Randall Kuhn
In the wake of Israel's invasion of Gaza, Israel's Defense Minister Ehud Barak made this analogy: "Think about what would happen if for seven years rockets had been fired at San Diego, California from Tijuana, Mexico."
Within hours scores of American pundits and politicians had mimicked Barak's comparisons almost verbatim. In fact, in this very paper on January 9 House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and House Minority Whip Eric Cantor ended an opinion piece by saying "America would never sit still if terrorists were lobbing missiles across our border into Texas or Montana." But let's see if our political and pundit class can parrot this analogy.Think about what would happen if San Diego expelled most of its Hispanic,
African American, Asian American, and Native American population, about 48
percent of the total, and forcibly relocated them to Tijuana? Not just
immigrants, but even those who have lived in this country for many
generations. Not just the unemployed or the criminals or the America haters,
but the school teachers, the small business owners, the soldiers, even the
baseball players.
What if we established government and faith-based agencies to help move
white people into their former homes? And what if we razed hundreds of their
homes in rural areas and, with the aid of charitable donations from people
in the United States and abroad, planted forests on their former towns,
creating nature preserves for whites to enjoy? Sounds pretty awful, huh? I
may be called anti-Semitic for speaking this truth. Well, I'm Jewish and the
scenario above is what many prominent Israeli scholars say happened when
Israel expelled Palestinians from southern Israel and forced them into Gaza.
But this analogy is just getting started.
What if the United Nations kept San Diego's discarded minorities in crowded,
festering camps in Tijuana for 19 years? Then, the United States invaded
Mexico, occupied Tijuana and began to build large housing developments in
Tijuana where only whites could live.
And what if the United States built a network of highways connecting
American citizens of Tijuana to the United States? And checkpoints, not just
between Mexico and the United States but also around every neighborhood of
Tijuana? What if we required every Tijuana resident, refugee or native, to
show an ID card to the U.S. military on demand? What if thousands of Tijuana
residents lost their homes, their jobs, their businesses, their children,
their sense of self worth to this occupation? Would you be surprised to hear
of a protest movement in Tijuana that sometimes became violent and hateful?
Okay, now for the unbelievable part.
Think about what would happen if, after expelling all of the minorities from
San Diego to Tijuana and subjecting them to 40 years of brutal military
occupation, we just left Tijuana, removing all the white settlers and the
soldiers? Only instead of giving them their freedom, we built a 20-foot tall
electrified wall around Tijuana? Not just on the sides bordering San Diego,
but on all the Mexico crossings as well. What if we set up 50-foot high
watchtowers with machine gun batteries, and told them that if they stood
within 100 yards of this wall we would shoot them dead on sight? And four
out of every five days we kept every single one of those border crossings
closed, not even allowing food, clothing, or medicine to arrive. And we
patrolled their air space with our state-of-the-art fighter jets but didn't
allow them so much as a crop duster. And we patrolled their waters with
destroyers and submarines, but didn't even allow them to fish.
Would you be at all surprised to hear that these resistance groups in
Tijuana, even after having been "freed" from their occupation but starved
half to death, kept on firing rockets at the United States? Probably not.
But you may be surprised to learn that the majority of people in Tijuana
never picked up a rocket, or a gun, or a weapon of any kind.
The majority, instead, supported against all hope negotiations toward a
peaceful solution that would provide security, freedom and equal rights to
both people in two independent states living side by side as neighbors. This
is the sound analogy to Israel's military onslaught in Gaza today. Maybe
some day soon, common sense will prevail and no corpus of misleading
analogies abut Tijuana or the crazy guy across the hall who wants to murder
your daughter will be able to obscure the truth. And at that moment, in a
country whose people shouted We Shall Overcome, Ich bin ein Berliner, End
Apartheid, Free Tibet and Save Darfur, we will all join together and shout
"Free Gaza. Free Palestine." And because we are Americans, the world will
take notice and they will be free, and perhaps peace will prevail for all
the residents of the Holy Land.
Randall Kuhn is an assistant professor and Director of the Global Health
Affairs Program at the University of Denver Josef Korbel School of
International Studies. He just returned from a trip to Israel and the West
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