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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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"From Midwest to the Middle East" misrepresents the facts
Wednesday 06 August @ 11:16:21 |
 by Liza Burr and Polly Mann
First and foremost, Fields should know that Razowsky and others like her are risking their lives, as members of the admirable International Solidarity Movement, by choosing to be witnesses and peacemakers in the Occupied Territories, nonviolently protecting Palestinians under occupation to whatever degree they can from the recurring onslaughts of Israeli soldiers and settlers. We believe that if Fields were to spend a month or more with the ISM in the field, so to speak, her life and her views would change.
Now to some of the mistaken points made in Fields’ article:
From 1948 to 1967 Jordan controlled the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. The indigenous inhabitants of this area were no less Palestinians then than they are now under Israeli military occupation. Jordan is not Palestine, nor is Palestine Jordan.
The 1967 war was initiated by Israel, not by Egypt or any other Arab state. In a 1982 speech to the Army War College of the Pentagon, Menachem Begin said: “In June 1967 we…had a choice. The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.”
U.N. Security Council resolution 242 prohibits the acquisition of territory by force (war), regardless of how the war originated; in any case we have just seen that the 1967 war from an Israeli standpoint was aggressive, not defensive. The Israeli military occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights (in addition to the annexation of East Jerusalem) is entirely illegal, i.e., contrary to international law. Furthermore, international law prohibits the settlement by an occupying power of the territory it occupies. In other words, ALL the Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories are illegal and should be vacated. There is NO legal parity between the Palestinian inhabitants of these areas and Israeli occupier-settlers.
At Oslo, Fields argues, Palestinians were “offered control of more than 90 percent of the disputed [sic] lands…” In fact, they were offered “a set of disconnected pieces of territory amounting to only 80 percent of the remaining 22 percent of historic Palestine,” according to Phyllis Bennis, fellow at the Institute of Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. Perhaps Fields is unaware that the Occupied Territories in toto comprise only 22 percent of the land that was Palestine before 1948. Robert Malley, an American negotiator under former President Clinton, denied that “Israel’s offer met most if not all of the Palestinians’ legitimate aspirations” (see Bennis, “Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict,” p. 45), including reasonable access to water, a shared Jerusalem, and the right of return (or compensation for loss of land and property).
Fields defends the “security fence” (aka separation wall) as a necessary consequence of “Arab terrorism.” It is legitimate to define acts by Palestinians that target and kill or injure Israeli civilians within Israel as acts of terrorism. Most Palestinians oppose attacks on civilians, and most have never participated in such acts. What about the other side? Official Israeli government policy translates into daily and nightly violence against Palestinians in the Territories. Far from affording “Arabs [Palestinians] human rights,” Israel routinely subjects them to killing in cold blood, arrest and detention without trial, systematic torture in prison, demolition of their homes, confiscation of their farmland and livelihood, environmental pollution, and more. All too often children are victims. In an article entitled “A Gaza Diary,” published in Harper’s Magazine in October 2001, Christopher Hedges wrote, “Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered…but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.” On July 20, Israeli journalist Gideon Levy described in Israel’s leading newspaper, Ha’aretz, the arrests of Palestinians by the Israeli Defense Forces “night after night in operations that frequently involve unnecessary killing,” and the “unnecessary and infuriating demolition” of Palestinian homes that continues day after day. (Incidentally, according to the same article, by that date no Palestinian prisoners had been released, contrary to Fields’ contention near the top of her final column.)
This is state terrorism. Does Fields think that young Palestinians, who should have everything to live for (like their Israeli counterparts) and would in a just society, have an innate desire to become suicide bombers? We may rightly condemn their actions against civilians, but we must also understand what drives a human being to follow such a path. More than a year ago, an Israeli and a Palestinian psychiatrist independently defined a suicide bomber as someone whose father is powerless.
Finally, to cast Palestinians as “anti-Semitic” is to impose a European mindset on a Semitic people whose antagonism to the Israeli government and military has nothing whatsoever to do with racism. In fact, the blatant form of racism in Israel today consists of Israeli racism against Palestinian Arabs. Any dispassionate observer at any army checkpoint (and in various other contexts) can attest to it. An Israeli expatriate woman who spoke at a conference that one of us attended in March stated unequivocally that Israeli racism against Palestinians is “rampant.” In relation to the Israeli reign of terror over Palestinians under occupation, she compared the majority of her fellow citizens to “good Germans.”
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