Wang is a second-year political science and international
economics student.
By Darren Wang
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon recently said, “There
are things we will take responsibility for, things we will deny and
things that will never be known.” Here is just one of the
many things that the general American public, including myself,
almost never knew.
On January 21, 2001, Nahum Korman, a 37-year-old Israeli
settler, was sentenced to six months community service and fined
the equivalent of $17,500 for beating to death an 11-year-old
Palestinian child, Hilmi Shawasheh.
On the same day Su’ad Hilmi Ghazal was sentenced to six
and a half years in prison by Israel’s Jerusalem District
Court. Ghazal is a Palestinian who, at the age of 15, while
suffering psychological problems, stabbed an Israeli settler,
injuring him. (www.amnesty.org).
Am I the only one extremely unnerved by this? An Israeli settler
beats to death an 11-year-old child and gets away with six months
community service? A Palestinian teen-ager with psychological
problems stabs an Israeli settler, only injuring him, and gets
thrown into prison for six years? With such blatant and appalling
sentences by Israeli courts, I would not be surprised if Nahum
Korman’s community service assignment was to bulldoze one
Palestinian house in West Bank per day for six months.
However tragic this seems to you, I do not bring this example to
appeal to your emotions. I am not looking to jerk tears from your
eyes. Rather, I am showing how this case exemplifies the Israeli
scales of injustice. This case demands that people reassess claims
that “Israel is the only real democracy in the Middle
East.”
The truth is that the United Nations General Assembly
consistently and continuously condemns Israel’s violation of
Palestinian human rights and their illegal military occupation of
foreign territories. Israel is a special “democracy” of
the Middle East, for it has legalized the torture of Palestinians
and detained many of them under brutal conditions for years without
bringing charges. Israel readily disregards principles and rights
that Americans hold as inalienable.
Israel has ignored every U.N. resolution condemning its brutal
nature. Israel has rejected General Assembly Resolutions 194 (III),
3089 D (XXVIII), 242, 383, 237 and 681. These resolutions, voted on
by U.N. countries of the world (except the United States and
Israel), declared that the Palestinian people should be compensated
for property losses and should be entitled to equal rights and self
determination. This includes withdrawal of Israeli armed forces
from territories occupied in the Six-Day War.
Furthermore, the United Nations once denounced the Zionist
political ideology as “racist,” but was forced to
retract it after pressure from the United States. The brutalization
of the Palestinian people and the occupation of their land,
however, are not the core problems, but symptoms of a disease.
This disease is Zionism ““ defined by Webster’s New
Riverside University Dictionary as “a movement originally
aimed at the re-establishment of a Jewish national homeland and
state in Palestine and now concerned with the development and
support of Israel.” People must look through the violence we
see in the news every day to find the cause.
It is true that the culmination of Zionism today is the state of
Israel, and to many Israelis it has meant a nation and territory of
their own in which they have the military might to control their
own destiny. I do not deny this.
Unfortunately, Zionists leave out the fact that the
establishment of Israel resulted in the expulsion of more than
700,000 Palestinians, the thousands of Palestinians massacred to
make space for Israeli settlers, and the countless numbers of
Palestinian villages and homes destroyed by Israeli soldiers
following their “independence.” This is not a one-sided
view of the issue but a reality.
David Ben-Gurion, a former prime minister of Israel declared it
himself when he said,”Why should the Arabs make peace? If I
was an Arab leader, I would never make terms with Israel. That is
natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us,
but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs, we come
from Israel, it’s true, but 2,000 years ago, and what is that
to them?
“There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler,
Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we
came here and stole their country. Why should they accept
that?” (http://www.al-bushra.org/israel/ben.htm)
Let me repeat “we have taken their country.” The
crux of the issue is that the establishment of Israel, like the
establishment of the United States in the New World, was at the
expense of an indigenous people. Zionism is perpetrating the same
atrocities against the Palestinian population that American
Manifest Destiny perpetrated against the Native American population
in the U.S.
Until Palestinian right of return is redressed properly, a
thousand Yasser Arafats and 500 Oslo peace accords will achieve no
justice for the Palestinian people.
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 Illustration by CASEY CROWE/Daily Bruin