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ALUMNI NEWS
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If You Live Over 'There' Then You Are a 'Terrorist'
Tuesday, August 26 2003 @ 06:56 PM GMT
"While I understood that collective punishment had become a way of life from my studies of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I never realized the depth of such a statement until I lived here .."
By BRIAN LIND
By Thursday 21st, normalcy returned to Palestine quite suddenly. I came to Palestine this summer in the midst of a now failing peace process that was attempting to alleviate the daily hardships that have become a part of life here. A few checkpoints have disappeared during my stay, some prisoners have been released, and cities were being turned back over to the Palestinian Authority.
However, Wednesday’s suicide bombing brought the Road Map to a halt as numerous roadblocks and checkpoints reappeared on the road to peace. By Thursday morning the collective punishment and oppression that has become acceptable and “normal” to the occupation of Palestine and life here had returned, without the fanfare and flocking press that had accompanied its departure a few weeks earlier.
Like many things I have learned during my summer in Palestine, many lessons are not fully learned until they are experienced. And with the return of the Surda checkpoint between my apartment in the town of Birzeit and Ramallah, I began to realize the extent to which freedom of movement is a privilege to Palestinians and not a right.
Surda returned, with bigger piles of dirt, more blocks, and more soldiers after last Wednesdays suicide bombing, with an added barrier in the middle of the kilometer work so that horse carts cannot take people the length of the checkpoint. No longer can one drive to Ramallah, pass safely between Ramallah and Birzeit after about 10 pm, or, if injured, take an ambulance to the hospital without being raced over the bumpy checkpoint on a stretcher. Collective punishment has indeed become a way of life here in Palestine.
And while I understood that collective punishment had become a way of life from my studies of Palestine and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, I never realized the depth of such a statement until I lived here. Collective punishment is just a nice way of terming racist methods of punishment. Just as racial profile is a nice way of terming how a racist authoritarian looks at and judges someone, collective punishment is a nice way of terming how a racist system punishes an entire people.
The utter racism of Israel’s policy of collective punishment did not hit me until this past weekend, when a friend and I were attempting to return to Birzeit (a small town just north of Ramallah) from Jerusalem. Now that Surda has returned there is only one way to drive in and out of Birzeit, which is of course controlled by a checkpoint, called Atara (between Birzeit and the village of Atara). Since Wednesday’s suicide bombing, the Atara checkpoint has been “improved” just like Surda, with a large gate. We made the turn off of the bypass road up the rough and makeshift drive that brings you around the blocked road to Birzeit to the Atara checkpoint at 7:05pm, with the sun still in full evening view. As we approached the gate, two soldiers were beginning to close it and were devising a way to keep it shut, as their chain to lock it was too short.
As we approached the soldiers glanced over their shoulders and ignored us. We got out of our car and asked them if, before they shut the gate, if we could just drive into Birzeit. “No, this checkpoint is closed was the response.” After some discussion and argument, we gathered that the new policy at Atara was that the checkpoint and gate closed at 7pm, the gate was locked and the soldiers went home. As we argued another Palestinian driver showed up and pleaded with the soldiers to let us through. The “commanding officer,” who I’m pretty sure was younger than me, told us that we could drive around and come through Atara and across the bridge into Birzeit, but we should hurry while sunlight was on our side. The Palestinian driver turned to us and told us not to bother that it would take us the better part of two hours to drive, if we knew the way, which we didn’t.
As my friend became agitated he said to the commanding officer, “its not like we have bombs,” lifting up his shirt to show the officer, “search our car we are normal people, you have no reason to punish us.” The commanding officer, becoming frustrated with our persistence, turned to my friend and coldly replied, “If you live over there, with them,” pointing toward Birzeit, “you have bombs and you are terrorists.” And with that he returned to attempting to keep the gate shut.
I was shocked as I watched him work. “That’s nothing but racist,” I said to him, “you are a racist.” He looked up at me, slightly startled, and bid us a good night. As we walked back toward our cars, defeated I turned, in my disbelief and said to him again “you’re nothing but a racist.”
I have always regarded Israeli policies toward Occupied Palestine and Israeli-Palestinians as racist. But to see and experience this racism, like any racism, makes you connect emotional response to an otherwise academic perception. The continued occupation of Palestine, and the reasons used to justify relies on nothing more than pure racism. In the west and in Israel we sugar coat and hide the racism of the occupation and its oppression with cute buzzwords like, collective punishment. We justify and condone the behavior and practices of the IDF and the Israeli government with excuses of a "war on terrorism".
