The Israeli government and the media explain the many
Israeli checkpoints, military bases and daily incursions in the West Bank as
security requirements.* But the suicide bomber only came to Israel a decade
after the tactic successfully pushed the Israeli army back to the south of
Lebanon. While Israel uses these acts of terrorism as justification for the
continued occupation of the West Bank, the correlation between the two may be
the other way around.
The media and the Israeli government have worked
hard to marginalize the Palestinians. The soldiers I see certainly make no
efforts to conceal their view of the Palestinians as being inferior. When a
Palestinian kills an Israeli he is a terrorist, but when an Israeli kills a
Palestinian civilian it is either the work of a madman or collateral damage.
There is no such thing as Israeli terrorism, just like throughout all
discussions of the conflict in the media it remains taboo to discuss the
continuing and violent expansion of Israel into the West Bank by armed
fundamentalist Jewish settlers and the Israeli separation barrier—thrice the
length of the Berlin Wall, 80 per cent built on Palestinian territory, annexing
46 per cent of the West Bank and itself taking up 9.5 per cent of it.
This is the world’s last colonial war. As Ariel Sharon, himself an
officer during the Algerian war, told former French President Jacques Chirac:
“You have to understand us, here, it’s as if we are in Algeria. We have no place
to go. And besides, we have no intention of leaving.”
It is convenient
to profile the suicide bomber as a monster, as something made of evil incarnate.
Though this categorization is certainly politically expedient, despite the
assurances of George W. Bush and Israeli generals, no such dichotomy of good and
evil exists.
I have spoken to some who have lost a loved one gone to
blow himself up in Israel. The bomber as a child has usually lost a best friend,
or maybe his brother, cousin or father to an Israeli attack. He has sat amid the
rubble of his family home or the home of a loved one possibly still buried under
the slabs of stone. He has been humiliated, imprisoned and deprived of all hope.
And at some point, their family will tell you, something happens inside. The
once extroverted child becomes an introverted adolescent or young adult. He
starts to speak more of religion, of death and of revenge. Soon after, innocent
Israeli children die and he becomes a grisly headline.
Since I have been
here I have seen Israel invade on an almost daily basis. I have seen them riddle
homes with bullets and sometimes bulldoze them to the ground. I have seen the
people lining up at the checkpoints for hours unable to move about freely within
their own country and make a decent living. I have seen the soldiers roll in at
the dead of night, surround a building and blast it with flash-bangs and gunfire
while screaming through their megaphone for the occupants to come out. Three
times so far they have dragged a man out onto the street and executed him—no
arrest, no court hearing, just a bullet. Every child here or adolescent has
suffered. Everyone has lost someone or been hurt.
The Israeli soldiers
came into my friend’s home some weeks ago. They made him sit with his hands
above his head along with his entire family. One soldier went behind him and
broke his back with the butt of his gun. The other soldiers then vandalized and
looted the home. This 19-year-old was no militant and certainly posed no threat
to Israeli civilians. His passions include bodybuilding and American pop
culture. His ambition is to go to America to be free. So why did a soldier feel
it was necessary to permanently injure him?
When you see the soldiers
riding through the city in their heavily-armoured vehicles blasting away at
everything you have to start to wonder whether this is not just a game to them,
a playground bout of cops and robbers. Do they understand the impact their
actions are having on the lives of Palestinians and the potentially disastrous
repercussions? Is it of any surprise that afterwards an adolescent, unable to
see any glimmer of hope in his future, is ready to pick up a weapon and join the
militants in defending their city? Is it any surprise that one of those youths
will have his heart filled with enough rage to only dream of revenge?
I
have met Israelis who have chosen to go to military prison because they felt
that what they were being asked to do as soldiers was immoral. I have met
Israelis who have bravely stood in front of tanks or bulldozers à la Tianamen
Square to prevent yet another Palestinian home from being destroyed. I have met
countless young Palestinians, many university graduates, who only want peace.
Then I have met those young Israelis who will tell you this is a religious war
and that in light of this the Palestinians must be driven out and their holy
places blown to smithereens so that the prophecies may come true. Yet Jewish
extremism and fundamentalism seldom make front-page headlines.
Spend
time here and you will realize just how false the image constructed by the media
of Palestinians is, and just how much restraint these people have shown. Witness
the occupation and Israel’s total disregard for international law and you wonder
how this place has not become radicalized to the point of forming yet another
Afghanistan, Algeria or Iraq in the Middle East. Only when the international
community begins to put real pressure on Israel and to take concrete steps
towards guaranteeing Palestinians a state of their own and economic
opportunities will there be peace. The longer this tragedy is allowed to go on
the greater the risk it will turn into another war and cause the deaths of
countless more innocent civilians on both sides.
In the meantime, I will
have to go ask Israel, a foreign country, if they would be so kind as to renew
my visa and give me permission to keep living in Palestine…
*Security has been used to justify Israeli actions to a preposterous
degree. As Premier Urgence notes in their annual report, in the eight years
following the signing of the 1993 Declaration of Principles, 70,000 hectares of
land were appropriated and 282,000 trees on Palestinian agricultural lands were
uprooted. Three reasons were provided: they lacked the necessary authorization,
for security reasons and by calling into effect a law stipulating that lands
unused for three consecutive years could be seized. Israel has even used the
establishment of nature reserves as a means of confiscating yet more land from
the Palestinians. Since 1967, half the agricultural lands of the West Bank have
been appropriated in this manner.
To get involved in Nablus check out
Project Hope at http://projecthope.ps/ Project Hope is a non-profit volunteer
organization whose goal is to provide a participatory, educational space for
Palestinian youth and children.
Opinions
Living with terrorists
A dispatch from Nablus, West Bank
By Barnabe Geisweiller - Nablus, West Bank
Illustration by Sinbad Richardson |
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