Mahmood is a fourth-year business economics and international
development studies student. He is also a member of the Muslim
Student Association.
By Ghaith Mahmood
As we look at the recent Israeli incursion into Palestinian
towns and villages, the mass graves being built in the West Bank
town of Ramallah eerily parallel a scene out of the genocide in
Bosnia. Witnessing the Israeli army rounding up all men in
Palestinian villages, detaining them for days, and then branding
them with identification numbers brings back horrific images of a
concentration camp somewhere in Auschwitz. Calls to rewrite the
history books of the Palestinian people makes one recall the era of
a racist colonization that this world has supposedly shed once and
for all.
As we witness the innocent spilling of blood in all parts of the
Palestinian region, we must ask ourselves, how have we as a
collective humanity allowed this tragic siege to become so
horrendous? A siege in which one of the world’s largest
military forces has been wreaking destruction on Palestinian
hospitals, schools, refugee camps and civilian residences.
The sad reality of the conflict in the Middle East is that it is
not a balanced conflict between two forces of equal strength. The
reality is that we are witnessing one of the largest armies in the
world invading what few cities, refugee camps and Bantustans are
left to a stateless, repeatedly refugeed, and dispossessed people
lacking weapons and real leadership. Ariel Sharon’s actions
are shamelessly pounding the Palestinian people into complete
submission and utter humiliation.
Yet Israeli policy makers truly cannot believe that policies of
invading Palestinian cities, killing Palestinian women and
children, and bulldozing countless Palestinian homes and
universities will actually lead to the Palestinian people simply
rolling over and submitting to their grim fate without a word.
Malcolm X once stated that there can be no peace without
freedom, for a people cannot be at peace unless they have their
freedom. The current generation of Palestinian people is a
generation that never tasted freedom in their whole lives.
It is a generation that has seen their already small plots of
land evaporate with each new Israeli settlement illegally built in
the Occupied Territories. It is a generation that has had their
homes bulldozed. It is a generation regulated to the destitute
ghettos and refugee camps that are occupied by Israeli tanks
today.
This generation has been denied access to enter their most
sacred religious sites, seen their lives caged within a complex web
of Israeli military checkpoints, and have to live knowing that only
the most elite members of the Palestinian Authority could ever have
a chance at living a normal life.
The fact is that since the much-heralded Oslo Accords, the
corrupt and inept Palestinian Authority still cannot make any
administrative or civil decisions in running what sliver of
autonomous land they control.
For the Palestinian people, this form of existence is anything
but free, and this form of peace is anything but just. Yet,
everything we hear about the Palestinians is the final product of
this miserable tale ““ 18-year-old suicide bombers making the
only sacrifice they have left to make.
So we sit back, shake our head in cold judgment, and indulge in
this bitter fantasy we call the War on Terror.
Yet in the wake of the Israeli raids, detainment and
subjugation, support of the Palestinian people is reaching a global
high. Massive demonstrations crying out against Israeli human
rights violations are occurring in all parts of the world: 100,000
people marching for justice in Rome, a Japanese man setting himself
ablaze in Tokyo, demonstrations in Paris, South Africa, and even
here at home have shown that the world is beginning to unite into
voicing a single collective message: end the violence and end the
occupation.
Also, courageous Israeli soldiers have begun to stand up and
refuse to serve in the Occupied Territories, risking their
livelihood and being thrown in jail rather than taking part in the
mass subjugation and occupation of another people’s land.
We must ask, why has it taken this long for the international
community to stand up and plead for an end to the violence and the
occupation? Where have these cries been for the past 54 years, as
the Palestinian people have been the daily victims of violence by
being physically pushed off of their land?
Where were these cries as countless Palestinian homes in the
West Bank were bulldozed every day to make room for new Israeli
settlements? As human rights organizations cried in the wind,
lambasting the Israeli army’s practices of torture, why did
the world stand by silently? The tragic violence unfurling before
our eyes is the terrible product of a deep legacy of violence and
oppression against the Palestinian people, an oppression that was
left unchecked by the world, and which has now created an explosive
cesspool of desperation, anger, and hopelessness.
How miserable has this horrific siege become when the occupied
and dispossessed must guarantee the peace and security of the
occupier?