Today Michael Totten posted about how he arrived at his views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and I think he did it rather eloquently. In fact, there’s a portion of his post that I’ll copy here, if only because I echo his sentiments:

…When I knew next-to-nothing about the Arab-Israeli conflict and I saw photographs of Palestinian kids throwing rocks at Israeli tanks, it was a no-brainer to side with the kids. I’d do the same today without apologies if I didn’t have more information.

When I learned a bit more, it was still easy to sympathize with the Palestinians. Here’s a group of people who kinda sorta live within Israel, yet are not Israeli citizens and are not granted the right to self-government. They want their own state, and it’s a grievance that someday must be redressed. It looks to the uninformed observer a bit like the apartheid regime in South Africa. It’s the civil rights revolution all over again. Or so it appears on the surface.

I never excused the terrorists. They were undermining the Palestinian cause, and they made it difficult to support them. But I didn’t think it right for extremists to discredit the majority. Even after September 11 I maintained this view. A friend once asked me in an argument whose side I’d be on if a full-scale war erupted between them. If push came to shove, I said, I would have to choose Israel. I sympathized with Palestinians, but I knew very well that Ehud Barak was elected because he promised a permanent settlement. Arafat was a dictator, and he rejected Israel’s offer. If a war were required to settle it, it would not be right to blame Israel.

Still, I knew I was unfairly biased. I didn’t understand the Israeli view. So I read Thomas Friedman’s From Beirut to Jerusalem. He is fair to both sides, and that’s why I picked him. When I finished the book I was no longer biased. Though he tilts toward Israel himself, Thomas Friedman put me in the middle. I gave each side a hearing and split the difference.

I kept reading, and I kept learning. I discovered that Hamas and Islamic Jihad are not fighting for a state in the West Bank and Gaza. They are fighting for a Taliban regime “from the river to the sea,” including all of Israel. They say negotiation is treason, and that means war. I learned about Arafat’s education system, which glorifies suicide murder.

In a nutshell, the more I learned, the more I leaned toward Israel.

And so it is with me. The poem you see below (my “response,” as it were, to the suicide bombing from last week) is from early last year, after some idiot Palestinian “martyr” walked into a crowded Jerusalem cafe and blew himself up, killing 11 Israelis and wounding 72 others. One picture I found from that bombing showed a young Israeli on a stretcher, pale and dazed. Most of his clothes had been torn off from the blast, and most of his left arm was gone, replaced by a bloody stump.

At the time I was a centrist who leaned towards the left of the political spectrum, and I thought the IDF was responsible in more ways than one for instigating the string of suicide bombings occurring in Jerusalem and in other Israeli towns. I went so far as to think Ariel Sharon was sanctioning the murder of his own people by showing no mercy towards the Palestinians and thus perpetuating the cycle of violence that’s continued since September 2000.

The more I learned about the Palestinian side of things, however, the more aware I became that worldwide sympathy for their “plight” may as well be the same as saying that Mugabe is God and Zimbabwe is the Promised Land. And he isn’t and it ain’t.

That doesn’t mean I always agree with what the Israelis do to deal with their brand of terrorists (i.e. rounding up young men who probably had nothing to do with the bombing in question and interrogating or even torturing them to force them to make false confessions). You cannot lump together an entire population and label them as “enemies” simply because a few extremists on their side of the line are making them look bad and are making life where they are go from bad to worse. HOWEVER, when a huge majority of that same population supports suicide bombings to further the goal of forming their own state…and when the education system of that same population indoctrinates their young so that the idea of blowing yourself up to kill a few Jews is one of the highest honors worth attaining…why would I want to support a people who have adopted a culture that glorifies death in that manner?