Palestinians are second class citizens in their own country. Until 1988 all non-jewish people had a special license plate on their cars so Jews would know who wasn't jewish.
Palestinians have great reasons to be angry.I'll share with you a paper I wrote, that hopefully you'll read and understand the cultural, economic, and physical oppression that the Israelis are forcing onto the Palestinians.
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A number of children are in the street when Israeli soldiers appear. When they begin to throw stones at those they have been raised since childhood to see as their oppressors, the outcome is not pretty. A shout rings out, and one not so lucky child lies alone. This is not the only shot, and it is certainly not the last as Israeli soldiers have frequently gone to extreme lengths to end any uprising. Fifteen year-old Ibrahim Abu Habla is just another tragedy in this Middle Eastern struggle. This is a frequent occurrence as this game of chicken over who will be the first to give up continues, and it seems as though the leaders of each side are fearless when it comes to sacrificing the lives of those whom they represent (El-Sawwaf paras. 10-11). Violence has become the only language that Israelis have come to use when they must deal with these troublesome Palestinians. Palestinians over the past half century have gone through untold acts of violence, discrimination, and the theft of their homeland. The only way to end this needless bloodshed is to finally create a much deserved, separate Palestinian state.
The issue of an Israel/Palestinian state first appeared after the creation of Israel following World War II by the U.N. which was meant to create a homeland for the dislocated Jewish people who had survived the wrath of Hitler and the Nazi regime in Europe. In 1948, the U.N. mandate expired and the Jewish people declared their sovereignty, which led to the Arab-Israeli war. An armistice was reached and Israel still stood (Muravchik 1).
In 1967, the infamous Six-Day War began when Israel’s Air Force attacked bases in Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Overall, approximately 80% of these countries’ warplanes were destroyed by this pre-emptive strike. Israel then deployed its troops to the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights (Smith 220). According to Ersun Kurtulus, many began to argue that this was not a pre-emptive strike, but a surprise attack. In response, Israel claimed that such an attack was necessary to protect itself as Egypt had moved 80,000 of its soldiers into the Sinai Peninsula, believing that this was the early sign of an attack. This combined with the frequent cries for the destruction of Israel had fueled Israel’s fear. However, was an attack justified? Israel’s attack on these different countries and regions did not meet the global criteria of being pre-emptive, making it a surprise attack. However, many countries continued to support Israel’s decision (1-5). The end of the Six-Day War expanded Israel, and ended Palestine. Thus began this long lasting struggle to recreate a Palestinian state.
A major change that dramatically angered Palestinians was the annexing of the eastern section of Jerusalem, which was ¾ Jewish and ¼ Arab, and had been a sole Arabic city since the 7th century. After the 1948 war for independence, Jews held the Western section and Arabs held the East. After the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel took over the whole city, and the reign of Islamic dominance of Jerusalem ended (Viorst 4). From the end of a Palestine, the remaining Palestinians who did not leave were aliens in what was once their own country. Political parties arose from the fanatical groups, such as Hamas and Fatah (Abusada 4-6). This has led outsiders to see Islam as a violent religion, whereas these groups are the minority. The majority of Islamic groups are peaceful organizations; however, these few have ruined the reputation of the rest (Ayoob 5). The United States’ stand on the issue has changed repeatedly over the past fifty years, from support of Israel to the opposite. Currently, President George W. Bush has supported the creation of a Palestinian state; however, he demands new leadership as he sees the current administration as terrorists or the supporters of terrorists reports David Unger (1). Although there are an abundance of reasons to create a separate Palestinian state alongside Israel, valid reasons to stop its creation do exist.
One such reason would be that the land on which Israel stands was originally Jewish land. Biblical characters, such as King David, were the earliest rulers of Israel. The city of Jerusalem itself has been a spiritual center for Judaism for over 2000 years. Currently 200,000 Jews live there, making a change to the city’s sovereignty a hard change to make (Unger 5). The amount of land currently held by Arab nations is an astounding forty-four different states with over a billion residents. Israel is smaller than Lake Michigan and has barely five million people living in it (“Independent” 2). These reasons are some of the most logical arguments from a geographical standpoint.
