by Charlie Gluckman
11th December 2007

Considering the claim in Joseph Brown’s op-ed of November 27, ‘Take a stand’, with regard to the ‘Israel-Palestine debate’, that ‘...those who…seek to compromise are actually sustaining the status quo of violence and terror just as much as those who are for the occupation’, I think that the jury is still out on his flat-out denial of a polarising agenda. It is not indifference that ‘sustains or even advances injustice, whether we want [it] to or not’, it is articles like this.
In a university with a stronger support for Israel, Brown’s article, along with Vladimir Unkovski-Korica’s column, ‘A Tale of Two Apartheids’, of December 4, would invoke the following hostile chain of events. There would be a response explaining that Israelis live in existential fear because of their neighbours’ denial of Israel’s right to exist. Following this, there may be articles that say: Israelis are occupiers; those Palestinians who were driven out of their homes are now forced to live in refugee camps; Israel is preventing the progress of the establishment of a Palestinian state. The response might then be: the Palestinian people have no sufficient leadership, Hamas is a terrorist organisation, and there are no viable partners for a peaceful two-state solution. And so on and so forth.

I have never been able to understand why it is that rigid supporters of Israel reject all rhetoric against Israel as the resurgence of anti-Semitism. Similarly, why is it that pro-Israel students tend to fall into being rigid and narrow supporters of Israel? Well, thanks Joseph, you helped me to figure it out. The uncompromising support for the Palestinians sustains the status quo by creating a rigid and narrow support for Israel, and vice versa. It then just becomes an unsolvable ‘chicken or the egg’ debate.

This polarisation ignores the real people, in both Israel and in Palestine, who are affected by this violence on a daily basis. I always find myself saying to rigid supporters of Israel, with regard to Israel’s right to defend its borders: go and actually witness the way in which Palestinian people are imprisoned, with little or no freedom of movement, then come back and tell me if you still think that the actions of the Israel Defence Forces in the Occupied Territories are justified. Similarly, I want to ask Unkovski-Korica about his claim in his column regarding the ‘Palestinians’ right to resist’. Go and actually talk to bereaved parents who have lost their innocent son or daughter whilst on a bus to school, then come back and tell me that this ‘right to resist’ should continue. The ‘Israel-Palestine debate’ is not a debate; labelling it so condenses the complexity of the situation into simple notions that one side is right, the other wrong, reducing both sides into homogeneous blocs, each bitter about the other. It is those that sustain this position who exacerbate the problem.

Why can’t we stand in solidarity with both those Palestinians and those Israelis who are losing their family members because of the violence? We need to support organisations like the Bereaved Families Forum where Palestinians and Israelis who have lost members of their family seek each other out as a means to put an end to the injustice. Why can’t we oppose the violence and terror coming from both Palestinians and Israel and stand in solidarity with those who are seeking peaceful means to end the conflict? Why can’t we just remember the values that drove us to care in the first place and support organisations such as One Voice, a grassroots movement of Israelis and Palestinians who work to push an agenda of peace together?

Joseph, you were right. The School definitely needs to take a stand. Not caring is not an option. However, the stand must be distinctly against the violence, in all the forms that it comes in. We must be pro-dialogue and not only support the current efforts that promote both dialogue and understanding, but actively seek new ways in which this can be done.