The Morning Paper

Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands,
organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?
Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons,
subject to the same diseases, healed by the same
means, warmed and cooled by the same winter
and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us,
do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh?
If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us,
shall we not revenge?
Samia Khoury

Now I can understand why my sister-in-law stopped
getting the morning paper. I am by nature an early riser and I
wake up full of high spirits. I still remember the few lines one
of my friends at Southwestern university wrote in my scrap
book. “I hope you will marry a man who can stand your
singing so early in the morning.” Bless his soul, he had
to cope with much more than that.

I picked up the paper from the front porch and the
first thing that caught my eye on the front page
was a photo of a little girl sitting on the rubble of her
home in the Old City of Jerusalem. Immediately my
mood changed.

On the second page there was an item about the closure
of a road parallel to the road where we live in Beit Hanina,
a suburb north of Jerusalem. It has been closed by barbed
wire and cement blocks. This road is the only outlet for the
people who live up the hill in order for them to reach the main
road to drive south to the centre of Jerusalem.

Of course as usual the justification was security reasons,
but the demolishing of the house was that there was no permit.
Very few people might be aware that the Palestinians in
Jerusalem are continuously denied building permits on their
own land, not even for extensions due to the natural growth
of their families. Whereas the expansion of the Jewish
settlements, in violation of the Road Map was justified
for the natural growth of the settler population, and
ironically Mr. Bush bought that gimmick. Of course
all settlements are illegal according to international law.

So when Jerusalemites get desperate they build without
a permit and expect to be fined and not to have their
homes demolished. For that specific home, the
Israeli authorities had set a deadline for the family
to demolish the home themselves, but it was one day
before the dead line, that the Israeli bulldozers
demolished the house, and to add insult to injury,
the family was asked to pay the expenses
of the demolition.

Be it security or any other pretext, it is very clear that
those repressive measures are basically to make life
unbearable for the Palestinians. When an occupying
force maintains a military rule over a population of
more than three million people against their will,
it has to be continuously innovative and creative in
finding ways and means to subjugate the occupied
population. People in power seem to have a short
memory because throughout history, oppressive
governments end up learning the hard way, as they
never take heed of past experiences. We have
seen empires fall and regimes tumble, because the will
of the oppressed people for liberation is always
stronger in the long run. The sight of the Gaza people
who have been under siege, and deprived of their
basic needs, tearing down the borders should be
a lesson. But can anybody teach Israel a lesson?
It has graduated summa cum laude in democracy,
human rights and international law !!! Nobody dares
challenge it. Israel has been privileged by the
international community to go by its own set of laws and
checks and balances while the rest of the nations at least
in the same region are accountable to another
set completely.

For Israel to continue using the crude home-made rockets
over Sderot as a justification for this brutal siege, is pulling
wool over the eyes of the international community. Ever
since 19 67 we have watched how disproportionate the
collective punishment by the Israeli occupation forces
has been. So it is not really “an eye for an eye”
or “a tooth for a tooth.” It is in fact a whole face for an eye,
and a whole jaw for a tooth. And in the case of Gaza,
it is 1.5 million people for the sake of a few resistance
fighters firing rockets into Israel. The punishment never
fits the crime. That is if the resistance of an occupying force
is considered a crime. However it is worthwhile noting that
Gaza has been exposed to shelling and target killing
long before the people of Gaza even found out how
to make rockets. And what is significant to remember
as well is that when the Gaza people kept a period of
calm for many months, Israel resumed its target killing.

In fact one of the reasons for the Israeli unilateral
withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 was for getting the
Israeli settlers out of harm’s way. Another reason
was the demographic threat. However, the
Israeli occupying forces continued to besiege
Gaza, and the area became targeted and available
for another wave of Palestinian ethnic cleansing.

A phenomenon so well articulated by the prominent
Israeli academic Ilan Pappe in his latest book,
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.

Another book that might touch the conscience of the
Israelis and the international community is Dark Hope:
Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine by David
Shulman which has just been reviewed by Milton
Viorst. I am quoting from the review:

“In opening his stunning memoir, David Shulman
declares: “ I am an Israeli. I live in Jerusalem.
I have a story, not yet finished, to tell.” It is a
very sad story, of a society gone astray with
power, and of decent Israelis in despair over the
failure of their efforts to save it from itself. The
story, as Shulman says, is not yet over, but he asks
whether its end is not already determined. Is tragedy
inevitable? Can Israel right its course to achieve its
once glowing promise as a refuge and as a nation?

Shulman’s memoir is not unique in raising these
questions. Two recent books share his foreboding:
“Lords of the Land: The War Over Israel’s
Settlement in the Occupied Territories, 1967-2007,”
a careful work of scholarship by Idith Zertal and
Akiva Eldar, and “Toward an Open Tomb: The
Crisis of Israeli Society,” a stinging essay by Michel
Warschawski. Shulman and Zertal are college
professors, Eldar is a journalist, Warschawski is
a peace activist. All are Israeli Jews. Whatever
the stylistic differences of their books, they are
equally unforgiving of Israel for placing its future in
stark jeopardy.

None of these authors, it should be emphasized,
is an apologist for Arabs. They do not deny that
two peoples of vastly different cultures are engaged
in a conflict of nationalisms, in which both sides have
killed intemperately. All agree it is a conflict with
too many victims, in both cultures. But these
writers, good Israelis, are convinced Israel cannot
resolve it by military superiority, much less
by physical abuse.”

--------------Shulman tells of the uprooting by the
settlers of thousands of olive trees, icons of the
local culture and the chief source of income of
the inhabitants --------The settlers, he writes,
“have stolen and desecrated not only olives,
not only land, but the dignity that once belonged
to Jewish books, the love I had for the …Jewish
God of my childhood, the musical Hebrew of my
early poems….My own grandfather, a Jewish
humanist of the old school, would never have
believed it possible…..I know that I am seeing ….
the prelude to the vast expulsion that these Jews
are planning for these people {the Palestinians}
all three million of them. Let no one say he did
not know; let no one talk of vast historical forces,
of wrongs piled on wrongs…
let no one speak philosophy.”

-----------------------To explain why he and fellow activists,
like the women of Machsom Watch, leave their warm
homes to subject themselves to vituperation and
sometimes personal peril, Shulman also conveys
the thought that their concern is not just the
Palestinians but Israel’’

Will the wise words of those writers and academics fall on
deaf ears? Or will Israel, as the stronger party be
magnanimous enough to put an end to all this brutality
and realize at long last that its security is dependent on
granting the Palestinians their inalienable rights, and
their freedom and liberation from the yoke of occupation.
An occupation that has been affecting the stability of the
whole region when in fact the Holy Land and Jerusalem
in its midst with its multi religious and multi cultures could
be the Jewel of the Middle East.

I like to end this reflection with the quotation from
Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, which Milton
Viorst used as an introduction to the book review
and think how easily it can be reversed to fit the
Palestinians and Israelis.

Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands,
organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?
Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons,
subject to the same diseases, healed by the same
means, warmed and cooled by the same winter
and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us,
do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh?
If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us,
shall we not revenge?