I’ve just returned from a two-week
visit to Israel and the Occupied Territories, a land dear to me.
As a Jewish person, it’s a part of the world that I’ve
long held an inherent connection to, a connection that has only
been strengthened through many wonderful experiences and friendships
that arose during my time spent living and working on a kibbutz
there. I can say the same of this most recent visit, perhaps far
more than before, although under very different circumstances.
I went as part of a Canadian delegation
sent by Alternatives, a
Montreal-based NGO, to monitor and assess living conditions for
the 3.1 million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza
Strip, now in their 35th year under Israeli military occupation.
The consequences on the ground have not gone unnoticed in Israel,
where Michael Ben Yar, Israel’s Attorney General from 1993-1996,
writing in the country’s leading newspaper, can lament that
“we enthusiastically chose to become a colonial society,
ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring
settlers from Israel to the occupied territories, engaging in
theft”, effectively establishing an “oppressive regime
[that] exists to this day.”
Indeed, these conditions have only endured
throughout the Oslo "peace process" pursued over the
past decade, and not incidentally. The 1993 Oslo Accords between
Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization "were
founded on a neo-colonialist basis" as Israeli scholar Schlomo
Ben Ami wrote in 1998, before he joined the Israeli government.
Its "economic protocol," he explained, imposed almost
total dependence on Israel,” ensuring that "when there
will finally be peace between us and the Palestinians, there will
still be a situation of dependence, of a structured lack of equality
between the two entities." Ben Ami’s (uncritical) view,
by no means uncommon, is particularly noteworthy given his later
role as Ehud Barak’s Foreign Minister and chief negotiator
at the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks at Camp David in July
2000, whose failure has been widely blamed on the Palestinian
leadership that refused to consummate the basis that had been
established at Oslo.
The experience of seeing an entire people
subjected to the rule of this regime is a deeply disturbing one;
so much so, in fact, that it can feel simply unfathomable, impossible
to understand. There were so many moments where what I saw in
front of me, what I heard in countless stories of humiliation
and loss, did not seem real; not possible to have been carried
out and endured by fellow human beings.
A few hours after Israeli troops withdrew
from a five-day siege of
Nablus, which kept 250,000 residents locked inside their homes
under twenty-four hour curfew, we visited Balata, a refugee camp
on the outskirts of the historic city. There we saw an elderly
woman lying amidst the ruins of her home, destroyed the previous
day by an Apache helicopter, sobbing and mourning for killed family
members, occasionally attempting to recover some lost possession
that might have been buried somewhere beneath her. The neighboring
lot was an even larger pile of chaos, bits of clothes and furniture
scattered indiscriminately, smoke and dust rising over the ruins.
It was unimaginable to believe that this had once been the home
of a family of seven, who were killed all together as they sat
in their living room, now only a crevice under the mountain of
rubble on which we stood.
A few blocks away, the youth center of the camp had been totally
pillaged, its windows broken, the walls smashed in. A large trophy
case was kicked over, the ground awash with shards of glass and
the medals and trophies once proudly displayed stacks of little
soccer uniforms buried beneath them. The computers where children
had done their homework or played on the internet now smashed
to pieces, desk chairs piled over on top of them.
Many areas that were spared the outright
force of tanks and helicopters were still sights of humiliation
and interference with Palestinian daily life. We see saw this
at the numerous Israeli-manned checkpoints scattered about the
territories, which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians must
pass through every day, be they on their way to work, to school,
to visit family members, to go shopping, trying to go anywhere
outside their town. The checkpoints often keep people in long
lines for hours on end, sometimes even days. There are no guarantees
that the long waits in the hot sun will be worth it, as the soldiers
may refuse people at their discretion, or arbitrarily close the
checkpoint down altogether.
Our visit to the Gaza Strip felt like entering
a giant prison, where over a million Palestinians are confined
to the most densely-populated area in the world, much of it refugee
camps that lack running water and sewage systems, all of it walled
off and heavily guarded to ensure that no one can enter or leave.
Often these camps lie only a few feet away from sprawling and
ever-expanding Israeli settlements, their well-kept agricultural
tents more sturdy than the living quarters of neighboring Palestinians,
their plants and fields receiving far more water in a day than
a camp could see in a month.
I would leave these experiences consumed
with feelings of such rage, such sadness, made all the worse by
the paralyzing feeling of not being able to do anything about
what I was seeing. I also felt deeply ashamed. It was embarrassing
to hear almost every Palestinian that I met having to explain
to me that their people really do love life, that their mothers
really do love their children, that their struggle was only against
Israeli occupation, not the Jewish people. Their nearly automatic
need to disavow what are essentially racist assumptions that they
do not value life as much as we do, that the antiradar is not
a struggle for national liberation, for a state of their own but
a jihad to drive the Jews into the sea, is, I think, a sad reflection
of the discourse that occurs over here on their plight. Although
we rightfully condemn terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians,
we have too often chosen to stereotype an entire community based
on the actions of its extremists, ignoring the deplorable and
humiliating conditions that could possibly help us understand
why human beings could commit such atrocities. While only a few
days of seeing these conditions in their cities and towns had
me consumed with rage, consumed with a guilt and sadness that
I could not reconcile, I was deeply moved and touched by the way
in which those that had been enduring this all their lives had
chosen to cope. I would have expected an entire people’s
collective psyche to be broken down, just as had happened to mine,
crushed and demoralized by the cruelty of their surroundings.
This is not to say that I did not find
any anger or sadness, far from it: but it is an anger that is
not consuming recognized, but not internalized to the point of
losing one’s sense of self, one’s sense of dignity,
one’s desire for freedom. It is anger that recognizes the
limits to which one is responsible for the suffering around them,
and a dignity and a spirit that maintains a self-identity in the
face of that suffering. As I found from my own experience, to
be able to do this requires a great deal of emotional strength,
a self-awareness and identity that is able to live through an
endless campaign to break your spirit. I can think of no better
example than the family of my friend Mutaz Kheaber invited me
to stay with them while I was in Ramallah. On my first night,
the Israeli army invaded the city, imposing a twenty-four curfew
that would last for three days.
While no one was happy, particularly the
family’s youngest daughter,
Rand, whose last day of school before summer would have to be
postponed, there was not a sense of self-defeat, of wallowing
in the frustration of being locked indoors as tanks and helicopters
roared outside, their loud gunfire interrupting all moments of
the day and night. Instead, the family initiated several tasks:
taking out the floor carpet, remodeling the living room, cutting
down an entire tree in the back-yard, playing games and chatting
with neighbours. “We live under this all the time,”
the youngest brother, Ma’moun, 18, explained, pointing out
that the current siege was nothing like the last, which had lasted
for thirty days. “But we try not to let it get to us...we
just continue with our lives as best we can.”
I left with a heavy heart, but also with
no illusions. No matter how strong the Palestinian self-identity
and their determination to preserve it, they need the support
of those of us lucky not to have to worry about military checkpoints,
curfews and invasions, who can recognize that the freedoms and
privileges that we enjoy here can never fully be celebrated until
they have been achieved elsewhere. And we need do so not just
out of moral obligation to the Palestinians, but out of concern
for the well-being of Israel, whose security will never be realized
through the continued suppression of another people, a people
that has had to endure far too much suffering, and have had to
show far too much courage and strength, in their ongoing struggle
for freedom.
Aaron
Maté
Vice-President (Campaigns)
Concordia Student Union
Montreal, Quebe
