Now that President Bush has finally become actively engaged in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, I think that we must have a clear understanding of the situation there in order to help ensure a just peace. Every just peace negotiation must acknowledge the claims and grievances of both sides in a conflict. Americans already have a good grasp of the Israeli side of the story. Books and films such as “The Diary of Anne Frank”, “Exodus” and “Schindler’s List” have produced powerful support for the state of Israel. But the Palestinian story is one that mostly goes untold. I went to Israel and Palestine in 2005 as part of a peace delegation and I had the opportunity to hear both sides of the story.
In order to make the Palestinian story something that readers can relate to, I have devised an imaginative exercise that places people in the role of the Palestinians. I have placed Native Americans in the role of the Israelis only because both peoples have experienced a holocaust and centuries of discrimination. The actions that I attribute to the Native Americans are used only to make my analogy work and are purely imaginary. In reality, Native Americans have shared the experience of the Palestinians.
The events described below mirror the experience of the Palestinians:
Imagine yourself living in your state 100 years from now. You and your ancestors have lived in your state for centuries. But you awoke this morning to find out that the U.S. government has decided to partition your state into two parts in order to give Native Americans a homeland of their own. After years of determined work, Native Americans have finally convinced the government that their experience of genocide and centuries of discrimination have made it imperative that they have a homeland of their own. Your state will be divided in half. The eastern side of the state will become the Tribal Nations State while the western side will be known as the state territory.
Soon after the partition, fighting breaks out between your state’s residents and the Native Americans who have poured into the new Tribal Nations State from all over America. The Native Americans win this war and hundreds of thousands of your state’s residents living in the Tribal Nations State are forced to flee and end up living in crowded refugee camps in the western territory. Their homes and property are given to Native Americans. The fact that the rest of the states have adopted strict immigration rules that require new residents to have substantial assets means that these people, their children and their grandchildren, will spend their lives in these squalid refugee camps that become breeding grounds for extremism. Those who remain in the Tribal Nations State are forced to live as second class citizens because they are not Native Americans.
Twenty years go by and the Tribal Nations State becomes a prosperous and powerful state with the help of billions of dollars of US government military and economic support. But life in the state territory is another matter. Poverty and hopelessness become a way of life. Anger and resentment among the people grows. Finally, after repeated threats from the territorial residents that they will drive the Native Americans from their land, the Tribal Nations State launches an invasion of the state territory and quickly achieves a decisive military victory.
For the next forty years, the people in the territory are forced to live under a military occupation. Their rights are suspended and they are subject to military law. Military checkpoints are set up around every city and town in the territory and people are prohibited from leaving their hometowns without a military pass. Those suspected of plotting against the Tribal Nations State are put into prison without a trial. Their homes and the homes of their relatives are often demolished by the Tribal Nations Defense Force as a warning to the rest of the population.
During the occupation, the Tribal Nations State begins establishing Native American settlements in the occupied territory. Land is seized from people in the territory and over 200 settlements containing over 225,000 Native Americans are constructed in the state territory. These settlements are virtual military fortresses and are linked together with the Tribal Nations State by roads that can only be used by Native Americans.
Anger and frustration continue to mount in the territory. With no access to sophisticated military weapons, some young men in the territory begin strapping dynamite to their bodies and blowing themselves up in order to drive out the Native Americans. Preachers in some churches tell them that they will go to heaven as Christian martyrs.
Faced with the threat of these suicide bombers, the Tribal Nations Defense Forces begin raiding cities and towns in the territory and putting more young men into prison.
They also begin building a wall around the territory that will effectively turn the entire territory into a vast open air prison. The situation for those living in the occupied territory is becoming increasingly desperate.
What I have just described as happening in an imaginary future has actually happened in Palestine. Ask yourself how you would react under these conditions. What would you do if most of your land was confiscated and you were forced to live like a prisoner in what remained? Now let’s return to the present and ask ourselves what must be done to achieve a just peace between Israel and Palestine. President Bush finally put his finger on it when he declared on his recent visit to the Holy Land that Israel must end its occupation of Palestine. If you can relate to what I have described above, you understand why this must be the critical first step toward peace. There is a fundamental truth that cannot be ignored if peace is to be achieved. Security for Israel means justice for the Palestinian people. As long as the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territory continues, there can be no peace in this troubled land.
Joe Parko is a retired college professor living in Cumberland County, TN. He has served as an advisor to the American Friends Service Committee’s Middle East Peace Education Program and was the Quaker delegate on a peace mission to Israel and Palestine in March, 2005.
I recently returned from my first trip to Israel/Palestine in Dec 07. Good analogy- I use one very similar to this- except of course, I really tend to think of the Palestinians as the Native Americans for my analogy because the argument is most often that the land GIVEN to Israel was not OWNED by the Palestinians and that they voluntarily ABANDONED it, which would be a similar argument I suppose the early settlers of American could have used when they TOOK the land of Native Americans in the US. Of course, this is not true, Palestinians still have deeds to land they can no longer return to and keys to homes in villages that were destroyed by Israel long ago. The truth is that Israel including Gaza and the West Bank is very small and really is about the size of New Jersey, so relating it to one of our states in the US is very good. Most American's don't realize how small an area it really is. And really while everyone wants to say the conflict is over religion, I honestly dont see that. That is not what most people will tell you. It is about land and resources, power and control. The Palestinians just want to live normal lives- have a home, a family, a job and a decent life with some freedom. No more than any other human being wants in life. They have been continually denied this by ALL the forces that have perpetuated the conflict on both sides and by US involvement.
