The Crisis of Zionism opens with Peter Beinart watching a video on his computer sent by an Israeli friend. It depicts an incident on the occupied West Bank: Israeli military police arrest a Palestinian man for trying to siphon water from the pipes that feed an Israeli settlement, after he had made repeated efforts to secure permission. As he is taken away his five-year-old son, Khaled, cries plaintively after him, “Baba, Baba.”
For those familiar with the occupation, the context is clear. The settlers, with the legal rights of citizens of Israel, have privileged access to the aquifers in this arid land and use water at five times the rate of the Palestinians. This inequality is secured by Israeli military law, which governs the stateless inhabitants of this occupied territory.
Beinart describes the emotions the video set off in him:
As soon I began watching … I wished I had never turned it on. For most of my life, my reaction to accounts of Palestinian suffering has been rationalization, a search for reasons why the accounts are exaggerated or the suffering self-inflicted. … But in recent years, for reasons I can’t fully explain, I had been lowering my defenses, and Khaled’s cries left me staring in mute horror at my computer screen.
It is a powerful passage in a book filled with them, one that encapsulates and personalizes the inequity of the occupation, the apartheid-like legal distinctions between Jewish settlers and Palestinians, and the grotesque disparity between two people’s access to natural resources and civil and political rights. It captures with precision the rationalizing process of many American Jews, most of whom would decry such injustice were it to occur in America or elsewhere in the Western world. Finally it touches on the ineffable mystery of how sophisticated people change their minds—“I had been lowering my defenses”—a puzzle even for those at the top rungs of opinion journalism.