And it is under this racist mentality that the hiatus of freedom that the Road Map created quickly disappeared, unquestioned. Roadblocks, checkpoints, and curfews have reappeared in full force in Occupied Palestinian, erasing the few “privileged freedoms” that the Road Map had allowed Palestinians. But this is all easily excused by the “us”/”them” binary that we allow ourselves to believe, where all of “them” that live “over there” have bombs, where all Palestinians are terrorists.
It doesn’t matter that the suicide bombings that “broke the hudna” have all been in response to Israel’s continued aggression and violence against Palestinians, through the extra-judicial assassinations of three militants. The fact that Israel is the party that never committed itself to the hudna doesn’t seem to matter, because Israel is fighting a "war on terrorism". Before any of the three bodies exploded, first in Rosh Ha’ayin, then in the illegal settlement of Ariel, and finally and most deadly in Jerusalem, the deck had been stacked against the Palestinians. The linguistics of the hudna had already been put in motion to make sure the blame for the failure of the peace process landed fully in the lap of the Palestinians.
And Israel continues to make sure that not only will the Palestinians take the blame, in full, but also that no matter what they do, they will not be able to salvage the Road Map. Nothing demonstrates this better than this weekend's assassination of Gazan Hamas political leader Abu Shanab, who had no connection to Wednesdays bombing, and who strongly supported the hudna to allow for a political process to occur. But regardless of the history that occurs here on the ground in Palestine, true blame does not matter. The blame will lie with Palestine, no its militant groups who chose vengeful violence over peaceful political movements, but on Palestinians as a whole, because “they [Palestinians] are all terrorists.”
And while this is a regional conflict, we as Americans are implicated in it, the blood that is spilled here stains our hands too. Not just because of the 9 billion dollars (both direct aid and promised loan guarantees) we will give to Israel this year, 75% of which will go toward military aid, but because we also have chosen to facilitate a peace process which we do unjustly. A few weeks ago when I was in Jenin, a young Palestinian man asked me why the U.S. never comes to the aid of the Palestinians, we go to Liberia and Iraq, claiming to be concerned with bringing “peace and democracy to the world” but we never come to Palestine.
I told him that was because the U.S. government is not concerned with peace and democracy, and quite frankly neither are a good number of the citizens of the United States. But as I leaned against the gate at Atara that I could not pass through; I began to realize it doesn’t matter whether the U.S. or international community is really committed to peace and democracy or not. The racism and bigotry of the western world stands directly in the way of facilitating a solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict or, at the very least, seriously aiding the Palestinian people.
As long as we wage a “"war on terrorism"” where you are either “with us or against us;” as long as we see stone throwing children as equally threatening as militants with guns; as long as we accept home demolition and other forms of collective punishment as effective methods of combating “terrorism;” as long as we justify a fence that ghettoizes the West Bank as a necessary and acceptable method of security; as long as we equate Islam with Jihad and fail to realize that the Palestinian conflict is a secular nationals struggle, not a religious one; as long as we see the killing of innocent Palestinian people and children as acceptable “collateral damage” while the deaths of innocent Israeli people and children is barbaric and different, as long as we never understand Palestinians as people just like us, with a culture just like us; then we nothing more than racists.
After returning from Atara, by means of Ramallah, where we parked the car, crossed Surda and took a cab to return to our homes, adding an easy 45 minutes to what could have been a 5 minute process (sans the gate), I was telling a Palestinian friend of mine about the experience. He turned to me, with a sarcastic smile on his face, as he said, “What better illustrates the apartheid system that we live under than when soldiers lock up the gate, uncaringly, locking us in as animals, so that they can go home in the evening and forget that we are here.” And how right he is, as roadblocks, gates, and fences grow like cancer on the lands of Occupied Palestine, I cannot help agree with the quite apartheid that had been created here.
As my time here in Palestine draws to a close, it saddens me to see the apathy and lack of commitment with which the U.S. attempts to facilitate peace.
Life in Palestine remains dire, and continues to get worse as the separation wall/fence deepens and cements the apartheid system that exists here and has been created by the Israeli occupation.
I leave here knowing that whatever I say or write about my time here cannot combat the deck that has been stacked against the Palestinian people. Because as an American, I am implicit in the injustices that exist and are being created here in Palestine, and until, as a nation, we can see this conflict through unbiased and un-racist eyes, the words and experiences that I have had will make no difference at all.
Mr. Lind is an a student at St. Lawrence University in Canton NY, Global Studies major with a focus in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Brian has spent this summer studying Arabic at Birzeit University in the West Bank of Occupied Palestine.
Source: Palestine Chronicle – www.palestinechronicle.com
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