Samuel Ashner’s letter (“Unfair view on Israel,” page 4, Nov. 7) claiming that Israel “does not kill civilians” was surprising, given that a petition signed by over 1,400 Israeli soldiers states that “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 … It was part of the norm; a habit that an Occupation soldier gets used to doing.”
Ashner’s claim further 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 … taking over civilian houses, extensive damage to civilian property, shooting at ambulances and prevention of medical care to the injured.” Other human rights organizations have said the same. Amnesty International, another human rights group, writes: “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; perhaps he agrees with Israel’s Deputy Defense Minister Ze’ev Boim, who suggested that Palestinians have a “genetic defect.”
Contrary to Ashner’s claims of Israel’s “countless offers” of peace where Palestinians “had wonderful jobs in Israel,” Israel refused even to recognize the existence of Palestinians until 1991, and during the Oslo Accords (1993-2000), Israel accelerated aggression against Palestinians, building illegal settlements in the West Bank and Gaza and systematically destroying the Palestinian economy.
Harvard University Professor Sara Roy writes, “One need only look at the economy of Gaza on the eve of the uprising to realize 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 Territories 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. Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu observed, “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. As Israel recently removed 8,000 settlers from Gaza, 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. Israel’s occupation is possible because of the billions of dollars of U.S. aid Israel receives every year and the dozens of vetoes the U.S. has cast in the United Nations to protect Israel from the implementation of international law.
Since 1967, Israel has controlled all of Palestine, while the indigenous people, the Palestinians, live under permanent occupation, subject to widespread torture and execution. This is a strange definition of a “peace offer.” An actual peace can only develop if the U.S. stands up for human rights and international law and demands an end to Israel’s illegal occupation.
Tarek Fouda CAS ’06
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