1 post tagged “palestine”

So another round of peace talks opened in Annapolis today--or were they talks about talking? An NPR report this afternoon interviewed a Palestinian woman who held up a piece of bread and complained the peace talks are always just words. "They bring us no bread," she exclaimed. Now, I have nothing against talking. We have to try. But we also need to be committed to the process and fairly adjudicate, to ensure not just peace, but justice. There can be no peace without justice.

How can anyone who listens to the news not feel dismayed by what is going on? As the most powerful nation in the world, do we use our considerable global influence to protect those whose lands and rights were and continue to be taken from them? Our media smoothes it over so blithely so as not to ruffle powerful feathers, but let's be honest, that is what Zionism is all about. It is a quasi-religious homeland ideology that conveniently ignores the precious fact that other people were living there and called the land home for generations. Now if Israel were making an honest effort to live in peace and equality with the Palestinians, that would be one thing. But they are not. Israel discriminates. It is a blatantly unjust government which took the land by military force and increasingly marginalizes the Arabs. Israel assassinates political opposition, leveling houses with air-to-ground missiles, then has the audacity to cry foul at the "terrorists" on their doorstep.

Now, terrorism, be it suicide bombers at bus stops or hijacked airplanes crashed into skyscrapers, is a terrible thing. It is a terrible thing for people to die like that, and I am not defending acts of terrorism or saying they are justified. But we have to be honest about it: Terrorism, to a large extent, is just warfare by another name. It is a label that large, powerful nations use to point the finger at weaker opposition they particularly despise. The difference between terrorism and asymetric warfare is largely symantic. A terrorist is someone we hate. A guerilla fighter is someone we respect. After all, we define terrorism as attacks on civilian targets, but how many countless civilians are killed and civilian property destroyed by conventional armies and air attacks? My knowledge of Africa leads me to make a rather uncharitable comparison: Before black rule, the aggressively unjust Apartheid governments of South Africa and Rhodesia (what became Zimbabwe) routinely labeled the armed struggle against white rule as "terrorists." It worries me how freely we use the word in America these days. 

Walk on Water

Over the break, a friend showed me Walk on Water, an award-winning film from Israel which includes some implicit criticism of Israel's policy and attitudes toward Palestinians. In one bit of dialoge, a German tourist asks his Israeli guide about the suicide bombings, if he ever wonders what the Palestinians are so upset about that they would blow themselves up. "They are animals," the Israeli answers, "there is nothing to think about." 

Our decidely one-sided Israel policy has irked me for years, but sorry to say, I have never done anything about it. One of my friends from Walla Walla recently returned, however, from a peacemaking mission to Israel / Palestine. He tells tales of Palestinians who struggle to find drinking water in their wells, while just across the fence, Israeli homes are drying up the aquifer with their green lawns. Check out the blog from his trip at http://palestine-delegation.blogspot.com/.