Meretz To Oppose Any Bill Implying Arabs Have Volition

It would be imposing Western morality on Palestinians to insist they adhere to such notions as not killing people whose views they oppose.

The Danish embassy in Syria, set alight by rioters who had no free will not to respond to cartoons with violence.

Tel Aviv, July 23 – Representatives of the dovish Meretz Party informed their colleagues in the Opposition today that they would not endorse any legislation that in any way supports the notion that Arabs are capable of their own decisions, as such an idea would undermine the axiom that Israel alone must take steps to achieve peace.

Meretz Chairwoman Zehava Gal-On and MK Ilan Gilon told lawmakers from the Zionist Union that they remain ideologically opposed to laws or policies that place any onus upon a party other than Israel, since it is unreasonable to expect Palestinians or other Arabs to independently choose a peaceful path toward resolution of the conflict, as they are incapable of acting independently of Israeli stimuli. Even if Palestinians frequently resort to violence, they explained, it is only as an automatic reaction to Israeli behavior, and denying that Israeli policies are the root cause of Arab violence wrongly implies that Palestinians are capable of more than Pavlovian responses.

“We wish to emphasize that we will be forced to vote against any measure that treats Arabs, especially Palestinians, as fully developed human beings with the capacity to modify their behavior of their own free will,” Gilon told Opposition leader Isaac Herzog of Labor. “The central tenet of the Oslo process is that only Israeli concessions and incentives can motivate Palestinians not to kill Israelis, and, as a corollary, that it is wrong to expect Palestinians to stop that killing, and the incitement to kill, simply because killing is wrong. Asserting such things, or even implying them, has no basis in reality.”

MK Gal-On added that it would be imposing Western morality on Palestinians to insist they adhere to such notions as not killing people whose views they oppose. “Who are we to insist that Palestinians conform to our ideas of what is right and wrong?” she challenged. “We cannot in good conscience demand that they avoid violence unless we provide incentives for them to do so, in the form of concessions.” Those concessions, she explained, necessarily will result in so-called “desirable” behavior by the Arabs, since Arab behavior always follows a predictable stimulus-response model that remains blessedly unsullied by actual volition or moral capacity; thinking otherwise would be a racist imposition of a Western cultural framework.

Meretz lawmakers have frequently parted company with their Opposition colleagues from Labor on similar issues, notably insisting last summer that Israel immediately cease fighting even as Hamas rockets rained down on the South. While Labor MKs largely supported the military operation to cripple or destroy Hamas’s rocket-launching capacity, Meretz insisted that violence was not the answer – specifically, violence done by Israel, as it would be presumptuous to condemn Palestinian violence of any sort.