In his Viewpoint ("Peace with Security," 11/30) Howard Wolke assures us that amidst the recent violence in the occupied territories, he has "asked people here in Israel, and everybody wants peace." "Human life," he writes, "is sacred for the Israeli people." In a shameful paradox, however, Wolke uses this "sacred" moral foundation not as a basis to criticize Israeli government violence, but rather, to justify it. While Wolke may be correct in stating that an abstract "desire for peace" is not enough - the "peace" that Wolke supports in his article, what he calls "peace with security," amounts to the defense of illegal occupation, the rationalization of atrocity, and a case of selective amnesia.
Although he is supposedly reacting to Dina Karam's Viewpoint ("Who is to blame for this Israeli/Palestinian conflict?" 11/28), Wolke fails to address the vast majority of the specific points that Karam brings to light. In her Viewpoint, for instance, Karam clearly documents the fact that the Israeli government has consciously and repeatedly violated peace accords (as well as international law) by expanding illegal Jewish settlements on Palestinian lands. Wolke simply refuses to confront this ugly reality. He deals instead with stereotypes and simplifications; like many US media commentators, he concentrates almost exclusively on the "terrorism" that threatens Israeli "security." Fair enough, one might argue, terrorism is an important concern. But by abstracting Palestinian violence from the context of the Israeli government aggression and betrayal that Karam so clearly presents, "terrorism" becomes for Wolke an unintelligible pathology. "Terrorism," in this narrow-minded way of thinking, starts with the "terrorists;" it has no prior cause, no preventable conditions, nothing to do with anything else; it's just what evil people do; it must be stomped out of existence in the name of "security."
But, contrary to what Wolke and the US State Department would have us believe, the "terrorism" and "riots" in the Palestinian territories are not the singular product of deranged and psychopathic savage Palestinian minds. Rock-throwing teen-agers in the streets are not the cause of the violence in the Middle East, but a response to prior violence, theft, and injustice. What mass media commentators continually reify and demonize as "terrorism" and "riots" are in reality the last resort of a people who want what any other oppressed people desire - justice, and the chance for a decent life. Palestinians want to return to their lands, in accordance with international law, and to determine their own destiny as a people, without having to worry about Israeli helicopters hovering outside their windows.
These people live under conditions of foreign occupation. Forced to obey military curfews, they huddle in single-room hovels with upwards of ten family members. All the while Jewish settlers - with the aid of the Israeli government, and in violation of international law - continue to move into the Palestinian territories, appropriating the most valuable land and resources for themselves, depriving the Palestinian majority of access to even the water beneath its feet.
Yet US "experts" prefer to ignore these ugly material realities. They ignore the basic fact that Israel has never fulfilled - indeed, has never intended to fulfill - its end of recent treaties. Or if they don't ignore it altogether, than like Wolke, they justify it retroactively by pointing to Palestinian violence, acts which are chiefly responses to those aforementioned Israeli betrayals. Israel is freed from blame, in essence, because the Palestinian "terrorists" simply cannot be trusted. "A true peace based on the agreements of the past is not what they really want," Wolke writes, implying quite clearly, that since those Palestinians don't want "peace," Israel may justifiably wage war by whatever means necessary for its "security."
But whose "security" is really threatened here? The recent violence in the occupied territories indicates that it is the Palestinians who are confronting "insecurity," to put it mildly. Over ninety percent of the dead and wounded in the recent violence have been Palestinians, with children accounting for more than a quarter of the total. Amnesty International, in a detailed report scarcely mentioned in the US press, has concluded that during this most recent intifada, the Israeli Army has made "excessive use of lethal force in circumstances in which neither the lives of the security forces nor others were in imminent danger, resulting in unlawful killings." There is invasion, there is "security," and then there is slaughter.
Wolke's rationalization, however, is familiar to anyone who pays attention to US media coverage of the Middle East, where the prevailing image of the current conflict is of Israel as an island of flowering civilization amidst a desert sea of rock-hurling Arab barbarity. In actuality, the situation is quite different; historically, it has been the state of Israel, not the Palestinians, that has been the aggressor in the region, as Basil Darwish makes exceedingly clear in his Viewpoint ("The Six Day War," 12/5). Israel - not the Palestinians - has illegally occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip since 1967, despite the repeated demands of the UN that it withdraw. Israel - not the Palestinians - has invaded both Lebanon and Egypt, killing thousands of civilians. Indeed, it is the state of Israel itself - not the Palestinians - that traces its very origin to the slaughter and mass dislocation of an entire population in 1948. The Palestinians, make no mistake about it, were there first.
The Israeli and American peoples can "want peace" all they want, but until their governments are compelled to offer real concessions to the oppressed Palestinian people, such "desire for peace" will continue to signify little more than an apology for land theft and apartheid. As long as the United States government continues to back Israeli government policies, the deliberate depopulation and colonization of Palestinian lands will continue. US aid to Israel - this year slated at close to $3 billion -strengthens the military grip of the occupying army, and makes a mockery of the oft-touted "peace process:" Why should the Israeli state actually negotiate, after all, so long as it can simply impose its will by force? Until the US government's "blank check" to Israel is voided, Palestinian children will continue to suffer and struggle - throwing stones, though they confront tanks in the street.
Picture it: The child with the rock, enraged by injustice. See it: The barrel of the gun as the soldier takes aim, his finger on the trigger, the child in the sight. He's ready to fire... and your tax dollar may have paid for the bullet.
Joe Ramsey is a graduate student studying English.
