Asra Ziauddin outlined an alleged list of facts concerning the Israel-Palestine conflict in “Understanding Israel-Palestine requires grasp of myths, facts” (May 17). However, upon closer examination, I noticed that Ziauddin’s factual research was just as biased as those found on either Palestine Awareness Week’s “Dispelling Myths: Face the Facts” or David Horowitz’s “Wall of Lies,” qualifying it as a full-fledged opinion.
Ziauddin starts off her piece by taking a stab at Israel’s respectability as a democracy, claiming that it should “exercise policies which apply equally to all citizens and protect their basic rights.” However, Israel, like any democracy, is not perfect. Yet, as Alexander Yakobson and Amnon Rubinstein point out in “Israel and the Family of Nations,” considering the fact that Israel houses a minority that identifies itself with an enemy nation, the success and achievements of the democracy are actually quite striking.
While Arab citizens certainly face challenges, they are provided with means of redressing those challenges through the rights that the democracy grants, such as access to higher education, the courts, the media and freedom of speech. To claim that Israel is not a democracy because it is an imperfect one means that no country in the world qualifies as such.
Not to mention, Arab citizens are active members of the Knesset, the Israeli congress. In the 1990s, Ahmad Tibi served both as a Knesset member and a senior adviser to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
Ziauddin then moves on to describe the Palestinian refugee problem, labeling the group as a “displaced people.” Although some number of Palestinians were driven out of Israel between December 1947 and May 1948 due to expulsion and atrocities, the majority left the land voluntarily, according to historian Benny Morris. As Morris puts it in his book “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem,” “The Palestinian refugee problem was born of war, not by design, Jew or Arab.”
While Ziauddin claims that “the occupation began the violence,” I firmly believe that such an enduring conflict is far too complicated to be boiled down to a single cause.
Rather, I believe that the root of the conflict is the presence of two national groups that regard this single land as their national home. Each group has a strong claim to the land, yet if one group is to deny the legitimacy of the other outright, there can be no compromise. In the words of the first president of Israel, Chaim Weizmann, “The conflict in Palestine is not a conflict between a right and a wrong but between two rights.”
Like so many agenda-driven fact-givers, Ziauddin only gives half the story. While she somewhat accurately cites unreferenced statistics of Palestinian and Israeli casualties, she does not report the reasons for such numbers. While the Israel Defense Forces actively work to protect its citizens, Hamas uses “human shields,” leaving the Israel Defense Forces with the operational and ethical challenges of defending its people against rocket launchers embedded in a civilian population.
Contrastingly, according the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs website, when Israel is forced to retaliate to regular terrorist rocket attacks, the Israel Defense Forces often drops leaflets to warn Palestinian civilians.
Although I entirely disagree with the statement that Muslims and Jews cannot live together peacefully, I nonetheless cannot accept the picturesque scene that Ziauddin portrays. While it is true that Jews were tolerated in the Ottoman Empire, they received the status of dhimmi, second-class citizens with restricted rights, and maintained a comfortable coexistence with Muslims preferable to Europe’s strong anti-Semitic sentiments of the time.
With the advent of Zionism, Jews no longer desired this second-class citizenship. Simultaneously, nationalism was making waves around the globe, encouraging the emergence of Arab nationalism and Palestinian-Arab nationalism. These three arising ideologies changed the nature of Jewish-Arab relations.
However, why should you believe me? I am just another cause-proponent feeding you information that suits my agenda. Thus, I urge you to look for yourself before you develop an opinion, make sure your sources are generally bias-free and reliable and decide for yourself whether peace is possible.
_Molly Cornfield
Third-year, environmental science_