The following is a response to Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren’s September 15th editorial in the Los Angeles Times:
Imagine that you are a parent who sends her children off to school in the morning worrying whether they will be arbitrarily stopped, stripped nearly naked, and in most cases returned back home from an Israeli checkpoint without any redress process.
Imagine that, instead of going off to college, your children at age 18 are stripped of their dignity and honor and continue to remain colonized until they die.
Imagine that you live under perpetual fear as have your parents and even your grandparents; that you have seen Israeli bulldozers razing your home and olive trees and you have lost family and friends to the raining of military rockets or militant settler attacks under the auspices of Israeli military.
Picture all of that and you will begin to understand what it is to be a Palestinian. And you will know why all Palestinians have desperately striven for peace for more than sixty years.
Nearly all media reports have promoted the myth that Palestinians — who are currently experiencing economic growth (as recently reported by Rabbi Ken Chasen in an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times) do not care about peace.
The truth is that what Palestinians want is to live with dignity and in safety from the American-made gunships and Apache helicopters raining white phosphorous bombs on civilians by the Israeli military. Yet they go about living their lives behind apartheid walls and checkpoints but fully determined to build a normal, fruitful society in the face of incredible adversity from the world’s sixth nuclear power.
Yes, many Palestinians are skeptical about peace, and who would not be? They continue to live under brutal occupation without food, water and medicine and instead receive thousands of missiles and bombs crashing into their homes and hospitals, mosques and playgrounds.
They continue to negotiate for decades in an attempt to live in peace side by side with their occupiers and yet their land continues to shrink and homes bulldozed.
Over the past six decades, seven million of the 11 million Palestinians are made refugees or displaced while tens of thousands are killed and maimed in their homes and fields. The world watches grieving Palestinian mothers and the “international community” keeps pleading for justice from Israel, while their rabbis and politicians praise their soldiers for killing unarmed Palestinian women and children trapped in camps and ghettos.
Given the Palestinian experience of never-ending trauma, it is astonishing that they still support the peace process at all, yet there is overt support by an overwhelming majority in the streets of Jerusalem, Bilin and Gaza.
Indeed, Palestinians have always grasped and gasped at opportunities for peace.
Whenever there was an attempt to achieve peace for Palestine and Israel, Palestinians passionately responded and even made even more painful concessions than the previous time. That most Palestinians are still willing to take incalculable risks for peace and are still willing to share their ancestral homeland with a people that has repeatedly tried to destroy them is nothing short of miraculous.
It’s true that Israel is a success story. The country has six world-class universities, more scientific papers and Nobel Prizes per capita than any other nation and the most advanced high-tech sector outside of the Silicon Valley. The economy is flourishing; tourism is at an all-time high while on the other side of the apartheid wall is some of the most egregious poverty, hunger, and unemployment on the planet. The Gaza Strip is widely believed to be the most densely populated area in the world. What good have all the Nobel Prizes and high-tech achievements done for these indigenous people?
No one should ever apologize for working for the inalienable right of self-determination. No one should ever tell the oppressed and dominated not to cry out for freedom from this apartheid occupation. Remarkably, the occupied have, over the past 60 years, deepened their commitment to peace. That yearning is expressed every day by the mother who risks her life to take her child to the hospital; by the young lady who dares to stand for hours at a military checkpoint in hopes that she will able to meet her beloved on the other side of the apartheid wall; by the young father who for the fourth time is randomly stopped by patrolling soldiers, stripped, humiliated, taunted, and held at gunpoint in front of all of his family. He knows that one day they will not release him at the end of this torturous ordeal.
These everyday Palestinians’ commitment to peace is different than that of those dignitaries who meet in ceremonies of and for the sake of peace and have their pictures taken while sipping fine wine in palaces and mansions. For everyday Palestinians who know all too well the life of perpetual apartheid occupation, that vision of peace is remains just out of reach. How long can they indulge in the luxury of hopefulness?
Shakeel Syed is the Executive Director at Islamic Shura Council of Southern California.
