Israelis are not the Sky People of the movie “Avatar.” That’s what I’d hoped to say during The Q & A following Ali Abunimah’s recent presentation on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at Lawrence Hall.
During his talk he showed a video making the analogy that Israelis are like the evil Sky People and Palestinians are like the oppressed, blue-skinned Navi of Avatar. He also argued that Israel and the Palestinian territories should be replaced by a single, secular state, in which Palestinians will be the majority — the “one state solution.”
The presentation oversimplified the conflict to a struggle between “good” and “evil.” Mr. Abunimah cherry picked his facts, telling only part of the history. His presentation was designed to elicit feelings of disgust towards one side, sympathy for the other.
Classic propaganda.
Here are just some of the things that he omitted: He portrayed the Jews who moved to British-run Palestine as foreign colonizers, neglecting the crucial fact that Jews began as a people in that very land, and maintained their religious and historical ties to it. He didn’t mention that Jews living in Europe and in Arab lands faced repeated periods of massacre, persecution and dispossession. (Those who falsely claim that this didn’t happen in Arab countries ignore the pogroms, massacres, and routine humiliations that Jews
experienced under Islamic rule.)
He emphasized the plight of the Palestinian refugees of 1948, but ignored the 800,000 Jewish refugees thrust from Arab lands 50-60 years ago. He argued that it’s wrong for Israel to be a Jewish state, claiming this is inherently racist, so it should be replaced by a bi-national secular democracy. Yet he said nothing about similarly redesigning the 20-plus states in the region that privilege Arab ethnicity and enfranchise Islam as the state religion.
So Jews, post-Holocaust, should lose the one place where their small and vulnerable religion and culture has protected status, but the rest of the Arab world gets to carry on as Arab-Islamic states?
But the worst was the Sky People part. Now Israelis are invaders from another planet!
It’s not okay to “otherize” and dehumanize people this way. Jews aren’t a foreign infection in the Middle East. In Israel they began as a people and didn’t leave by choice.
Ironically, Avatar’s blue people are called the “Navi,” from the Biblical Hebrew word, “prophet.” Given history, Jews can also relate to the Navi. Since Abunimah introduced the metaphor, let’s consider it further. What if Avatar had ended with the Navi being exiled from their land, just as the Jews were from Israel 2000 years ago? And what if, after centuries of exile, at a time of persecution the Navi sought to return to their sacred lands and re-establish themselves as a sovereign nation? We’d feel sympathy.
If, however, during the time of the Navis’ exile another people had moved into this land and developed an equally profound connection to it, we’d feel sympathy for them, too. A just resolution of that dilemma would involve compromise and a sharing of the land through an agreement that gave both peoples some protected space for collective sovereignty and self-determination. This is the ethical basis for the two-state solution that so many Israelis and Palestinians seek.
I’m tired of people who lay all the blame for this conflict on one side. I remain pro-Israel, pro-Palestine, pro-peace. I have no problem with fair criticism of Israel. My beef is with giving an oversimplified and inaccurate, two-dimensional portrait of the conflict instead of a human, three-dimensional one. Both Avatar and presentations on the Middle East are better in 3D.
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