Earlier this month, as Israeli bulldozers sought to raze olive groves in the forgotten Palestinian village of Al-Walaja, many thoughts raced through my mind. At one point, the best I could muster to a young soldier intent on carrying out his cruel order was to exclaim, "Why are you doing this? Shame on you." More than a shame, it is a calamity.
Unquestioned orders threaten to make apartheid in the West Bank the norm. As the world watches, and responds with "proximity talks," we are forced into ever-smaller Bantustans and subjected to an abusive system of law that favors Jewish settlers and discriminates against Palestinians.
To the people of Al-Walaja, residing in idyllic hills just west of Bethlehem, renewed Palestinian-Israeli talks matter little with Israeli bulldozers muscling into their olive groves. Israel's violent 1948 expansion forced villagers off most of their lands and now Israel wants the rest.
As we mark the Nakba this month, the catastrophe of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, Walajans cling to what little land remains to them. They see the West Bank and East Jerusalem dotted with 250 colonial settlements housing over 450,000 Jewish settlers.
The Israeli government's rampant settlement expansion has foreclosed on the two-state solution. Who will have the power to force these modern-day colonizers to comply with international law and depart their illegal colonies? It is not surprising that the talks between the most right-wing government in Israel's history and the weakest and most divided Palestinian leadership will not advance international law or human rights. Palestinian Bantustans will be passed off as a state with US blessing.
Rejecting Israel's imposition of apartheid, many have joined us in advocating for a multi-ethnic, multi-religious society with a constitution and a bill of rights. Nearly three decades in the US - much of it in the American South where such equality was once thought impossible - strengthens my resolve to challenge Israeli military personnel seizing Palestinian land and to press for one state with equal rights for all.
Israel wants West Bank land but does not want the people who come with it; a program established decades ago of maximizing geography and minimizing Palestinian demography. Repeating the ethnic cleansing of 1948 would be difficult, leading Israeli planners to do it in other ways: constructing settlements on confiscated lands, demolishing homes, and building a wall around the built-up area of villages to deprive people access to their remaining lands and destroy the local economy. The message to villagers is one of Israeli control, loss of Palestinian agency, and to get out.
Instead, we resisted. Physically weak, but buoyed by justice and international law, we employed Gandhian methods to slow their work and highlight the injustice of their actions. Once detained, I spent long hours in interrogations, conversations with soldiers, and waiting. I drew strength from the civil rights movement in the 1960s and my own experiences working against South African apartheid. The words of Henry David Thoreau, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, Mahatma Gandhi, Desmond Tutu, and AbdelGafar Khan echoed in my mind.
I also drew strength from those arrested with me, both Christian and Muslim. Two young brothers from Al-Walaja had endured pepper spray, billy clubs, and even a blow with a rifle butt yet showed no bitterness. They talked to soldiers and tried to convince them. They asked: "What would you do if someone uprooted a tree that your grandparents had cultivated and that your life depended on?" The young soldiers had few answers.
It came as a revelation to these soldiers that there are seven million refugees and displaced Palestinians yearning to go home. It was a revelation that international law rejects land expropriation and bringing settlers into occupied territory (including East Jerusalem).
While we cannot reach all soldiers, civil disobedience is working. A nonviolent campaign of boycott, divestment, and sanctions is taking hold despite strong opposition. In response to our success, vicious violence is being unleashed against peaceful demonstrators by an increasingly isolated Israeli government.
We are willing to pay the price of popular resistance. Yet it is dismaying that the US government gives overwhelming support to a state adhering to supremacist ideologies long discredited by the successful American civil rights movement and anti-apartheid struggle. Governance based on ethnic or religious superiority should have no place in the 21st century.
A government that intentionally and methodically excludes us because we are Christians and Muslims in a land now controlled by "a Jewish state" ought not to receive billions of dollars from American taxpayers. The Obama administration says it wants peace to advance US national interests. If this rhetoric is to result in any change from previous administrations, we must all insist on ending discrimination. No durable peace can come without justice to the displaced and discriminated against Palestinians in Al-Walaja and elsewhere.
Mazin Qumsiyeh, PhD, is author of the book "Sharing the Land of Canaan: Human Rights and the Israeli-Palestinian Struggle" and the forthcoming "Popular Resistance in Palestine: A History of Hope and Empowerment."
Can you please not be so biased in your coverage of the middle east?
Israel's idea of peace has always involved far more land than their numbers warranted.
Israel has simply taken too much for a two state solution to be viable.
"Jewish State" does not have to mean "Jewish Majority". There are probably a dozen ways to make Jews safe without keeping so many Palestinians in the equivalent of ghettos.
Thats right. Each country ethnically cleansed less than 500,00 EACH.
But altogether Arab countries cleansed about +/-800,000 Jews from their lands.
The difference:
Disposed Jews from Palestine and the Middle East were welcomed and absorbed by Israel.
