Someone So Confused Apparently Needs to Come up with Simple Answers

Quaker columnist Helena Cobban reminds us on her blog justworldnews.org (is that “just” pause “world-news” or “just-world” pause “news”?) that the Gaza settlers are not the first “colons” to be forcefully evacuated from their homes.

“In 1962, a million French citizens who, as colons rooted in Algeria for many generations had considered that territory was just one other departement of Mother France, realized that Paris had changed its mind: Algeria was being summarily [sic] over to the FLN.”

Lest we forget (or are simply ignorant of history) a good many of those million pied noir who felt the need to flee were Algerian Jews and Qabyli Berbers who, in many cases, had a far better argument that they were “indigenous” than did many Algerian Arabs. Further, while the French took over Algeria in the mid-nineteenth century with the expressed purpose of colonizing the country (mainly to enhance the metropolitan’s grain production capacity), no reasonable or rational historical investigator looking at the facts can make anything near the same claim concerning Israel’s conquest of Gaza and the West Bank.

But this aside, it is not quite clear – to me at least – what Ms. Cobban is going on about in her posting. She seems to be upset that the French fleeing certain slaughter in Algeria did not get the same “slaveringly [sic] attentive media coverage” that the settlers in Gaza and the northern West Bank are getting. In all fairness, I think that she should take into account that there were no satellite feeds in 1962, no cable news networks and that, on the whole, reporting global events was much more sober four decades ago.

Cobban then gets her rant around to the “racial” issue, that is that the colonists are of European origin while the colonized are “indigenous” populations. Just a casual observation. From what I’ve seen daily on local (Israeli) TV, I’d say that a good percentage of the Israeli settlers in Gaza are not at all European in origin (and I’d be willing to bet that there are some descendents of those very same pied noir whose families had lived in Algeria for centuries and who fled after Algeria started to become more “egalitarian”, and the “democratic forces” informed them, quite openly, that they should leave while they could do so carrying their baggage, rather than while occupying coffins.)

In the end, Cobban does get around to something that resembles a point. That is that although the retreating settlers are receiving compensation, the Palestinians of Gaza are not. More to the point, she maintains that these same settlers (“pampered” she calls them) were subsidized for 38 years by her tax money, and that the Palestinians should “be given a chance to pursue her [sic] dreams on a quite egalitarian basis. That is, including the provision of a fair degree of reparations for the extensive damages of the past.”

Well, let’s look at this more closely.

I’m not sure what reparations have to do with “egalitarianism”, but just to get things straight, it hasn’t been your tax money that’s subsidized the settlers, Ms. Cobban, it’s been mine. That is one of the many reasons that I have opposed government settlement policies for years. The US government, on the other hand, has been very clear about aid money and loan guarantees not being used on the other side of the Green Line (simply deducting any amounts at source that are deemed to be in violation). If Helena Cobban is concerned about her tax money being put to bad use, she should probably have been out there asking some very serious questions when the PA began funding the intifada, rather than putting those tens of millions to productive use for the population as intended. I think that there’s a fair chance that more of her tax money was tied up in the cargo holds and on the decks of the Karin A then there was in, say, Kfar Darom!

Again, it’s my, tax money that’s compensating the settlers for loss of home and livelihood as a result of a policy of disengagement that I fully support (and advocated long before Ariel Sharon thought of it). That’s pretty clear, I think.

But what are the “damages” that have been done to the Palestinian population that require payment of reparations? Since the “brutal occupation” began in 1967, the Palestinian population experienced extensive improvement in almost every facet of its economic and social existence, including massive improvements in education, health care and overall standard of living. Efraim Karsh details the statistics in his book Arafat’s War (pp. 43-45). Most notable is the phenomenal population growth rate of roughly 3.5% between 1967 and the start of the first intifada. (By way of comparison, the Jewish population in Europe declined by nearly 50% between 1933 and 1945, which seems a much more understandable basis for reparations!)

So here we have it. A confused (and frankly somewhat mean) attack on the settlers because they had the temerity to receive reportage on television; a totally irrelevant and inappropriate comparison with a different group of “settlers”; and a demand for reparations based on an extremely weak and factually questionable argument. Ms. Cobban not only appears to be confused about history and the facts, she also fails to examine her own arguments below the level of very superficial comparison and simple repetition of propaganda. This would, however, appear to fit in quite well with her simplistic world view of good vs. bad, native vs. settler and Third-World victim vs. European-American victimizer. And if the simplistic answers work, why bother to ask difficult questions?