Israel and Palestine: Tit for Tat?

By Craig Martin

I recently saw this video, “This Land Is Mine,” which was making the rounds on Facebook (at least among my friends). There’s no doubt that the video is clever and that the choice of music is perfect for the author’s purposes. In addition, I’m somewhat sympathetic to the author’s agenda. However, as a relentless critic I cannot help but point out what I think the video obscures.

Like many accounts of Israel vs. Palestine (and, admittedly, this is not only about modern day Israel and Palestine), the video presents the issue as a “he said, she said” sort of affair. We’re presented with a variety of groups, all with competing claims on a piece of land, each willing to kill in defense of their claims.

Now pause for a moment, and imagine someone saying: “well, when the white colonizers spread across North America in the 18th and 19th centuries, they did some bad things, and the Native Americans did some bad things too. Why can’t we just get past all that?” Such a claim would distort to unintelligibility the differences in power between the whites and natives during the European colonial expansion.

However, people quite regularly frame the current conflict between Israel and Palestine as a sort of tit for tat competition, as if between two equal powers. Framing conflicts with clear disparities of power as if they were conflicts between equals seems, at least to me, as clearly set up—intentionally or not—to advance the interests of the already dominant group.

In addition, such a framing masks the extent to which Western nation-states are contributing to the conflict, to say nothing of the many other influential players in the region. In the present iteration of the back and forth depicted in the video, there are billions of dollars flowing from the United States to one party—a fact that is nowhere made visible in the video.

For these reasons, despite my sympathies with the creator’s agenda, I’m uncomfortable with it, and would be unlikely to use it in class except as data that would have to be unpacked and critiqued.