Dispossessed Arabs. from Palestine are savagely oppressed by Arab brothers.
...........................HAVE A NICE WAR FOLKS........................................
Name any other country where that many different types of people are represented.
Name any other country where it would be possible for Arabs to hold seats in any elected body.
Jewish state or not, seriously, read the history of the place more closely.
Now, if you could have absolutely ANYTHING in the world, just one wish, what would it be?
Topple Israel?
Ah, I thought so.
http://flapsblog.com/wp-content/uploads/Mohammed-Cartoon-Bomb.jpg
Enjoy, unfreenation.
http://sacredearth.org/DanishCartoons%20best%20and%20worst.jpg
Palestinains who hypocritically marching now, met Arafat with flowers and jubilation when he turend down Palestinain state at Camp David.
Palestinains who hypocritically marching now, participated and facilitated a wave of terrorism against Israeli women and children.
Why didn't they march against their own militants blowing up Israeli buses, kindergarten and cafes?
Simple-- they supported and participated in terrorist war on Israel.
And now that the Security Barrier has defeated their bloodthuirsty designs-- suddenly ... Hurrah!!!"we're marching for peace and co-existence."
Yeah... right.
I look upon the approaching 'Free Gaza' fleet as a beautiful paradigm of the civil disobedience you highlight - //civil disobedience is working. A nonviolent campaign of boycott, divestment, and sanctions is taking hold despite strong opposition. In response to our success, vicious violence is being unleashed against peaceful demonstrators by an increasingly isolated Israeli government.//
Today Amnesty International ust released it's annual report - they state that the U.S. and members of the European Union had obstructed international justice by using their positions on the UN Security Council to shield Israel from accountability for war crimes allegedly committed during last year's Gaza war.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/amnesty-u-s-europe-shielding-israel-over-gaza-war-crimes-1.292505
The Latest news from Palestine indicates that Israel is preparing a wide scale attack on the Gaza strip. Several Israeli leaders repeated the Israeli intention to launch a wide scale war against Gaza.
Not only Israel attacked Palestinian and international Christian pilgrims in the Good Friday, its planes attacked several places in Gaza strip which is considered by some analysts as an Israeli test to the resistance forces. But the spokesman of the Palestinian resistance in Gaza emphasized the readiness of the Palestinian freedom fighters to defend Gaza if Israel attacks. Last year Gaza was the theatre of a huge Israeli genocide which was condemned by the whole world. The UN Goldstone commission found Israel guilty of crimes against humanity, but the international community has not so far done any serious step to punish Israel for its responsibility of murdering 1600 Palestinians including 600 babies and children.
It must also be remembered that Israel has been imposing a tight siege on the one and half million Palestinians in Gaza since 2006, rejecting all the appeals to lift the siege to allow medicine and food to flow freely into the strip
http://www.aljazeerah.info/Opinion%20Editorials/2010/April/12%20o/Will%20Israel%20Attack%20Gaza%20Again%20By%20Salim%20Nazzal.htm
In 2009, Christian community activists within the West Bank wrote an open letter asking Pope Benedict XVI to postpone his scheduled trip to Israel unless the government changes its treatment.They highlighted improved access to places of worship and ending the taxation of church properties as key concerns. The Pope began his five-day visit to Israel & the Palestinian Territories on Sunday May 10, planning to express support for the region's Christians. In response to Palestinian public statements, Israeli FM spokesman Yigal Palmor criticized the political polarization of the papal visit, remarking that "[i]t will serve the cause of peace much better if this visit is taken for what it is, a pilgrimage, a visit for the cause of peace and unity".
In 2009, Berlanty Azzam, a Palestinian Christian student from Gaza, was expelled from Bethlehem and was not allowed to continue her studying, after there was only two months left for her degree. She said the Israeli military handcuffed her, blindfolded her, and left her waiting for hours at a checkpoint on her way back from a job interview in Ramallah. She describes the incident as "frightening" and claims to have been treated like a criminal, and denied her education by Israel, only because she is a Palestinian Christian from Gaza.
The United States State Department's 2006 report on religious freedom criticized both Israel for its restrictions on travel to Christian holy cites. It also reported that it gives preferential treatment in basic civic services to Jews. The report stated that, generally, the ordinary Muslim and Christian citizens enjoy good relations in contrast to the "strained" Jewish and non-Jewish relations. A 2005 BBC report described Muslim and Christian relations as "peaceful" as well.
The Arab Human Rights Association, an Arab NGO in Israel, has stated that Israeli authorities have denied Palestinian Christians in Israel access to holy places, prevented repairs needed to preserve historic holy sites, and carried out physical attacks on religious leaders
You're thoughtlessly parroting propaganda heard elsewhere.
Instead, visit Haaretz website, a prestigeous and popular Isralei newspaper.
http://www.haaretz.com/
And read wide and divergent set of opinions on the subject of Palestinains.