Another point by those who don’t want to create a Palestinian homeland is that Israelis fear that the Palestinians would not hold true to their promises, as they have done in the past. One example, as explained in “A Demilitarized Palestinian State: Should Israel, Should the World, Rely on it?,” an opinion letter by anonymous, is that the Palestinian people cannot be trusted as they have repeatedly broken the promises that they have made, such as the Oslo Agreement, where they agreed to give up their weapons, yet still today its seems as though rocket launchers and machine guns are more plentiful than cars (1). Others believe that if a compromise was finally reached, they would simply bicker over who would rule what, as no guidelines have been set to determine leadership in such an event. This causes Israelis to fear the very real possibility of a civil war aided by the fact that there are already warring sects who make it seem almost as an inevitability, rather than a possibility (Robinson 4).
The leading reason that Israelis generally oppose the creation of a Palestinian state however is violence. Terrorism has left the Jewish people fearful, as suicide attacks have been aimed at anyone Jewish, regardless of age or gender, knowing only the hatred of religion. These types of feelings are not new to the Jewish faith, as similarities to the Holocaust are usually brought up in their defense. Once more the general opinion is that Jews fight for survival. To the Jewish people, giving up their land in Israel means endangering their own well-being. They may as well be signing their own death warrants. With this is distaste for anything former Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat has touched, believing that he supported a culture of violence against Israel. All the news attention to terrorism has created a state of fear, where the common notion is that anyone could be a terrorist, and no one can be trusted (Robinson 2-7).
Violence is also an issue because giving the Palestinians land so near the heart of Israel would allow them an excellent vantage point by which to attack Israel. Palestinian rockets could easily reach well into the Israeli homeland, doing an unparalleled amount of damage to its people and infrastructure (“Independent” 1). When these accusations are denied by the Palestinians leaders, such as the former leader Yasir Arafat had done, they can only point to the uncountable number of weapons that have been smuggled into Palestinian lands, and later discovered. Yet these are only the weapons they have found (“Demilitarized” 1).
As stated by Mkhaimar S. Abusada in “Palestinian Party Affiliation and Political Attitudes Toward the Peace Process,” groups such as Hamas have made it perfectly clear to Israel that they will not stop until they have wiped it from the map, and such words certainly evoke great feelings of distrust towards any Palestinian, destroying the path to compromise and peace (2). These are very valid reasons as to why Israel should fear and disprove of a separate Palestinian state being so close to itself. However, they are but one side of the argument.
The first argument that many Palestinians looking for their freedom would make is that the country of Israel was once their own homeland of Palestine. Before the U.N. intervened, they had lived there since the seventh century. For over a thousand years generation after generation called this land home. The city of Jerusalem alone still holds 85,000 Palestinians, yet this number is only the few who have remained after half a century. Many more have left and either moved away or abandoned their homeland completely (Unger 5). The primary point of this argument is whether the takeover of another peoples’ land can be justified. Israelis like to argue that this land was at one time their land, long ago in the past.
However, it was so long ago, can it be held relevant? It was also not the Palestinians who took the land from the Israelis, as they did not move into the area until the seventh century, and those whom they took the land from were not of Israeli descent, but of Roman heritage according to Milton Viorst, who wrote “Middle East Peace: Mirage on the Horizon?,” which appeared in The Washington Quarterly (2).
The holy city of Jerusalem also has great religious meaning to the Palestinians, as the Haram al-Sharif is the third holiest site of Islam. This not only brings sentimental value to their land, but religious value as well (Unger 5). Even when Palestinians, such as their past leader Yasir Arafat, have tried to come to compromises with Israeli diplomats, such as Ariel Sharon, such compromises have been refused by Israel because they see the land as theirs, while many Palestinians can still see, feel, and taste Palestine as it once was.
In 2002, for example, a compromise was proposed by Saudi Arabia, a country that was in total disfavor of Israel altogether that would leave both sides with good amounts of land. However, the Israeli government refused to agree to such a compromise and give up any land, even though said compromise was in accordance with the UN General Assembly Resolution 194 according to Joshua Muravik (2).
