Students Boycott Apartheid

The paradox of liberal Zionism

Jun 27, 2009 Palestine | Author: Holly.Jones

I was gmail chatting with an old friend today, and took the opportunity to unburden some of the emotional madness of the past few days. Some of my outrage, if you will. My friend, Shana, was raised Jewish, and is a great listener, even about Israeli Apartheid, but she mentioned the huge disparity between what I was telling her and what her parents believed and told her. My parents, too, fervently believe that Israel is a progressive democracy, fighting a war of self-defense against a belligerent and fundamentalist people who are in the business of oppressing gays, women, etc, etc. It is these people I am here because of. The liberals, the lefties, the vegetarians: my people, are still people who believe in this apartheid state of Israel.

But to me, the Palestinian people have seemed quite enlightened enough. Maybe many weren’t well-connected enough to the Western world at the time of the Naqba; the world seems to have been blind to it. But these are not ignorant people. They’re better represented by my friend Sinan, who spends hours each day passing checkpoints to Al Quds University; female and male students alike. People like Lubna, who go to Bethlehem University, subsidized by the Vatican, and live pluralism with their Muslim and Christian peers in the Holy Land, even while the missiles are demolishing their school buildings.

The things I have seen here in the West Bank are hard to reconcile with attempts at even-handedness between Jews and Palestinians. The latter, yes, have used violence, at times. I believe this policy is both immoral and has proven ineffectual. But it is a very different violence, greater both in quality and quantity, that I see in the systemic apartheid and ethnic cleansing which is planned and executed by the state of Israel.

I don’t, in so saying, want to condone or lessen the tragedy of violence from either side. But meeting a woman in Jerusalem, with ownership papers to her house from Israel, Britain, all the way back to the Ottoman Empire, who was forced from her house so that a settler could live there, and then had her tent (on rented Palestinian land) demolished 6 times by the Israeli military, and listening to how she had to answer her grandson’s question about why God, the same God of the Jews, martyred only Gazan Palestinian children, and never Israeli children, makes it easy to see the circumstances which could generate so much hatred. He told her that he wanted to be a martyr, too. She convinced him, instead, that he should be a doctor, and help people. Inshallah.