Judging by the temperature on campus, the Israel-Palestine conflict is starting to gain traction and attention among students. As a representative for Students for Justice in Palestine, there could hardly be better news. For too long, the legitimate rights of the Palestinians have been submerged under the unfortunate alliance between United States geopolitical strategy in the Middle East and Israel’s project of occupation and expropriation.
Now, the balance has shifted a bit, and for perhaps the first time ever, the Israeli apologists are on the defensive. Unsurprisingly, their response has been to try and silence and shut down opposition groups on campus, like SJP, and downplay or gloss over Israel’s brutal crimes. This is why SJP have chosen to erect a mock apartheid wall: no longer will Israel’s crimes go unmentioned and unknown to campus audiences, especially when the United States is the sole enabler left for the Greater Israel project.
Israel’s apologists claim sensationalism on our part, but they can only claim such so long as students on campus remain ignorant of the facts on the ground.
For one thing, it is difficult to “sensationalize” something that is very real. The real Wall, if part of it were placed in front of Marsh Chapel tomorrow, would tower over the mock wall Students for Justice in Palestine built this week. The real Wall is, in many places, 25 feet tall, often dressed in sniper towers designed to enforce arbitrary buffer zones with live bullets. Moreover, the real Wall extends twice as long as Israel’s recognized border, close to 440 miles in length.
Despite the leaflets Student for Israel pass out, which claim the “Security Fence” (a lesson in the propaganda of semantics) was built to stop Palestinian terror, close to 85 percent of the real Wall is built over Israel’s recognized border, the Green Line, and onto Palestinian land. In this light, the true purpose of the Wall becomes clear: the Wall is built, on the one hand, to insulate the major Israeli settlements – all of which are illegal under international law – from Palestinians living in the West Bank and incorporate them into the project of Greater Israel, and, on the other hand, to harass, frustrate, and intimidate Palestinians into destitution. The Wall’s location is the clue in judging intent. For, if security concerns were the true justification for the Wall, then the Wall would be built on Israel’s recognized border, not inside the West Bank. As B’tselem, the major Israeli human rights group, has said, the Wall’s purpose is the “de facto annexation of parts of the West Bank…[so that] 60 [Israeli] settlements will be situated on the Israeli side.”
Perhaps the most important declaration on the Wall’s illegality came from the International Court of Justice in 2004. There, the Court held that the Wall was illegal under both international humanitarian and international human rights law. The Court, which took into full account Israel’s security justifications, found that the Wall violated Article 49 of the Geneva Conventions, insofar as the Wall’s purpose was to assist the illegal settlement enterprise. The Court ruled that Israel must end construction of the Wall; remove those parts of the Wall built over the Green Line and compensate those Palestinians who suffered economic deprivation due to the illegal positioning of the Wall. Thus far, Israel has refused to abide by any of these commands from the world’s highest-ranking court.
These are not controversial issues. The weight of authority lies on the side of those who condemn the continued expropriation of Palestinian land, the continued demolition of West Bank homes, the harassment and imprisonment of Palestinian youth, and the apartheid conditions in both Israel proper and the West Bank. The entire world condemns Israel’s four-decade long brutal and repressive military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza – outside of the U.S.
But this is also why Israel’s apologists on campus, whether they be Students for Israel, Hillel, or, more recently, the ADL, are so desperate to silence student debate and discussion and accuse Students for Justice in Palestine of “sensationalizing” this issue. Not unlike the case of apartheid in South Africa, the United States is the last man standing, willing to once again sacrifice its moral standing to continue offering critical diplomatic, economic and military support for the brutal Israeli occupation regime. As long as students ignore these issues, Israel’s occupation wins. But when attention is drawn to the conflict and students on campus are organized in defense of Palestinian rights, Israel’s apologists are forced to resort to more back-handed tactics as their defense of Israeli’s occupation is called out for what it is: apologetics for apartheid.
-Tyler Cullis, BU School of Law and member of Students for Justice in Palestine