The only real possibility is a compromise and with a return to the borders of June of 67’ the most likely possibility. Such a compromise still needs to be worked out. With the large amount of Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, serious land swaps to create two independent states would be necessary. There would need to be on some level swaps that may include lands owned by opposing sides before the Six-
Day War. This is still a fair trade, the only problem is that it is all up to the leaders of both sides to finally sit down and draw out the compromise that would dissolve such land disputes that seem to plague a diplomatic solution to this crisis (Unger 1). If a compromise on the land dispute could be reached, peace in Israel/Palestine would be much, much closer.
Violence plays a key role in Palestinians’ anger towards Israelis as well. While the media in the United States always looks to point out the violence perpetrated on Israelis by Palestinians, the violence coming from the Israelis is just as bad if not worse. After the Six-Day War, any violent actions that have been carried out by Palestinians have been deemed acts of terrorism. However, anything that the Israelis have done has been acceptable. In our own society, police brutality is something that is taken very seriously, however, in Israel, Israeli police have been known to attack or even kill innocent Palestinians without repercussions. This type of hypocrisy can obviously make Palestinians angry, as they feel that they are fighting for their freedom and are being beaten down by those who oppress them, to the point where even innocent children are being put in the crosshairs of Israeli rifles.
While terrorism indeed exists as Israel claims it does, the amount of it is almost directly proportional to this situation of oppression. If the Palestinian people were free and had their land returned, the Palestinian people would have no need for anymore violence. The creation of a separate Palestinian state would lower the amount of terrorism worldwide by eliminating its prime source (Miskel 2). Some, such as James Petras whose article “Why Condemning Israel and the Zionist Lobby is so Important” showed the real corruption of the Israeli government when it comes to the treatment of Palestinians, feel that the violence by Israel is ethnic cleansing that is supported by the world. Countries such as the United States supplied Israel with weapons to use, for instance, in the recent war against Lebanon. However, it was not solely Lebanon that felt the sting of Israeli bullets, and Palestinians have been subjected to this US funded violence for years. Palestinians are a lower class who have been beaten into submission and segregated just as blacks once were in the United States (2-3).
All this violence is perpetrated against the Palestinian population, while the majority of the Palestinian population is in favor of diplomacy over violence. Eighty-two percent of Palestinians are in favor of the diplomatic approach used by Fatah, which include peace talks and negotiations, to create a Palestinian state, while only eighteen percent oppose it. On the other hand, only twenty-nine percent are in favor of Hamas’ approach, which include the use of violence to demand the creation of such a state. This is compared with the seventy-one percent who oppose Hamas’ methods (Abusada 6). In general, we can see that violence is not the Palestinian way of solving problems. However, negative images and stereotypes have labeled them as such, and Israel has responded overdramatically.
Author Edward S. Herman, in his article “Wholesale Terrorism Escalates: The Threat of Genocide,” argues that the general view of massive Israeli deaths caused by few guerilla like Palestinian fighters is quite untrue. Herman cites the fact that “the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli casualties in the first intifada, 25 to 1, has fallen during the second intifada to only three to one” (Herman 4). This however still shows the big difference in Palestinian to Israeli deaths even though the gap has shrunk. With the arsenal that Israel has at its’ disposal, Herman feels that there is a real possibility for further death and destruction. In fact, he views Israel’s actions as “a form of terrorism and ethnic cleansing that rests on Nazi-like quest for lebensraum sought on behalf of a superior race” (Herman 4). These numbers are further supported by reporter Mustafa El-Sawwaf in his article on IslamOnline.net, where in 2003 he reported that the number of Palestinians killed was up to 2,476 since 2000, while the number of Israeli deaths was only 742 (para. 12). This is quite a large discrepancy for the so-called ‘victims.’
