In his letter to the editor "Anti-Israel Letter Was Misleading, Misinformed," in the Jan. 21 issue, Eric Bokobza makes several errors. First, he seems not to know that Israel and Jordan divided Palestine between them in 1948 and that Palestinians on the West Bank did indeed suffer under and resist the Jordanian government, as they continue to resist the Israeli occupation. Jordanian oppression does not provide an alibi for Israeli oppression.
Second, he says the Occupied Territories "belong" to Israel. The United Nations disagrees: Resolution 242 (1967) calls for Israel to withdraw from all territories conquered (not "acquired") during the 1967 war.
Third, it is a gross distortion to say that the Palestinian people are suffering only because of their misgovernment by Yasser Arafat. Arafat is, indeed, incompetent, and he may well be as corrupt as Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, the terrorist general who oversaw the massacre of 700 to 2,000 Palestinian civilians in Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps, and who is currently under investigation for bribery. But it would be very difficult indeed to blame Arafat for the lost Palestinian villages, the stolen water rights and the Palestinian economy savaged by curfews, checkpoints and demolition.
Fourth, Bokobza says that "almost all" of the dead in Jenin were Palestinian fighters. This is not true. The neutral human rights group Human Rights Watch, after a thorough investigation, found that at least 22 of the confirmed 52 dead were civilians. For instance, "Kamal Zgheir, a 57-year-old wheelchair-bound man who was shot and run over by a tank on a major road outside the camp on April 10, even though he had a white flag attached to his wheelchair;" "58-year-old Mariam Wishahi, killed by a missile in her home on April 6 just hours after her unarmed son was shot in the street;" and Jamal Fayid, a 37 year old man disabled from birth, who couldn't speak, move or eat without help from his family, who was crushed to death when an Israeli bulldozer demolished his house, despite the pleas of his family to the bulldozer operator to stop.
Human Rights Watch documents other grave human rights abuses during the invasion of Jenin camp, including the use of prisoners as human shields (a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention), the denial of medical services to the wounded and the summary execution of disarmed and wounded Palestinian combatants. These and many similar incidents suggest something other than "an incredible amount of restraint and compassion."
There is indeed a problem with all the attention devoted to Jenin: like the earlier furor about the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, all this attention mistakenly suggests that such events are extraordinary, rather than the ordinary daily horror of life in occupied Palestine. For instance, Israeli bulldozers continue to destroy homes in Nablus, Rafah, and elsewhere - a war crime that violates Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which aimed to prevent the sorts of collective punishment practiced by the Nazis during their occupation of Europe.
Bokobza correctly notes that Arabs massacred Jews in Hebron. Twentieth century Palestine saw massacres of Jews by Arabs, Arabs by Jews, Arabs by British, and Arabs, Jews and British by Jews (the bombing of the King David Hotel by Yitzhak Shamir's terrorist Stern Gang.) Of course, most of the blood that has been shed has been Arab blood. During the Al-Aqsa Intifada, which began in 2000, three Arabs have died for every Jew and 13 Arab noncombatants for every ten Jewish noncombatants, as tabulated by the distinctly pro-Zionist Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya, Israel.
Now if one wishes to conduct a partisan body count, counting and mourning the bodies on ones own side and ignoring those on the other, one can perhaps claim some spurious justification for shedding more blood and launching more massacres. But the underlying cause for the violence in Mandate Palestine or the contemporary Occupied Territories is not simmering racial or religious hatred, but the Zionist colonization and ethnic cleansing of Palestine. This began with the steady immigration of mostly European Jews after the British Balfour Direction of 1917 and their acquisition of Arab lands. It continued with Israel's expulsion of 600,000 to 750,000 Palestinian Arabs in 1948 and its refusal to follow a U.N. directive to compensate them or allow them to return. It continued with the expulsion of at least 200,000 more Palestinians from the territories conquered in 1967, some of them exiled for the second time.
And it continues to this day with the theft of Arab lands by illegal settlements in the Occupied Territories where infant malnutrition, torture and detention without trial are commonplace, and where the Apartheid Wall on the West Bank promises to create the world's largest open-air concentration camp. There have recently been open proposals of further acts of oppression. The Israeli historian Benny Morris has justified ethnic cleansing, in so many words, and has compared the Palestinians to "wild animal[s]" who must be kept in "something like a cage," and to Native American victims of genocide: "Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians." Thankfully, there are many Jews in Israel and elsewhere who have argued eloquently and struggled forcefully alongside their Palestinian brothers and sisters against such sentiments. Israel's violations of international law are manifold and manifest and the horrors of Palestinian suffering will not be mitigated simply by putting "occupation" into quotation marks, as Bokobza does.
Finally, it comes down to two points. First, people should not be driven from their homes. Second, those who have driven them from their homes, if they regain a sense of conscience, should stop piling atrocity on atrocity, and start thinking creatively about an act of atonement.
Photo: Breadchastick / Wikimedia Commons
