
© Ariel Schalit/Associated Press
Why does Palestine matter? It's a question I ask myself nearly every day. Another way to put it is, "Is the devotion of major attention to the plight of the Palestinians an obsession worthy of suspicion or an appropriate response to a grave historic and continuing injustice?
No one will be surprised when I reply that major attention is an appropriate response. Palestine matters and should matter. I will try to explain why.
First, perhaps most basically,
the sheer cruelty - the scope of the violation of human, i.e., natural individual, rights - of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians warrants the concern of all who favor freedom and other (classical) liberal values: justice, social cooperation, free exchange, and peace.
Let's start with the Occupied Palestinian Territories. As B'Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories,
says front and center on its website: "Israel's regime of occupation is inextricably bound up in human rights violations." No one who sheds the blinders of the Official Narrative can help but feel pain over the institutional barriers to normal life, not to mention the literal destruction of life, that are regular features of Israel's rule in the West Bank (with nearly 3 million Palestinians), East Jerusalem (over 300,000), and Gaza Strip (nearly 2 million). It is no exaggeration to describe the system as an instance of apartheid, which is the word used by
Israeli human-rights organizations and
former government officials. (Then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin used the word in a
warning as far back is 1976. So did Israel's first prime minister,
David Ben-Gurion, when he was out of office after the 1967 war.)
Comment: Such occurrences are not as uncommon as one might think: