Few people, I realize, are as deeply entrenched in the issue of Israel/Palestine as I am. It is inescapable for me — as a Palestinian; as someone living on a campus that has a large, engaged, and important Jewish population; as someone who has both an academic interest in and a love for Judaism. I have spent so much time engulfed in the politics, stories, emotions, and perceived rights and wrongs of the conflict that I feel it has consumed my entire life up to this point. Grappling with Palestinian dispossession is a tradition that I was born into and am stuck with, unlike so many on the opposite side of the discourse. For those who understand Israel/Palestine as the sole Jewish homeland, no genuine conflict appears to be troubling the region at present. Sure, there is the problem of the occupied territories and “terrorism” — a buzzword applied almost exclusively to Palestinian violence — but the Land has been reclaimed and justice has been done. Equilibrium has been reached.
That is an extremely oversimplified version that, nonetheless, generally exemplifies an attitude that I have become overly familiar with. From a Palestinian perspective, it is difficult to feel that justice in the modern day is to be found anywhere in Israel/Palestine. There is none for the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who were uprooted from their homes, never to return. None for those who remained where they were, yet woke up to find that their homeland had become the homeland of another people; that they were no longer welcome and barely tolerated; that they would now need to carry a permit and cross through checkpoints to go from town to town; that their children would have rifles waved in their face at every point of their civilian lives and grow up idolizing martyrs instead of superheroes.
Despite this, conversations at Oberlin continue to fall into the one-sided trap of centering on Israel/Palestine’s importance for Jewish people. On a campus full of valuable and important Jewish voices, there are but a handful of Palestinians to raise their own. I recall overhearing two Jewish students at Oberlin talking about potentially taking their Aliyah to Israel; no doubt they felt a great deal of excitement, having likely dreamt all their lives of visiting the land of their ancestors. But, simultaneously, I thought of my grandmother, a woman who is literally older than the state of Israel, who was stripped of her Palestinian citizenship in 1967 and never allowed to return. She, like hundreds of thousands of others, is denied her legal status as Palestinian and cut off from any hope of returning to her childhood home.
What troubles me is the myth that Israel was inevitable, that the Land belongs to Jewish people and Jewish people alone, that Israel need not grapple with its past or its present because it has done no wrong. What troubles me is the length to which the nationwide organization Hillel goes to “inspire every Jewish college student to develop a meaningful and enduring relationship to Israel and to Israelis.” I hope, at a college like Oberlin, that Jewish students are cognizant of the active harm a friendly relationship to Israel entails.
I do not believe that Israel should not exist, nor do I believe that it should be destroyed. Israel is filled with human beings, whose lives and safety matter, and who make up a society that has planted itself firmly to become an undeniable reality. The existence of Israel is a fact. But the existence of Palestinians is also a fact, and they are not afforded the same luxuries as Israelis. It would be miraculous for a Palestinian born in Gaza to visit Jerusalem. A Palestinian born in the West Bank would be hard-pressed to visit the Mediterranean coast. A foreigner visiting Israel on vacation or on Birthright, however, will experience all the vast beauty of a land that is off-limits to an entire swath of its indigenous population.
I implore my Jewish peers on campus to consider the two-sided role Israel plays. It is a safe haven and homeland for the Jewish people and, simultaneously, an oppressor of Palestinians and an attempted ethnostate. It is actively employing a methodical cleansing of Palestinians through ethnic replacement. Note that the Law of Return does not only benefit Jewish migrants who claim it. The law also massively benefits Israeli state interests by shifting the demographics of the region slowly and steadily in favor of the dominant Jewish ethnicity. It is very clearly a tool to maintain Jewish domination, and it should either be abandoned or opened equally to Palestinian refugees and their descendents.
The continued existence of Palestinians and their most fundamental human rights are at stake. Do not be fooled by Israel’s paper-thin veil of democracy which it can practice because it keeps most Palestinians trapped under its boot without access to Israeli politics. Do not be fooled by its unending appeals to “self-defense” in the segregation and subjugation of Palestinians, nor the cries of antisemitism that meet those who question the façade of decency and innocence Israel projects to the rest of the world. The Israel Lobby, Evangelical Christians’ favorite foreign policy forum, is a massive force in American politics, and its influence has not completely missed our quaint little liberal college town.
Look at the region and its conflicts with a critical eye and as much compassion as you can muster, and if you decide to support Israel as a homeland of the Jewish people, then you must also recognize the destructive consequences that lie in its wake.
“The establishment of the State of Israel was justice for the Jews, but it was accompanied by a terrible injustice for the Palestinians,” Laurence J. Silberstein wrote in Postzionism, from a nameless commenter.
Support an overhaul of the current Apartheid system, support Palestinian human rights, and recognize the atrocities and injustices Israel has committed at every step of its brief history. One land must support two peoples. How that will look in practice, I cannot say, but Palestinians will hold fast to their land and their pride until they attain the rights and dignities they are due — of that I am certain.
