Guest Column | Love and Solidarity in Israel and Palestine

Can we please move past all the tired rhetoric characterizing either Israelis or Palestinians as the victim of the other?

To strike at the heart of the problem and help formulate a truly just peace, we must do better than adopt a Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) platform which aims to punish Israel for its alleged “apartheid” policies without also acknowledging its legitimate security concerns, the approach advocated by Clarissa O’Conor in her recent column. Likewise, we must do better than to use the fact of Palestinian terrorism against Israelis to absolve Israel of its moral responsibilities, as is so often the practice of Israel’s less responsible advocates.

Ms. O’Conor doesn’t have it quite right with regards to Birthright Israel trips; for example, the trip in which I participated last summer undertook considerations of Israeli and Palestinian coexistence which were very frank and serious. In one memorable stretch of travel, as the Taglit bus transporting my Birthright group made its way through the Israeli highway system, many of us, including some of our Israeli counterparts, noted the ease with which we could distinguish Palestinian from Israeli villages at a distance based on evident chasms in construction quality and general wealth.

Some of us noted that these identification criteria were unnecessary in places where Israel’s conspicuous security barrier separated our highway from a village. For me, the circumstances we witnessed were unsettling, and the context of the governing state’s neglected responsibilities came through clearly.

It won’t do to perpetuate the myth of totally propagandized Birthright trips or of an Israeli bully state suffocating Palestinian communities with security measures simply out of “irrational fear”. B’Tselem, one of the international human rights organizations cited by Ms. O’Conor, reports that 759 Israeli civilians were killed by Palestinians during the Second Intifada (2000-2005). Many of these civilians perished in suicide bombings which deliberately targeted densely-populated civilian locations, including malls, cafes and nightclubs. In the ensuing years, Israel’s construction of security barriers and military checkpoints in and around the Gaza strip and the West Bank measurably curtailed terrorists’ ability to carry out such attacks.

More recently, violence against Israelis has continued in the form of rocket attacks; while reported numbers vary, it is clear that thousands of rockets were fired from Gaza into Israel throughout 2012. In December 2012, Human Rights Watch condemned Palestinians’ rocket attacks, noting that “Palestinian armed groups made clear in their statements that harming civilians was their aim.” Is a just peace truly one in which Israelis are expected simply to dismiss any so-called “irrational” fear induced by these realities?

However, it also won’t do for supporters of Israel to dismiss the country’s ongoing neglect of Palestinians’ welfare as the necessary consequences of reasonable security policies. Notwithstanding countless reports by international human rights organizations, seeing prosperity and poverty separated for long lengths of highway by a government-mandated security barrier has made me wonder how many degrees of justice truly separate Israel from an apartheid state.

Moreover, if at least a few of today’s Birthright trip participants are reasonably motivated to ponder that question, then how many more years can it take for a greater number of honest observers around the world to do so? If Israel continues to impoverish and humiliate a mostly-innocent population as the cost for ensuring its own security, it will risk compromising all its credibility as a positive moral entity. For purposes of justice and self-interest, Israel must find a way to improve the lives of Palestinians while maintaining its security.

As for the BDS movement: none of the rhetoric arising from this movement acknowledges the complex realities contributing to both parties’ legitimate concerns. No strategy for creating a just peace in Israel and Palestine can succeed without full acknowledgement that all Palestinians and Israelis share both a right to peace and security and a responsibility to promote their neighbors’ peace and security.

As long as the BDS movement acknowledges only Palestinians’ rights and Israelis’ responsibilities while at the same time partitioning Israelis into those “of conscience” and those in a “frenzy of irrational fear,” it will remain a tool for promoting hatred and division, not fostering the love and solidarity that Ms. O’Conor invokes and that all parties to the conflict so desperately need.

Barry Slaff is a research specialist in the Pharmacology Department of the Perelman School of Medicine. He graduated from the College in May 2012

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