Exposing the Amherst community to these underrepresented stories will strengthen and deepen the debates about potential resolutions to the conflict. As a group, we have decided not to endorse one particular solution to the issue. Rather, we will provide the Amherst community with viewpoints disparate from those promoted by the mainstream media so that after considering all sides, students can form their own conclusions.
We will encourage widespread awareness and conversation by organizing various events, including lectures, film screenings and other creative activities. We also regularly discuss current issues salient to the suffering of the Palestinians at our weekly meetings. We invite all members of the Five College community to join us.
Individual members of the group have composed direct responses to Mr. Schulwolf’s article, each on his or her own behalf.
—Students for Justice in Palestine
Dan Kamen ’10
The conversation about Israel and Palestine must move beyond the boundaries that have been established by American discourse. The occupation of the West Bank and the strangulation of Palestinian society deserve our attention, but it is an illusion to assume that peace can be achieved simply if Israel withdraws to the 1967 borders. The siege in Gaza, the institutionalized discrimination against Arab Israelis enshrined in immigration and land legislation, the demolition of homes, the arbitrary arrests and the targeting of journalists (see the case of Mohammed Omer) are all serious matters that behoove us to reexamine the situation in Israel/Palestine beyond the occupation of the West Bank.
These affronts to human rights and international law, while unfortunately supported by a significant bloc of Israeli citizens, would be unsustainable without legal, ideological, economic and military support from the United States government. This “special relationship” is alternately defended by appeals to the innate similarities between Israeli and American society, by the coincidence of American and Israeli geopolitical aims and the perception of Israeli vulnerability, yet each of these arguments is morally bankrupt if it entails supporting the institutionalized oppression of the Palestinian people.
The U.S.’s support for Israel is perceived by many to exemplify the disregard of the U.S. for the well-being of Arabs and Muslims alike. But for us, as residents or citizens of the U. S., it represents a distinct opportunity. Just as American support has allowed Israel to circumvent or ignore United Nations condemnations of its activities, it can be used to leverage the powerful in Israeli politics to bring the nation into line with international conventions.
The U. S.’s unquestioning support for the Israeli government perpetuates the contradiction between the obvious but ideologically concealed oppression of Palestinian people and Israel’s Proclamation of Independence, which claims that it “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture … and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.”
Chris Tullis ’10E
Although I share the concerns expressed by Mr. Schulwolf in his recent op-ed piece about biased presentations of facts, I am somewhat perplexed by his suppositions regarding SJP’s politics and strategies. No SJP member, for example, has ever said anything to Mr. Schulwolf that would imply that the group holds the Israel-Palestine region to be “solely the homeland of the Palestinian Arabs.” Mr. Schulwolf’s concern about SJP’s photography exhibit is similarly puzzling. “[D]on’t show a picture,” he counsels, “of a Palestinian man getting beaten by Israeli police, only to have that picture turn out to actually represent an Israeli policeman protecting a Jewish student from a group of Palestinians.” Even if we overlook Mr. Schulwolf’s implication that ethnicity tells us something about who can perpetrate aggression and who is deserving of police protection, there remains the fact that SJP’s first-ever photography exhibit had yet to take place when the piece was published. While I do appreciate Mr. Schulwolf’s thoughtful perspective on the region, it is my hope that, in the future, before admonishing SJP against falling into the trap of “uncompromising ideological rigidity,” Mr. Schulwolf will attend a few of our club functions and evaluate the openness of SJP’s politics based on what we say and do, instead of simply assuming similarity between our positions and those of “more radical Palestinian advocacy groups.”
John Masato Ulmer ’12
Throughout his career, George Orwell warned of the dangers of manipulating language. One of his central beliefs was that sound language is the basis of intelligent thought. But if the vocabulary of a public discourse is warped, how can truth best be served?
One of the biggest problems with the dialogue on the Israeli occupation is that the facts and the basic realities of the situation don’t survive the packaging of the media. Mr. Schulwolf’s article unintentionally brings up one such way that the media distorts the truth. He urges that Students for Justice in Palestine “balance” photos and descriptions depicting abuses and deaths of Palestinians at the hands of Israeli soldiers and settlers with justification of such actions and accounts of equivalent suffering of Israelis. This is a fallacy of accurate reporting that the media uses in order to create “balance” in reporting of the conflict; in truth, such justifications and juxtapositions distort the realities of the situation. While there are cases where Israeli beatings and shootings of Palestinian civilians have security justifications, the way in which the media equates many abuses with terms such as “security needs” and civilians being caught in “crossfire” both sets up a false dialectic, making the Palestinian “side” appear equal to the Israeli state and army, and distorts the power and immediacy of objective facts.
Sometimes there is no justification or equivalent, such as when a child like Ahmed Mousa of Ni’illin is shot in the head by live M-16 rounds for protesting the construction of the Wall. Perhaps the Palestinians, too, have “security needs” and in fact are more likely to be the victims of bombings, missile strikes, and random terror than Israelis. Perhaps the situation isn’t a “conflict” but a single-sided oppression by a military that receives $16 million a day of American tax dollars.
The only way that there will be an open, informed discourse on the situation in Israel-Palestine is if the words and the reporting that depict the situation possess clarity and meaning. As a member of SJP, I hope that the group organizes honest and factual events about the Palestinians to compensate for the unbalanced mainstream discourse.