The Israeli occupation of Palestine

Dear Daily Free Press Editor: Please consider the following letter for publication. I realize that the issue has already been discussed extensively on the pages of the Daily Free Press, but my last letter was not published and I believe my letter makes points that have yet to be raised, and is therefore worthy of publication. If it is too long I would be happy to shorten it. Thanks, Tarek Fouda fouda@bu.edu 617 669 4145 CAS ’06

I was surprised to read Samuel Ashner’s letter claiming that Israel “does not kill civilians.” This claim puts Ashner at odds with over 1400 Israeli reserve soldiers, who, refusing to continue serving in the Occupied Territories, signed the “refusnik pledge” stating “We shall not continue to fight beyond the 1967 borders in order to dominate, expel, starve and humiliate an entire people.” One such soldier, Shamai Lebowitz, wrote “As a young soldier serving in the Israeli army, I was ordered to commit grave human rights violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. My platoon meted out collective punishment on Palestinian communities, shot and killed unarmed Palestinian civilians, and enforced prolonged curfews on Palestinian villages…These acts were not rare occurrences, nor were they the result of overly cruel soldiers. It was part of the norm; a habit that an Occupation soldier gets used to doing.”

Ashner’s claim also puts him at odds with B’tselem, the largest Israeli human rights organization, which wrote “In every city and refugee camp that they have entered, IDF soldiers have repeated the same pattern: indiscriminate firing and the killing of innocent civilians, intentional harm to water, electricity and telephone infrastructure, taking over civilian houses, extensive damage to civilian property, shooting at ambulances and prevention of medical care to the injured.” Other human rights organization have said the same. Wrote Amnesty International, “For many years, Amnesty International has documented serious human rights violations by Israeli forces — unlawful killings; torture and ill- treatment; arbitrary detention; unfair trials; collective punishments.” Ashner apparently believes that all Palestinians, even two year old children, are terrorists; maybe he agrees with Israel’s Deputy Defense Minister Ze’ev Boim, who suggested that Palestinians have a “genetic defect.”

Equally absurd is Ashner’s claims of Israel’s “countless offers” of peace. Israel refused even to recognize the existence of Palestinians, the indigenous people of the land, until 1991. 1993 saw the beginning of the Oslo Accords, the purpose of which was to create a Palestinian entity that would be “less than a state,” in the words of Prime Minister at the time Yitzhak Rabin. Between 1993 and 2000, Israel doubled the number of illegal settlements and checkpoints in the occupied territories and enforced months long curfews and closures; contrary to Ashner’s claim that Palestinians had “wonderful jobs” in Israel during this time, Harvard Professor Sara Roy wrote recently: “One need only look at the economy of Gaza on the eve of the uprising to realise that the devastation is not recent. By the time the second intifada broke out, Israel’s closure policy had been in force for seven years, leading to unprecedented levels of unemployment and poverty.”

Rather than ending the occupation, Israel aimed through the Oslo Accords to maintain it, keeping the land and resources of the occupied West Bank and Gaza while avoiding the horror of granting equal rights to the people who lived there. This plan was not unlike the Bantustan project attempted by apartheid South Africa, prompting Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu to remark, “I am a black South African, and if I were to change the names, a description of what is happening in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank could describe events in South Africa.”

Nor have recent events marked a change in Israel’s rejectionism. As Israel removed 8000 settlers from Gaza last summer, Ariel Sharon’s advisor Dov Weisglass explained that “the meaning of the disengagement is the freezing of the peace process…effectively, the whole package called a Palestinian state…has been removed indefinitely from our agenda.” Israel still controls the land, resources, and air space of Gaza, and has since moved 14,000 new settlers into the occupied West Bank, further preventing the possibility of an independent Palestine.

The intended end result of this is that Israel controls all of the land of Palestine, from the Jordan River to the Meditteranean, while the indigenous people, the Palestinians, live under permanent occupation, subject to torture or execution if they challenge this injustice. This is a strange definition of a “peace offer.” An actual peace can only develop if America stops financing Israel’s rejectionism and demands an end to Israel’s illegal occupation.