Here’s a little article I wrote for the Columbia Spectator a couple of months ago:
Recognizing Palestine’s Struggle
Saifedean Ammous
1/26/07
As anti-war activists prepare to march on Washington, D.C. on Saturday demanding an end to the war in Iraq, one issue will be conspicuous by its absence from the agenda of the majority of groups participating: Israel’s despicable oppression of Palestinians.
That this issue is left out of the march is more significant than it may initially seem. After all, there are many worthy causes around the world that are not mentioned in this anti-war march. Yet, not mentioning Palestine in the antiwar movement reflects an absurd short-sightedness in dealing with the Middle East. It will doom this movement to failure if the benchmarks for its success are set to a reasonable standard beyond the myopic (and by now largely inevitable) “Bring the Troops Home.”
First, the moral case: if the antiwar movement opposes the war on Iraq because of moral concerns, it is baffling it would remain silent on Palestine. Israel has set up walls and checkpoints that separate farmers from their lands, students from their schools and universities, patients from their hospitals, and fiances from each other. In effect, Israel has in place a colonial system of apartheid in the West Bank where close to half a million Jews get superior access to all resources, live in their Jewish-only communities, drive on roads for Jews only, and are completely separated from any contact with Palestine’s non-Jews. No wonder that Archbishop Desmond Tutu has denounced Israel’s policies in Palestine as worse than those of the apartheid regime in South Africa.
When confronted with these facts, some members of the antiwar movement will concede that the Palestinian situation is bad, but will wash their hands of it by saying that it is not America that is engaged in such policies and that the antiwar movement is a domestic movement aimed at exerting domestic pressure on the American government. They couldn’t be more wrong.
Whereas Americans are not carrying out the actual oppression in Palestine, America is as morally culpable as Israel in these actions. American aid (both military and civilian) subsidizes the racist occupation and settlements with billions of taxpayer dollars, leading to a situation where each Israeli citizen receives more money from the U.S. federal government than citizens of most American states do. In fact, America gives more to Israel than it gives to all of Sub-Saharan Africa combined.
Further, the political cover that has allowed Israel to continue in its delinquent disregard for international and human rights laws only comes thanks to the continued, unconditional, and morally complicit diplomatic and political cover it gets from the world’s only remaining superpower. America allows Israel to continue to oppress Palestinians. Moral opposition to the Iraq war has to be accompanied by moral opposition to Israeli apartheid.
Now we turn to the practical case. Many argue that in order for the antiwar movement to be effective, it needs to concentrate only on Iraq. Asking for too much is a recipe for achieving too little, we are told, and in order to save Iraq we may need to forget about Palestine. After all, politics is not all about morality, and politicians need to prioritize.
I disagree. It is flawed for the movement to think that the only problem with America’s Middle Eastern foreign policy is the occupation of Iraq. Continued support for Israel’s crimes is the root of the problem and has radicalized anti-American fervor since long before the Iraq debacle. Iraq has worsened this, but even if the situation there were to be magically resolved, this would still not end the anti-Americanism and the rightful resentment that the majority of Arabs and Muslims feel. It is surely not a solution, just a reversal of one of the many grave mistakes America has committed. But don’t take my word for it.
The Iraq Study Group’s report clearly states that America must engage in finding a real solution to the Israel-Palestine problem in order to succeed in Iraq and the wider region. From Jimmy Carter to Philip Zelikow to Zbigniew Brzezinski to Brent Scowcroft, a growing number of foreign policy experts and scholars agree with this proposition. As Martin Luther King said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
The antiwar movement continues to fudge the issue, carefully circumventing any serious discussion of America’s Middle East policy. It is truly a remarkable nadir for an antiwar movement to have a moral position inferior to that of hard-nosed, Cold War no-nonsense realists.
Neither immorality nor nationalistic chauvinism nor even bigotry could amply explain the antiwar movement’s silence on Israel-Palestine. The most flattering explanation one can find is ignorance, though more likely, it is a unique mix of cowardice, folly, and pathetic political hackery.
——————————————————————————–
© Copyright 2007 Columbia Daily Spectator