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Dana (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 10 comments)
on Sunday, February 3, 2008 at 11:40:12 PM
"Imagination is evidence of The Divine"-William Blake
I have been to Israel Palestine 5 times since June 2005 and i too have compared the ethnic cleansing of Palestine to what 'civilized white men' did to the indigenous people these united states, in my first book:
"KEEP HOPE ALIVE," is an imaginative retelling of the well remembered memoirs of a 1948 refugee from the Upper Galilee who made his way to the USA and realized the American dream. After a lucrative career in the Defense Industry during the Cold War and THAT DAY we call 9/11, Khaled Diab brought together American Jews, Christians and Muslims to respond to evil with good by founding the 501 3-c Olive Trees Foundation for Peace/OTFFP.
"Keep Hope Alive" is also my spiritual journey told through six fictional characters who represent six ways to intuit God.
100% of all royalties to me for "Keep Hope Alive" are donated to the OTFFP to provide three year old olive tree saplings that are being rooted on both side of The Wall. So far just over 30,000 have been rooted; our dream is for one million, which is what has so far been destroyed by The Wall.
"Financed with U.S. aid at a cost of $1.5 million per mile, the Israeli wall prevents residents from receiving health care and emergency medical services. In other areas, the barrier separates farmers from their olive groves which have been their families' sole livelihood for generations." Page 43, Jan/Feb. 2007-Washington Report on Middle East Affairs,
This being an election year, DO NOT MISS Vanunu's 2 minute video message to Hillary about THE WALL, freely streaming on WAWA under VANUNU ARCHIVES:
I'm curious to know why you obsess about the wall?
I happend to live just under a kilometer from the wall, on the Israeli side. I don't like the wall either, but I sure do want it to stay and be completed.
We Israelis really don't care what foreigners like you think about the wall. Call it whatever pet hate name you like, but rest assured it has as much to do with apartheid as Osama bin Laden has to do with human rights.
There are 2 things missing from the Palestinian side: a Hamas government that will negotiate peace with Israel ("PEACE", not a ceasefire), and a Palestinian government that will stop the policy of sending suicide bombers to Israel to kill civilians.
Go study the Israelis. You'll find that the majority of us hate the wall, but we're not taking it down until the Palestinian war crimes stop (yes, they are indeed war crimes). If Hamas changes its mind and says it wants peace, and if they stop sending suicide bombers to kill us, then I and my fellow citizens will support taking down the wall.
Until then, it gives foreigners like you something politically incorrect to fixate on. Go on screaming "apartheid apartheid" as much as you want. Then come help clean up the body parts after a suicide bombing and tell me if you feel the same way.
Joe
"The attacks against civilians by Palestinian armed groups are widespread, systematic and in pursuit of an explicit policy to attack civilians. They therefore constitute crimes against humanity under international law. They may also constitute war crimes" http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGMDE020032002?open&of=ENG-ISR
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Joe Ben Avraham (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 2 comments)
on Wednesday, February 6, 2008 at 2:43:59 AM
gave those lands to Zionists ( not to the Jews) for an experiment. They still conduct it. To them Jews and Arabs are the same: let them fight each other forever. This was a brilliant evil concoction.
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Mark Sashine (47 articles, 19 quicklinks, 235 diaries, 3360 comments)
on Monday, February 4, 2008 at 9:14:00 AM
Now we should do the same for all third world countries the United States wants to control and we should remind ourselves of the atrocities we Americans have done to the Native Americans and continue to do. This question needs to be asked by all Americans and only then can we be free.
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Rick Theile (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 50 comments)
on Monday, February 4, 2008 at 10:40:20 AM
Just asa soapbox has no part in a debate, comparing an American state to "Palestine" is simply stretching credulit to the breaking point.
This blogg is so full of mis-truths, rhetoric and half-baked ideas that it puts a big question mark over the group that Parko belongs to. I doubt very much that their goal is a just peace for both sides if Parko can write such biased and misleading comments.
I'll take just one basic faux pas: "Your state will be divided in half."
This statement assumes that the "you" in this story were the legal residents of the state in the first place. Where did that state come from? How long has it been established?
Well, truth be told, the states only started coming into being after the colonies grew enough. Colonies? Of whom? Of settlers, of course!
Uh oh. There's that accursed word "SETTLERS". Well, whose land were they "settling" on? The native Americans, of course.
So who owned the land before the colonists arrived? The native Americans, of course. Parko himself is thus a "settler" on occupied Indian land! Sound familiar?
So, here in the Holy Land we go back before the American revolution to find out who the natives are. And yes, go back 2000 years and you discover that the native Jews were invaded, conquered, occupied, and hauled off to slavery. But damn if those Jews didn't have the biggest stick-to-it-ness ever seen on Earth. For 2000 years they kept wanting to go back to their homes, and now they're back. But while they were gone who came to "settle" over the past 20 centuries? The Palestinians.
So, Parko is waaaaay off base with his attempt at a cute story. And he leaves out far too many details to give anybody a "clear understanding of the situation there in order to help ensure a just peace."
Far from it, he's got on his soapbox and confused the story by making it look far to simple. It's not. It's much more complex and Americans do NOT have a good grasp of the Israeli side, since they've been subjected to far too much pro-Palestinian propaganda. His story shows that.
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Joe Ben Avraham (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 2 comments)
on Wednesday, February 6, 2008 at 2:13:46 AM
JVP is the voice of those American Jews who support a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and an end to Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
www.btselem.orgthe Israeli Information Center for Human Rights
