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OpEdNews Op Eds    H4'ed 8/27/13

My Surprisingly Inspiring Trip to the West Bank: Echoes of Our Civil Rights Movement

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With the help of Israeli and international activists, the al-Kurd family has fought for years to live in peace and dignity in what's left of their house.  If you watch "My Neighborhood," you'll see grandson Mohammed, then in the 7th-grade, announcing that he wants to be a lawyer or journalist battling for human rights when he grows up.  Two years later, he holds to that dream. 

Maysa al-Kurd asked us to tell her family's story to President Obama -- and, if we can't reach him, to tell their story in social media.  She wants to ask Obama "if it would be acceptable to him if his own kids were harassed in their home; if not acceptable for his kids, then he shouldn't be silent" when Palestinian children are suffering.

HEBRON HILLS:  Near the end of our tour of the West Bank, we visited the beleaguered but unbowed village of Al Tuwani in the South Hebron hills, where expansion-minded ("God gave us this land") Israelis in nearby settlements have terrorized the village and sabotaged their fields and water. For "lack of a building permit," Israeli soldiers demolished their village school and mosque. It struck me that being Palestinian in some of these remote locations was akin to being black in rural Mississippi in the 1950s, facing continuous intimidation from lawless Klansmen (like these armed and sometimes-masked settlers) backed up by state power. 

 

But Al Tuwani has resisted -- with women taking new roles in the economic sustenance of the village, with young Italian solidarity activists ( Operation Dove ) accompanying the men into the field as a " protective presence" and videotaping any confrontations, and with Israeli human rights lawyers defending their right to rebuild their community. 

 

A woman leader in the village, like so many Palestinians, begged us to return home to contest media portrayals of Palestinians as terrorists: "You've seen the true Palestine, not what you see in news media . . . Tell the world the truth."

 

*  *

While it was inspiring to see nonviolent "popular resistance" groups persisting across the West Bank, I felt ashamed and angry as a Jew to hear Palestinians document the relentless drive by the "Jewish State" to Judaize East Jerusalem and intimidate and humiliate West Bankers into leaving their cities, towns and villages.  Everywhere we went, we heard complaints about day-to-day hardship -- checkpoints, Jewish-only highways, blocked Palestinian roads and how drives to work or school or neighbors that once took 15 minutes now take several hours.

 

Seeing these "facts on the ground," I kept asking myself NOT "Why have many Palestinians turned to violence and terrorism?" -- but rather, "Why so few?"

 

I'm not the first or only one to think that thought.  In a moment of candor in 1998, hawkish Israeli politician Ehud Barak admitted to Haaretz reporter Gideon Levy: "If I were a young Palestinian of the right age, I'd eventually join one of the terrorist organizations." (Barak wasn't punished for his candor -- Israelis elected him prime minister a year later.)

 

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Jeff Cohen was director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, where he was an associate professor of journalism. He founded the progressive media watch group FAIR.org in 1986.

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