thoughts, comments?
what do people think about this article, from today in the collegian?
full text under cut
It is a season of reflection for graduating seniors, a time to catalog both our greatest achievements and our deepest regrets. As to the former, I consider this column a tremendous accomplishment if, after the four semesters I have been writing it, readers have learned absolutely nothing about me personally. The opinion page of a newspaper, in my opinion, is no place for celebrity journalism. This is the public sphere. What matters here is the content of a writer's ideas, not the person espousing them.
It is a principle found seriously wanting in mainstream discussion on Israel and Palestine, a subject that I regret I am only now addressing. My classmates might remember when the issue of the Middle East was a hot issue on these pages, and on our campus. Those times are long gone. My failure - our failure - to address this issue, and to continue the discussion started by former students, has been shameful and pathetic.
When I was a first-year student, there was apparently a serious campaign underway by UMass students to divest, or pull all the University's investments, from Israel in protest of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. While I do not recall seeing any divestment actions firsthand, the campaign was evidently so well-coordinated that I was visited one day by some canvassers, asking me to sign a counter-divestment petition.
I didn't know much about Israel and Palestine at the time, and my geography was terrible, but there was something about the idea of a tank in a refugee camp that struck me as fundamentally unjust. I debated the canvassers for about 30 seconds before saying goodbye.
As time went on, it was hard not to notice the grim arithmetic. The press does a terrible job covering the conflict, particularly in providing the necessary context and history, but from time to time the number of civilians killed gets a brief footnote. According to B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, 3,367 Palestinians were killed by Israeli security forces in the Occupied Territories, 58 in Israel, between 2000 and April 10 of this year. 690 of those killed in the Territories were minors. Over the same period, 456 Israeli civilians were killed by Palestinians in Israel, 233 in the Territories. Palestinians killed 80 Israeli minors in Israel, and 39 in the Territories (btselem.org).
Ratios aside, the blood of the Palestinians is on all our hands. As noted in a recent paper by two political scientists, Steven Walt of Harvard and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, Israel "has been the largest annual recipient of direct economic and military assistance [from the United States] since 1976, and is the largest recipient in total since World War II, to the tune of well over $140 billion (in 2004 dollars)."
The Walt and Mearsheimer paper has come under fire for its attack on "the Israel lobby" in the United States, whom they accuse of hijacking American foreign policy and perverting "the national interest." Self-described "realists," the two academics see no reason why the benevolent United States would support the brutal Israeli occupation. I humbly recommend they look harder, specifically at the region's vast energy reserves, and the U.S. government's longstanding commitment to crushing independent political movements wherever they arise.
Returning to the facts on the ground, the so-called disengagement from Gaza last fall was anything but. Plans to expand Israeli settlements in the West Bank were announced just as former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon broached the subject of a pull-out. Furthermore, Israel's separation wall extends across the 1967 borders. In July 2004, the International Court of Justice condemned the construction of the wall as illegal, on the grounds that it protects 80 percent of the illegal settlements in the West Bank.
Meanwhile, B'Tselem now refers to the Gaza Strip as "one big prison." In an unpublished opinion piece written in September, scholar Norman Finkelstein writes that, according to a B'Tselem report, "Israel will continue to maintain absolute control over Gaza's land borders, coastline and airspace, and the Israeli army will continue to operate in Gaza."
Israel's continued harassment of Gaza includes the shelling of civilian areas, what B'Tselem in December called the creation of a "death zone," in "a flagrant breach of International Humanitarian Law."
It is important to keep these facts in mind when the international community demands that Hamas, the democratically elected government of the Palestinian people, must "renounce violence" and respect the security of Israel. It is enlightening to think how many times you hear about the security of the Palestinians, or that the Israeli government should renounce violence.
Or think how many times the media have referred to Sharon as a "terrorist" (zero), even though an Israeli government investigation deemed him "personally responsible" for the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982. The BBC commemorated the twentieth anniversary of the massacres in 2002, describing them as a "three-day orgy of rape and slaughter that left hundreds, possibly thousands, of innocent civilians dead in what is considered the bloodiest single incident of the Arab-Israeli conflict."
