that give Israel both material and moral/political support), “the West” is complicit in Israel’s crimes in ways that it’s not complicit in other, equally unjust, or worse crimes. It’s legitimate in this context for citizens of “Western” governments to single Israel out for special criticism.

One legitimate motive for doing so is to avoid moral complicity in Israel’s crimes via support given to the governments that abet these crimes. There certainly are other, illegitimate motives as well, e.g., anti-Semitism. But the illegitimate motives don’t negate or cancel out the legitimate ones. Their existence just requires disavowal–once again, to avoid complicity in them. In fact, responsible partisans of the Palestinian cause have always disavowed anti-Semitism. It’s pro-Israel organizations, in North America as well as Europe (not to mention in Israel itself), that have served up endless rationalizations for Israel’s crimes, and endless defamations of its critics.

Omar Baddar on “Three Lies About Gaza.” Spot on.

It’s become common wisdom in American political discourse that what distinguishes Hamas’s military tactics from Israel’s is that Hamas deliberately targets civilians while Israel does not. Both halves of this assertion strike me as highly dubious. It’s hardly clear that Israel doesn’t target civilians, whether deliberately or recklessly, but let me save that topic for another day. What’s also unclear is that Hamas deliberately (as opposed to recklessly) targets civilians, but I’ll leave that one for another day as well. The assumption I want to focus on here is whether the targets Hamas is hitting are as unambiguously “civilian” as is widely assumed.

Put more precisely, the issue is whether the targets make or don’t make a causal contribution to combat, and if so, to what degree. A civilian leader who issues a command to his military may  ex hypothesi be a “civilian,” but in his role as commander-in-chief of his country’s military forces may also be responsible for military commands, and in that respect be a morally legitimate target in warfare. An ordinary civilian who makes a self-conscious moral or material contribution to combat undertaken by others, but shrinks from engaging in combat in himself, does not by his reluctance to fight immunize himself from being targeted. He’s taken actions of a kind that mark him out for targeting.