Another editorial brought to you by the good people at Wombat
As a Green, I support the principle of non-violence and oppose the
use of violence on all sides, particularly when it is aimed at civilians.
However, to condemn violence by all parties in the current crisis would be
to utter empty cliches as long as one ignores the disproportionality of
the violence or its root causes. Moreover, unless parties have access to
non-violent means for problem resolution, violence is inevitable.
It is necessary to recognize that violence by Israelis against Palestinians is vastly greater than vice versa. This can be verified by statistics from either side of the conflict in terms of deaths (whether civilian or military), injuries, detentions, or property loss. The current crisis is an example. The Israeli air force is killing dozens of Palestinians each week since the abduction of their Corporal, and had been firing hundreds of missiles and shells into the Gaza each month prior to the abduction. Meanwhile, Israel has never had to endure anywhere near this level and frequency of violence from the Palestinians.
The American media paint the current crisis as an Israeli "retaliation" for the Palestinian "provocation" of abducting its soldier. However, what is essential to remember is that relations between the two peoples has been caught in a cycle of violence since before any of us were born. All violence in the conflict is considered a retaliation by whomever is perpetrating it, and of course it inevitably begets more violence. When an American newspaper starts its narrative with the abduction of the Israeli soldier, it leads many people to invoke a kind of playground logic and conclude that any punishment inflicted on the Palestinians is their own fault seeing as "they started it." However, in the rest of the world, the newspaper article is likely to begin with the Israeli missile that killed a Palestinian family picnicking on the beach or the assassination of Hamas leaders or the hourly shelling of Gaza, all of which took place in the days before the abduction. When the narrative starts this way, the capture of the Israeli corporal becomes easier to justify while the ensuing devastation of the infrastructure that life in the densely populated Gaza depends on appears barbarically disproportional.
We must keep in focus that the root cause of this conflict is Israel's occupation of lands it captured in the 1967 war. Most of the four million Palestinians in the Gaza and West Bank have lived their entire lives under a humiliating and often brutal Israeli occupation. This occupation has transformed parts of the West Bank into affluent colonies for Jewish settlers while turning the rest of the land into rubble-strewn towns and farms that often go untended as villages are denied access due to check points, walls, and bulldozers. Moreover, the occupation has turned Israel into a highly militarized garrison state, with decades of active-duty and reserve military service for most citizens and people living in constant fear of suicide bombings by desperate Palestinians. This is a heavy burden indeed. Had the economic dimension of the burden of occupation been shouldered by the Israeli taxpayer, it could never have continued, but the U.S. Congress has over the course of the occupation appropriated 100 billion dollars in foreign aid (mostly military) to Israel, thus subsidizing the fiasco. This occupation has continued for almost four decades in violation of international law as espoused in the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations Charter and in defiance of Security Council resolutions.
We as Americans are in a unique position to provide non-violent means of transforming the Israeli-Palestinian, so moralistic lamentations while continuing to finance the root of the conflict are hypocritical. Furthermore, as long as we do not use our influence to halt the Israeli onslaught on Gaza, we can hardly criticize the intervention by Hezbollah on behalf of the Palestinians, as counter-productive as that intervention is likely to be. It is vital that we put an end to this crisis before it balloons into a full-blown war that envelops the entire Middle East and beyond. To do this, we must insist that Israel halt its military operations and engage in a prisoner exchange. Then we must insist that Israel end its occupation of the lands it seized in 1967 and allow for the establishment of a truly sovereign Palestinian state. Israel's "unilateral disengagement" from Gaza last summer which still left Israel in full control of Gaza borders, coastline, and airspace, effectively turning it into a giant prison camp, is not a model for the future. Finally, demilitarization of the Middle East must be promoted and the region needs to be transformed into a nuclear-free zone. The United States must oppose Israel's territorial expansion while at the same time make it clear to Arabs and Israelis alike that the United States has the means and the will to guaranty Israel's continued existence. Only this can establish peace and security between Israel and its neighbors.
Titus North
Editor-in-chief, Wombat News
Center
July 16, 2006