In last week’s opinion piece, “Mideast Visits Show Truth,” Josh Parker illustrated his limitless capacity to produce rambling, hateful rhetoric masquerading as political commentary. In one stroke, Parker denigrated Islam, attacked Northeastern News columnist Joe Goldberg as a “self-loathing” and “feeble-minded Jew” (for opposing Israeli occupation), and demonized the Palestinians. Of these numerous “achievements,” Parker’s vicious attack against Palestinians is most striking in its ignorance.
While Parker paints Palestinians as a pack of “terrorists,” recent Israeli historians consulting declassified Israeli archives show that Palestinians have long been victims of Israeli colonialism. Benny Morris, for example, notes that early Jewish settlers acted “like white colonists everywhere,” a European “minority exploiting and occasionally displacing the native population.” Explaining that these settlers created Israel “by moving or transferring … most of the Arabs out” he cites the 1914 declaration of Zionist leader Sharett; “We have not come to an empty land to inherit it, but … to conquer a country from people inhabiting it.”
Tom Segev, after describing the massive robbery carried out by Israeli forces in 1948, concluded, “tens of thousands of Israelis, soldiers and civilians, helped themselves to the spoils.” Ilan Pappe writes that Israel’s creation was “a chapter of expulsion, colonization, massacres, rape, and the burning of villages [against Palestinians]” and describes Zionism as “dispossession of the indigenous population.” These and other Israeli ‘new historians’ all agree that from 1947-1949, Israel expelled at least 700,000 Palestinians, destroyed 400 villages, and began doing so before the 1948 war.
Thus while Parker howls endlessly about “Palestinian terrorists,” he neglects to mention that Israel itself was founded by decimating Palestinian society through ethnic cleansing — all-sided terror.
After 1967 Israel seized remaining Palestine and began military occupation. The United Nations reports that Israel leveled 48 Palestinian villages by 1971 and bulldozed 20,000 homes by 1974 – “self-defense,” no doubt. Israeli human rights group B’TSelem reports that Israel’s occupying soldiers have tortured tens of thousands of Palestinians, including minors (14-17), sometimes “beating [them] severely for many hours.” Their statistics also show that from Dec. 1987 to Aug. 2002, Israel has killed more than four times the number of Palestinian civilians and more than five times as many minors than vice versa.
Palestinian life under occupation is one of daily humiliation. USAID and IMF reports indicate that in some areas almost half of Palestinian women suffer from anemia, complicating pregnancies, a fifth of children suffer from malnutrition, and most inhabitants live in abject poverty–all courtesy of Israel’s stranglehold. Then there are the routine Israeli war crimes, such as burning Palestinian children’s genitalia for amusement – an integral part of Israeli “democracy,” of course (Jerusalem Post, July 24, 2002).
Parker absurdly contends that “there are no occupied territories, only liberated.” Here we discover “liberated” means “stolen.” For under Israel’s racist laws, any foreigner of Jewish descent is granted citizenship at the expense of the Palestinian native, whose land is usurped by the illegal settler (hence, Israel’s fondness for bulldozers). Jewish (Ta’ayush) and Christian (CPT) peace activists, trying to prevent the expulsion of Palestinians on Jan. 18, found out that settlers are armed gangsters, beating, stealing from, and harassing Palestinians and activists. In response to similar incidents last year, several hundred South African Jews, themselves witness to white apartheid – and apparently unconvinced that “liberation” was synonymous with theft and plunder – signed a petition directly equating Israel’s occupation with apartheid.
Parker’s utter lack of evidence, sources or statistics and strong reliance on smears, name-calling, and rhetoric in defense of Israeli colonialism is a testament to the moral bankruptcy of Israeli colonialism itself.
The Palestinian people demand freedom – and justice demands they should have it.
– Mohammad Junaid Alam is a sophomore political science major.
