Last week the Israeli air force bombed Iran military installations near the Syrian capital of Damascus. The previous week Israel destroyed an Iranian weapons depot in Syria. These attacks on Iranian bases seem to have three purposes. Escalating tension with Iran will allow Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to declare a state of emergency that will help him in his reelection bid and may manipulate President Trump into keeping U.S. troops in the region in defense of Israel. But the larger purpose, as it has been with Israeli policy for the last fifty years, is to solidify Israeli control over occupied Palestinians lands on the West Bank. It is still not clear how far Trump and the United States will go in support of Israel’s actions.
In July 1967, former Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion warned Israelis that prolonged occupation of Arab territory seized during the Six-Day War threatened the democratic ideals of the nation. Israel has now occupied some of those Arab territories for over fifty years, seizing land for settlements, and holding millions of people in perpetual limbo without basic political rights. Arabs now make up 40% of the population of Israel and the Occupied Territories.
Ben-Gurion’s fears for the soul of Israeli democracy were realized in July 2018 when its rightwing hyper-nationalist government passed a law declaring that only Jews have the right of self-determination in the country and removing Arabic as an official language in the country, although it is the first language of 20% of the population of Israel proper. The law also declared “the development of Jewish settlement” a national value and that the Israeli government policy is to “encourage and promote its establishment.” While it did not specify expanded Jewish settlement in Arab areas of the West Bank, that is clearly the intent.
On Sunday, December 9, 2018, a group called FLAME (Facts & Logic About the Middle East) published an ad on the second page of the New York Times Sunday Review equating the murderous attack at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh with any “attacks on Zionism” and declaring that anti-Zionism is both anti-Semitic and racist.
I started, and rewrote, this article multiple times during the last year months. As events in Israel, blockaded Gaza, and the occupied West Bank, faded from public attention, I put it aside. Then Israel did something else outrageous. On September 28, Israeli soldiers killed seven unarmed Palestinians, including two teenage boys, at ongoing protests at the Israel-Gaza border. The boys were age 12 and 14. Their deaths brought the total number of Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers at border demonstrations between March and September to over 200. These deaths hardly caused a ripple in international news. The New York Times picked up the story from a report by Reuters and published a brief article without any images on the bottom of page A10.
In May 2018, as many as sixty-four Palestinian protestors demanding an end to the Israeli blockade of Gaza and the right to return to homes their families were driven from in 1948, were murdered by Israeli troops as they protested along a border fence built by Israel to separate itself from Gaza. Thousands of others were wounded when Israeli troops who fired on protesters using live ammunition. Israeli officials blamed the deaths on Hamas, the Palestinian political organization that governs the region.
By mid-June, unless you were following closely, the story had disappeared from newspapers and television, but the blockade of Gaza continued. In July, Israel tightened the blockade barring the import of all goods into Gaza except food, medicine and “humanitarian equipment” and all exports from Gaza. The world, distracted by other events, including the World Cup, largely ignored the new Israeli actions. Empowered by the lack of global response, the Israeli government passed the law declaring that Jews had the exclusive right to self-determination in the country.
On Friday, July 20, Israel escalated attacks on Gaza again. In collective punishment, the Israeli air force bombed urban areas after a Palestinian sniper killed an Israeli soldier. The chief spokesman for the Israeli military blamed Hamas for the Israeli attack because of escalating tension caused by the protests along the border fence. BBC reported that more than 130 Palestinians were killed and 15,000 injured by Israeli forces since the start of the May protests. The soldier who was killed on July 20 was the first Israeli fatality.
In August, the Israel secret service murdered a Syrian rocket scientist. It was at least the fourth assassination conducted by Israel forces in the last three years. In each case the murdered person was a scientist or engineer and the attack took place inside another country in violation of its sovereignty.
A new road, opened this month, built by the Israeli government on the Palestinian West Bank, has a 30-foot high dividing wall made of concrete and metal that separates Palestinian and Israeli drivers. The Israeli side connects settlements with Jerusalem. The Palestinian side keeps them out of the city. Israel is both a terrorist and an apartheid state.
Back in May, New York Times opinion columns by Bret Stephens and Thomas Friedman blamed Palestinians for their own “miseries.” Real Time host Bill Maher and panelist Bari Weiss, another New York Times opinion writer, accused Palestinians in Gaza of using women and children as “human shields,” exonerating Israeli shooters and the Trump administration for provoking protests by moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. Stephens, Maher and Weiss were echoing the official Trump White House line. At a press briefing, Trump’s Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah declared “The responsibility for these tragic deaths rests squarely with Hamas” because “Israel has the right to defend itself.”
A recent op-ed in the New York Times charged that some American Jews were unhappy with Israeli transience, war mongering, and its apartheid treatment of Arabs because they zoomed in too closely on Israeli actions when they should zoom out and focus on Iranian behavior. However, other than zooming out, the op-ed proposed no solutions other than continued Israeli occupation of Palestine.
As tension built in June 1967, my high school friends and I volunteered with the Jewish Agency to go to Israel to defend it from invasion. Because of the short duration of the war we never went. By 1973 I had come to agree with David Ben-Gurion and could not support the occupation of Palestinian lands. I support the right of Israel to exist, as a “Jewish state” if that is the will of a majority of its citizens. I also support a two-state solution, the withdrawal of Israeli settlements, and a boycott of Israel until it permits the establishment of a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza. I believe the international community, but especially the United States, should withdraw all military and economic support from Israel until a Palestinian state is established.
There will be many issues to resolve, but they are resolvable. Palestinians claiming land rights in Israel should be compensated. International investment is needed in Gaza and the West Bank to help Palestine become a viable nation. The future of Jerusalem as both the capital of Israel and Palestine and as the holy site for three major religions will need to be decided through future negotiations.
In her Martin Luther King Day op-ed, Michelle Alexander cited King’s courage in challenging the U.S. war in Vietnam despite sharp criticism from many of the Civil Rights movement’s supporters. She called on contemporary politicians, many of who are beholding to powerful pro-Israel lobbyists for financial support, to take a similar courageous stand and oppose U.S. complicity with the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and apartheid policies within the State of Israel itself.
My father, who died in 2014, was an ardent supporter of Israel who visited regularly. When we discussed the situation there and my views he found it nearly impossible to believe that Jews would do such things to Arabs. Unfortunately they are. To recognize this does not make me either an anti-Semite or a racist. It only makes me angry and sad.
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