The news these days is so disheartening, filled with word of dead Israelis from fatal surprise suicide attacks and dead Palestinians in deadly Israeli security missions.
How much have we really learned from history?
The past week’s news says “very little,” an answer that makes me feel mortally wounded.
I love Israel. I have traveled to the Jewish homeland three times, and I am learning Hebrew in preparation for a more extended stay in the future. But the idea that Israelis can do no wrong, a perspective voiced repeatedly by my own Boston University Jewish friends, is as irrational as the idea that all Palestinians are victims of unreasonable Israeli aggression. The popularly espoused idea that Palestinians are free of blame is ridiculous.
Both sides are culpable. Both peoples have a legitimate claim to the land and both peoples have committed atrocities over the past 17 months.
The only solution to the current conflict is peace, with Israel rightfully retaining its right to a Jewish homeland and Palestinians rightfully creating a state of their own next door.
Peace is the only choice.
The last 17 months of fighting have not changed any facts. Rather, they have only resulted in the deaths of more than 1,300 people, Israeli and Palestinian, man and woman, adult and child, soldier and civilian. Further argument over each peoples’ right to the land will only mean more death and destruction in a region that has known far too much human suffering over the last 50 years.
Palestinians must realize Israel is a fact. More than 50 years of modern society and official statehood have made the state a fact that cannot be denied. The Jewish people deserve a homeland, partially because of the atrocities committed against us throughout our history, and more importantly, because of the lack of any other country where Jews feel comfortable that they will not be attacked or victimized by their neighbors.
Christians dominate the populations of countless countries. More than 40 countries boast a Muslim majority. Hindus hold the majority in one of the most populace countries in the world. Jews call a sliver of land smaller than New Jersey their home — a small safe haven for a religion that has consistently been victimized while constantly contributing positively to our global society in important and irreplaceable ways. We deserve a homeland and Israel, the place of our biblical heritage, is where that homeland rightfully belongs.
But Israelis must also realize Palestinians are a fact. Jews, people who have been denied so many times by others, should not fail to recognize that they, too, chased people from land to make a new home for themselves.
The Israeli right must realize that they cannot eliminate the Palestinian people or further drive them away. With 3.8 million Palestinians living within the borders of the Gaza Strip and West Bank, they, too, are a fact that must not be denied.
Americans must also face the facts. Though we reside more than 10,000 miles from the Middle East, its real proximity was made brutally clear little more than six months ago. With President George Bush’s administration pondering an expansion of the war on terrorism, Americans must recognize the inherent danger in attacking new Middle East targets without resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Iraq and Iran are both lead by autocrats who have historically deflected their peoples’ criticism of their own brutal regimes upon Israel.
Arabs in many Middle-Eastern countries do not see the results of Palestinian suicide attacks on their heavily biased television stations. They are not taught in school that Israel has been attacked in each decade of its existence by anti-Semitic Arab powers who do not recognize it as a legitimate state and whose goal is its elimination.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict only fuels the Middle East fire, giving backwards Arab leaders footage of Israeli soldiers attacking disorganized and unofficial, though lethal, Palestinian attacks.
And with the increasing threat of nuclear power in the region, further American attacks, while well intentioned, could produce disastrous results. Taking away the totatalitarian rulers’ easy fuel and their ability to garner support among their own people will exponentially diminish the potential for the eruption of what could be the deadliest violence in history. The Bush administration’s first priority in the Middle East should be Israeli-Palestinian peace.
A hasty peace will not do. A lasting peace in the Middle East will not happen within a month or a year. The Bush administration must not succumb to the American desire for immediate gratification.
A lasting peace will require the confidence of both peoples — Israeli confidence that Palestinians will not take advantage of a more prominent world position to further victimize Israelis and Palestinian confidence that Israel will treat the Palestinian people as equals. It will require compromise on both sides — Israelis ending settlements and relinquishing a fraction of Jerusalem and most of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and Palestinians giving up their claims of Palestinian right of return and full control of the Old City of Jerusalem.
I worry daily about a situation that threatens to ruin my hope of someday settling in the Jewish homeland — a land of Jewish freedom and success.
Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Muslims must realize that, while not a simple road to travel, the road to peace is the only choice.
“I don’t know how the despair can be vanquished, how the fear can be annihilated, how the hatred can be uprooted from the hearts of these children of Abraham,” said Rabbi Josh Zweiback, recently traveling in Israel. “I only know that we are not permitted to stop caring, to stop praying, to stop hoping for a return to sanity, for a better day, for peace.”
Joshua Karlin-Resnick, a freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences, is the assistant news editor for The Daily Free Press.
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