This situation is actually ironic, as the Jewish people, being those who were killed off and forced to find their own homeland, are now doing the same thing to another group of people just as the Nazis had done to them. Israeli officials have even admitted that such actions were unwarranted. Former Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharett stated in his diary that “the long chain of false incidents and hostilities we have invented, and so many clashes we have provoked” when speaking of Israel’s attacks on Palestinian civilians (Herman 2). Ariel Sharon stated in 2002 that they must be “hit hard until they beg for mercy” (Herman 2). Of course, this is the same Ariel Sharon that directed the killings of approximately eight hundred to three thousand women and children in the 1980s at one of the most infamous massacres in history at Sabra and Shatila (Herman 4). This helps to clear up the mystery as to why so many innocent civilians are being killed today. The only real mystery is why Palestinians have stuck with their ideas of peace for so long when such great violence is being used against them.
The leading cause of the current tensions between Israelis and Palestinians, however, points to the discrimination that Palestinians must endure daily by the Israelis, who have complete control over them. They have been forced into economic and political discrimination that has caused them to be treated as a lower class in Israeli society.
According to Arie Arnon in her article “Israel: Policy Towards the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the Economic Dimension, 1967-2007,” these feelings of resentment are well deserved. In 2003, the GNP, or Gross National Product, per person in Gaza was below 10%. This highlights the fact that even though there are negligible geographic differences between Gaza and the Israeli controlled Israel, Palestinians are subjected to much more poverty and discrimination. Besides simply the terrible GNP, there was also a severe rise in unemployment in Gaza and the Westbank. According to her research, since the year 2000, unemployment increased to 30% in the Westbank, and a freakishly high 40% in Gaza. The poverty level has also increased dramatically, as the poverty level in the Westbank has increased from 13% to 40% since 2000, and the Gaza went from an even worse 32% to 65% in that same time span. During this time, living standards dropped 30% in just three years. Arnon draws a direct correlation between the failure to reach an agreement at Camp David. Because of Yassir Arafat’s reluctance to give in and compromise, the Israeli government began to discriminate against the Palestinian people more than ever before (2-12).
According to author Glenn Robinson, Israel has such a large amount of influence over the lives of Palestinians that they even have the ability to close their own borders, which would leave 100,000 Palestinians without jobs as normally they must commute to Israeli areas to find work (2). This goes even further to support the idea that overall, Palestinians are discriminated against by their Israeli neighbors and are forced into terrible conditions where there is little hope ahead, and only a small sliver of chance that they might be able to escape the poverty with which they grew up with. According to Alan Dowty in his article “’A Question That Outweighs All Others’: Yitzhak Epstein and Zionist Recognition of the Arab Issue,” Arab farmers usually find that they must work much harder than their Israeli counterparts for significantly less. He finds that they work harder, and endure harsher manual labor for almost nothing, and then must return home to see their families continue to live in poverty (4).
Some Palestinians feel, however, that the discrimination that they face daily is much more than economic discrimination. They feel that politically, they have been taken out of the loop. Palestinians have been quoted as even believing that the Israelis control their election systems and abuse their human rights by doing such. They even feel that they cannot be outspoken against these abuses, because doing so would meet them with harsh criticism by the Israeli government. Author James Petras goes as far as comparing Israeli rule to a totalitarian government, rather than a democratic one (2-3). The Palestinian people have endured so many hardships over the years since the initial theft of their homeland, however, it seems as though they shall continue to be oppressed by the Israeli government as long as leaders like Ariel Sharon refuse to work towards a compromise with those which they see fit to discriminate. Discrimination has played a large role in how the Palestinian society has changed over the years, as the young Palestinians of today now look at Democracy as something that they want, because they feel that perhaps they could be the ones to make the peoples’ will heard, and finally save their people (Viorst 10). Discrimination has certainly become the most apparent reason as to why there should be a separate, independent Palestinian state.
“In the smoke and blood of Israel/Palestine these days one point should be clear, that Israel is the oppressor and the Palestinian Arabs are the oppressed” (Gordon 2). This signifies the general Palestinian outlook on their situation in Israel. They have had their land stolen, their families killed, and those who remained being forced into an inescapable poverty. This goes to simply reinforce the fact that a Palestinian state has been deserved since its original dismantling following the Six-Day War. Long have the Palestinians fought to regain their land, to regain their freedom. It is finally time to end this fight, and restore to them what we so clearly take for granted, freedom.
Please ignore the poor format, stupid computer...