We are approaching the 40th anniversary of the occupation, and the future looks even bleaker than the past. It is past time for UMass students to stop thinking only about themselves, and to start engaging with issues that have nothing to do with economic self-interest, but everything to do with moral culpability. If we do not, the future of our own society is in doubt, while the annihilation of the Palestinians is all but assured.
full text under cut
It is a season of reflection for graduating seniors, a time to catalog both our greatest achievements and our deepest regrets. As to the former, I consider this column a tremendous accomplishment if, after the four semesters I have been writing it, readers have learned absolutely nothing about me personally. The opinion page of a newspaper, in my opinion, is no place for celebrity journalism. This is the public sphere. What matters here is the content of a writer's ideas, not the person espousing them.
It is a principle found seriously wanting in mainstream discussion on Israel and Palestine, a subject that I regret I am only now addressing. My classmates might remember when the issue of the Middle East was a hot issue on these pages, and on our campus. Those times are long gone. My failure - our failure - to address this issue, and to continue the discussion started by former students, has been shameful and pathetic.
When I was a first-year student, there was apparently a serious campaign underway by UMass students to divest, or pull all the University's investments, from Israel in protest of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. While I do not recall seeing any divestment actions firsthand, the campaign was evidently so well-coordinated that I was visited one day by some canvassers, asking me to sign a counter-divestment petition.
I didn't know much about Israel and Palestine at the time, and my geography was terrible, but there was something about the idea of a tank in a refugee camp that struck me as fundamentally unjust. I debated the canvassers for about 30 seconds before saying goodbye.
As time went on, it was hard not to notice the grim arithmetic. The press does a terrible job covering the conflict, particularly in providing the necessary context and history, but from time to time the number of civilians killed gets a brief footnote. According to B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, 3,367 Palestinians were killed by Israeli security forces in the Occupied Territories, 58 in Israel, between 2000 and April 10 of this year. 690 of those killed in the Territories were minors. Over the same period, 456 Israeli civilians were killed by Palestinians in Israel, 233 in the Territories. Palestinians killed 80 Israeli minors in Israel, and 39 in the Territories (btselem.org).
Ratios aside, the blood of the Palestinians is on all our hands. As noted in a recent paper by two political scientists, Steven Walt of Harvard and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, Israel "has been the largest annual recipient of direct economic and military assistance [from the United States] since 1976, and is the largest recipient in total since World War II, to the tune of well over $140 billion (in 2004 dollars)."
The Walt and Mearsheimer paper has come under fire for its attack on "the Israel lobby" in the United States, whom they accuse of hijacking American foreign policy and perverting "the national interest." Self-described "realists," the two academics see no reason why the benevolent United States would support the brutal Israeli occupation. I humbly recommend they look harder, specifically at the region's vast energy reserves, and the U.S. government's longstanding commitment to crushing independent political movements wherever they arise.
Returning to the facts on the ground, the so-called disengagement from Gaza last fall was anything but. Plans to expand Israeli settlements in the West Bank were announced just as former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon broached the subject of a pull-out. Furthermore, Israel's separation wall extends across the 1967 borders. In July 2004, the International Court of Justice condemned the construction of the wall as illegal, on the grounds that it protects 80 percent of the illegal settlements in the West Bank.
Meanwhile, B'Tselem now refers to the Gaza Strip as "one big prison." In an unpublished opinion piece written in September, scholar Norman Finkelstein writes that, according to a B'Tselem report, "Israel will continue to maintain absolute control over Gaza's land borders, coastline and airspace, and the Israeli army will continue to operate in Gaza."
Israel's continued harassment of Gaza includes the shelling of civilian areas, what B'Tselem in December called the creation of a "death zone," in "a flagrant breach of International Humanitarian Law."
It is important to keep these facts in mind when the international community demands that Hamas, the democratically elected government of the Palestinian people, must "renounce violence" and respect the security of Israel. It is enlightening to think how many times you hear about the security of the Palestinians, or that the Israeli government should renounce violence.
Or think how many times the media have referred to Sharon as a "terrorist" (zero), even though an Israeli government investigation deemed him "personally responsible" for the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982. The BBC commemorated the twentieth anniversary of the massacres in 2002, describing them as a "three-day orgy of rape and slaughter that left hundreds, possibly thousands, of innocent civilians dead in what is considered the bloodiest single incident of the Arab-Israeli conflict."
We are approaching the 40th anniversary of the occupation, and the future looks even bleaker than the past. It is past time for UMass students to stop thinking only about themselves, and to start engaging with issues that have nothing to do with economic self-interest, but everything to do with moral culpability. If we do not, the future of our own society is in doubt, while the annihilation of the Palestinians is all but assured.