Now I can understand why my sister-in-law stopped getting the morning paper. I am by nature an early riser and I wake up full of high spirits. I still remember the few lines one of my friends at Southwestern university wrote in my scrap book. “I hope you will marry a man who can stand your singing so early in the morning.” Bless his soul, he had to cope with much more than that.
I picked up the paper from the front porch and the first thing that caught my eye on the front page was a photo of a little girl sitting on the rubble of her home in the Old City of Jerusalem. Immediately my mood changed.
On the second page there was an item about the closure of a road parallel to the road where we live in Beit Hanina, a suburb north of Jerusalem. It has been closed by barbed wire and cement blocks. This road is the only outlet for the people who live up the hill in order for them to reach the main road to drive south to the centre of Jerusalem.
Of course as usual the justification was security reasons, but the demolishing of the house was that there was no permit. Very few people might be aware that the Palestinians in Jerusalem are continuously denied building permits on their own land, not even for extensions due to the natural growth of their families. Whereas the expansion of the Jewish settlements, in violation of the Road Map was justified for the natural growth of the settler population, and ironically Mr. Bush bought that gimmick. So when Jerusalemites get desperate they build without a permit and expect to be fined and not to have their homes demolished. For that specific home, the Israeli authorities had set a deadline for the family to demolish the home themselves, but it was one day before the dead line, that the Israeli bulldozers demolished the house, and to add insult to injury, the family was asked to pay the expenses of the demolition.
Be it security or any other pretext, it is very clear that those repressive measures are basically to make life unbearable for the Palestinians. When an occupying force maintains a military rule over a population of more than three million people against their will, it has to be continuously innovative and creative in finding ways and means to subjugate the occupied population. People in power seem to have a short memory because throughout history, oppressive governments end up learning the hard way, as they never take heed of past experiences. We have seen empires fall and regimes tumble, because the will of the oppressed people for liberation is always stronger in the long run. The sight of the Gaza people who have been under siege, and deprived of their basic needs, tearing down the borders should be a lesson. But can anybody teach Israel a lesson? It has graduated summa cum laude in democracy, human rights and international law !!! Nobody dares challenge it. Israel has been privileged by the international community to go by its own set of laws and checks and balances while the rest of the nations at least in the same region are accountable to another set completely.
For Israel to continue using the crude home-made rockets over Sderot as a justification for this brutal siege, is pulling wool over the eyes of the international community. Ever since 19 67 we have watched how disproportionate the collective punishment by the Israeli occupation forces has been. So it is not really “an eye for an eye” or “a tooth for a tooth.” It is in fact a whole face for an eye, and a whole jaw for a tooth. And in the case of Gaza, it is 1.5 million people for the sake of a few resistance fighters firing rockets into Israel. The punishment never fits the crime. That is if the resistance of an occupying force is considered a crime. However it is worthwhile noting that Gaza has been exposed to shelling and target killing long before the people of Gaza even found out how to make rockets. And what is significant to remember as well is that when the Gaza people kept a period of calm for many months, Israel resumed its target killing. In fact one of the reasons for the Israeli unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 was for getting the Israeli settlers out of harm’s way. Another reason was the demographic threat. However, the Israeli occupying forces continued to besiege Gaza, and the area became targeted and available for another wave of Palestinian ethnic cleansing. A phenomenon so well articulated by the prominent Israeli academic Ilan Pappe in his latest book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
Another book that might touch the conscience of the Israelis and the international community is Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine by David Shulman which has just been reviewed by Milton Viorst. I am quoting from the review:
“In opening his stunning memoir, David Shulman declares: “ I am an Israeli. I live in Jerusalem. I have a story, not yet finished, to tell.” It is a very sad story, of a society gone astray with power, and of decent Israelis in despair over the failure of their efforts to save it from itself. The story, as Shulman says, is not yet over, but he asks whether its end is not already determined. Is tragedy inevitable? Can Israel right its course to achieve its once glowing promise as a refuge and as a nation?
Shulman’s memoir is not unique in raising these questions. Two recent books share his foreboding: “Lords of the Land: The War Over Israel’s Settlement in the Occupied Territories, 1967-2007,” a careful work of scholarship by Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, and “Toward an Open Tomb: The Crisis of Israeli Society,” a stinging essay by Michel Warschawski. Shulman and Zertal are college professors, Eldar is a journalist, Warschawski is a peace activist. All are Israeli Jews. Whatever the stylistic differences of their books, they are equally unforgiving of Israel for placing its future in stark jeopardy.
None of these authors, it should be emphasized, is an apologist for Arabs. They do not deny that two peoples of vastly different cultures are engaged in a conflict of nationalisms, in which both sides have killed intemperately. All agree it is a conflict with too many victims, in both cultures. But these writers, good Israelis, are convinced Israel cannot resolve it by military superiority, much less by physical abuse.” --------------Shulman tells of the uprooting by the settlers of thousands of olive trees, icons of the local culture and the chief source of income of the inhabitants --------The settlers, he writes, “have stolen and desecrated not only olives, not only land, but the dignity that once belonged to Jewish books, the love I had for the …Jewish God of my childhood, the musical Hebrew of my early poems….My own grandfather, a Jewish humanist of the old school, would never have believed it possible…..I know that I am seeing ….the prelude to the vast expulsion that these Jews are planning for these people {the Palestinians} all three million of them. Let no one say he did not know; let no one talk of vast historical forces, of wrongs piled on wrongs… let no one speak philosophy.” -----------------------To explain why he and fellow activists, like the women of Machsom Watch, leave their warm homes to subject themselves to vituperation and sometimes personal peril, Shulman also conveys the thought that their concern is not just the Palestinians but Israel’’
Will the wise words of those writers and academics fall on deaf ears? Or will Israel, as the stronger party be magnanimous enough to put an end to all this brutality and realize at long last that its security is dependent on granting the Palestinians their inalienable rights, and their freedom and liberation from the yoke of occupation. An occupation that has been affecting the stability of the whole region when in fact the Holy Land and Jerusalem in its midst with its multi religious and multi cultures could be the Jewel of the Middle East.
I like to end this reflection with the quotation from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, which Milton Viorst used as an introduction to the book review and think how easily it can be reversed to fit the Palestinians and Israelis.
Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