In fact Israel has more NGOS helping Palestinains than the rest of oppressed Arab world combined.
You're entitled to repeating other people's r own opinions, but you're not entitled to present it as fact.
"After the death of Nurit Peled-Elhanan's 13-year-old daughter, Smadar, in a Palestinian suicide bomber's attack in 1997, she became an outspoken critic of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. "My little girl was murdered because she was an Israeli by a young man who was humiliated, oppressed and desperate to the point of suicide and murder, just because he was a Palestinian. Now their blood is mixed on the stones of Jerusalem that have long been indifferent to children's blood. We, who were not wise enough to free our children from the grip of hate and racism before they found their final rest, need to look at their mutilated bodies and innocent faces, and ask ourselves, with the poetesse Anna Akhmatova, Why does that streak of blood rip the petal of their cheek?"
Haaretz is an excellent newspaper which states a variety of opinions. There are many Israeli groups, such as the Israeli Committee Against House Demolition, working for a just solution. Many Arab countries, such as Egypt, have horrible human rights violations and the US supporting the dictators in power. This does not excuse what Israel is doing.
Palestine" is no more. Call it a "peace process" or a "road map"; blame it on Barack Obama's weakness, his pathetic, childish admission – like an optimistic doctor returning a sick child to its parents without hope of recovery – that a Middle East peace was "more difficult" to reach than he imagined.
But the dream of a "two-state" Israeli-Palestinian solution, a security-drenched but noble settlement to decades of warfare between Israelis and Palestinians is as good as dead.
Related articles
•In the West Bank's stony hills, Palestine is slowly dying
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•Robert Fisk’s World: Israel can no longer ignore the existence of the first Holocaust
Search the news archive for more stories
Both the United States and Europe now stand idly by while the Israeli government effectively destroys any hope of a Palestinian state; even as you read these words, Israel's bulldozers and demolition orders are destroying the last chance of peace; not only in the symbolic centre of Jerusalem itself but – strategically, far more important – in 60 per cent of the vast, biblical lands of the occupied West Bank, in that largest sector in which Jews now outnumber Muslims two to one.
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-why-does-the-us-turn-a-blind-eye-to-israeli-bulldozers-1883670.html
The problem is the one-sided over-simplistic approach to this conflict. The official Israeli government position lacks credibility. But it is naive to make proposals that are completely divorced from the reality of what is going on in the region as a whole. Both Israelis and especially Palestinians are suffering from an intolerable status quo, and both have bankrupt leadership. People of goodwill on both sides need to be honest and come clean about the defects within their own communities and in the region as a whole. Perhaps that is asking too much for people living under occupation. However it is not asking too much for gullible people in the West who don't know the languages or the history of the region to not jump to conclusions, simplistic solutions and ahistorical claims that the current balance of power has always existed in the past and will continue into the future. Ignoring global anti-Semitism is also not particularly helpful either.
Yes, the palestinians have done a very good job of ethnically cleansing the land of most Christians.
Islamic mafia' accused of persecuting Holy Land Christians
By Harry de Quetteville in Bethlehem
Telegragh.co.uk
Christians in the Holy Land have handed a dossier detailing incidents of violence and intimidation by Muslim extremists to Church leaders in Jerusalem, one of whom said it was time for Christians to "raise our voices" against the sectarian violence.
The dossier includes 93 alleged incidents of abuse by an "Islamic fundamentalist mafia" against Palestinian Christians, who accused the Palestinian Authority of doing nothing to stop the attacks.
The dossier also includes a list of 140 cases of apparent land theft, in which Christians in the West Bankwere allegedly forced off their land by gangs backed by corrupt judicial officials. ...
http://www.c4rpme.net/bin/articles.cgi?Cat=christians&Subcat=cpa&ID=8
The manager of Gaza's only Christian bookshop, who was abducted on Saturday by suspected Muslim extremists, was found dead yesterday. Medical officials said Rami Ayyad, 31, had been shot and stabbed. He was the father of two small children and his wife is pregnant with their third.
He is reported to have received several death threats since his Protestant bible shop was fire bombed six months ago,...
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/gazas-christian-bookseller-killed-396283.html
No mention that the Christians of the land point the finger at Israel for causing misery to every single one of them, every day.
No mention that the Israeli government has a history of trying to start conflicts between Christians and Muslims.
Nope, none of that will ever pass your lips, all that will come forth is the message as writ in Tel Aviv.
Christians are not persecuted by Israel.
Now if we turn to Iraq and Christians..........
or for that matter any Middle Eastern nation and Christians........
You get it
As for Jewish students here this what I would recommend - go to the region and see for yourself. Also learning Arabic and Hebrew - to the point where you can read a book in Arabic on Jewish history and a book in Hebrew on Palestinian history - and reading and watching the media, and looking at the type of comments that get posted by readers will give you a better idea of the obstacles to peace.