LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Burlington Free Press - printed January 11, 2002

Working for a Lasting Peace for Palestinians, Israelis
by Mousa Ishaq

The Holy Land is experiencing a nightmare that can and will end if we collectively as Americans, as human beings--Jews, Palestinians, and people of good will of all backgrounds--will it to terminate for a lasting, dignified peace based on justice for both the Palestinians and Israelis.

In this horrific nightmare both peoples are locked into a disastrous, lose-lose relationship. I call it the MAD relationship of occupation, i.e. Mutual Assured Destruction; oppressor and oppressed, masters and slaves, prisoners and prison guards. The illegal Israeli military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem is the root cause of the unfolding pain; violence is only the symptom. The occupation is costing Israel its soul and inflicting untold destruction on Palestinian society. To oppose the occupation and work to end it is to work for the benefit of both peoples.

The captive, subjugated Palestinians are resisting, to throw off the shackles of this military occupation and gain their freedom. I prefer to see a totally nonviolent, passive resistance to oppression. That, by the way, does not guarantee that one does not get shot by the Israeli military death squads that continue to snuff out the lives of the resisters, whether they are armed or not.

The Palestinians are trying to rid themselves of an occupying foreign army, one of the mightiest of our time, that has been abusing them for the past 34 years, besieging them, assassinating men and women, leaders and writers, humiliating them at checkpoints, robbing them of their dignity and their land. Israeli forces have demolished Palestinian homes and property, destroyed their crops, uprooted their beloved olive trees, restricted their movement to visit with family or loved ones in the next town, prevented them from going to hospitals or emergency care, to schools, universities, or work.

The so-called Oslo peace process and the "generous" Israeli peace offer regrettably turned out to be a repackaging of the Israeli occupation. The Palestinians were offered continued marginalization in discontiguous parcels of land--call them bantustans, reservations, or ghettos--in an apartheid-like system being marketed to the world under many guises--as self-rule, autonomy, a homeland but with illusionary sovereignty--and without any real control of their destiny as a people. No other people, least of all the Israelis, would have accepted such a cruel fate.

The Israelis are also traumatized, not by a mighty foreign army at their gates or in their midst but by their weak captives and prisoners who do not accept continued incarceration, enslavement, and confinement. They are traumatized by the occasional crazed prisoners so driven by hopelessness and aborted tomorrows that they take their own lives and others' lives with them in a senseless and counter-productive act of despair.

The Israelis are especially traumatized by their own ruthlessness, brutality, and tyranny that are necessary ingredients for maintaining absolute control over the Palestinians. Certainly, other occupiers and oppressors have resorted to such tactics in the not-too-distant past in India, Algeria, South Africa, Bosnia, and Serbia. All oppressors learn the hard way that they cannot live in peace and tranquility while their sisters, brothers, and neighbors in humanity are enslaved, hungry, deprived of their basic human rights, and desperate for freedom. Sooner or later, the oppressed rise up. And in the end--and after horrendous losses on all sides--the oppressed always gain their inalienable right to freedom.

The casual observer will note that, with all the pain and suffering that both Palestinians and Israelis have endured thus far and despite the disparity in their strength--one very powerful and one very weak--neither has acquired security under their current poisoned relationship of inequality.

The solution is not a complicated matter as some would have us believe. Those who are silently indifferent or hopeful for a good ending exclusively for their own group are deluded, mired in a paradigm from which they must extricate themselves.

History teaches us that exclusivity and blind tribal allegiance end up bringing incalculable pain and suffering to both the included and the excluded. We must change the pattern. We must work for a better tomorrow for both peoples. If we do not, we are accomplices, and we condemn them both to continued misery. The solution requires our combined efforts to point them, nudge them, and, if necessary, push them--even if it takes suspending U.S. funding, boycotts, and South Africa-style divestment--to the only safe exit of equal access, dignity, and opportunity, to a place in the light and not in the shadow of any ethnicity or religion, whether Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, to a place where equal goodness and universal humanity, not tribal allegiance and exclusivity, rule, to a place of true democracy that serves all its citizens with equal measure, in two sibling states or one.

There are no other acceptable options. The solution is at hand if we collectively choose to reach out and grasp it for the equal benefit of both our beloved peoples, who are one in humanity.

Mousa Ishaq is an engineer. An American of Palestinian descent, he has made his home in Vermont since 1978. He can be reached at <mkishaq@adelphia.net>.