In his viewpoint “Israel Right to Protect Its Borders” (THE HOYA, Nov. 14, 2006, A3), Mark Lerner argues that “anyone can see from recent negotiations that Israel believes in peace.” Such an assertion is utterly indefensible.
Lerner’s most serious error is that he implicitly takes Palestinian attacks as the beginning of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He assumes that this violence is random and unprovoked. He lets readers assume that Palestinian militants kill Israelis “just for being Jewish.” What he ignores is that Palestinian violence is a response to violence, the violence of occupation. For the past 39 years Israel has occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Despite Israel’s “withdrawal” from Gaza, the Gaza Strip’s borders, air space and access to water remain under Israeli control. It is effectively a cage in which Palestinians are imprisoned, and to which only Israel has the key.
What is essential to understand is that occupation is violence. It is not only a total violence in that the violence is against all Palestinians, but also in that it is constant. At every moment of every day, Palestinians live under this violence.
The violence of Israel’s occupation includes not only brute force, but also many other tools. The latest tactic is the building of a wall that digs deep into the West Bank and which it seems they mean to use to annex a chunk of Palestinian territory, thereby incorporating a number of illegal settlements into Israel. The Georgetown Israel Alliance handed out a flyer on Tuesday denying Israel’s intention to annex territory enveloped by the wall. They offered no evidence to support this, however, and simply made the impotent assertion that a final border would be negotiated.
The wall, like the illegal settlements, is designed to establish “facts on the ground,” concrete evidence of their “legitimate” claim. The purpose of these facts on the ground it seems is to ensure that Israel gets the most land possible. While Israel has, in the past, expanded its illegal settlements in the West Bank against the United States’ wishes, today it argues that since people live in the settlements it would be a crime to have them evacuated. According to article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, it is illegal to transfer your own population to occupied territories.
Today, Israel is erecting the wall, which the International Court of Justice has ruled illegal, in the midst of the West Bank while confiscating Palestinian land, destroying homes and encircling hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. If the wall was really about security it would have been built along the Green Line, the internationally recognized border between Israel and the West Bank, rather than deep inside the West Bank. According to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, the wall will absorb nearly 87 percent of all Israeli settlers in the occupied territories. The objective of establishing permanent facts on the ground clearly ties together the illegal settlements and the wall.
Lerner’s viewpoint appears to rest on the argument that the tragic death of his young friend justifies Israeli violence against Palestinians. While I offer my condolences, I will not employ such a morally vacuous argument. I will not argue that Israeli snipers who gun down young Palestinian girls on their ways to school justify the killing of Israeli school-children. I will not argue that Israeli shells that bury Palestinian babies alive in their sleep, as occurred last week in Beit Hanoun, makes killing Israeli children acceptable. Also, unlike Lerner, I will not single out the victims’ response for condemnation while ignoring the brutality of their provocateur, the Israeli government.
I condemn all attacks against civilians. I condemn simultaneously the occupation of an entire people.
We all accept that people have a right to live freely. The Palestinians, however, suffer under Israel’s brutal occupation and then when they retaliate, Israelis paint themselves as victims. Who is in power? Who chooses to occupy whom? If Israel is truly committed to stopping attacks against Israelis, then it must end the reason these attacks occur. It must end the occupation.
Timothy E. Kaldas is a graduate student in the School of Foreign Service.