In what should come as no surprise to people who pay attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the last couple of weeks have seen a lot of death in the Holy Land–on both sides. Jewish Voice for Peace, the American Jewish pro-BDS group, released a statement on this violence last week.
In its mission statement, JVP claims to support “security and self-determination for Israelis and Palestinians… an end to violence against civilians; and peace and justice for all peoples of the Middle East.” But mostly, they work to end the Israeli occupation through boycott, divestment and sanctions–and do much less to condemn violent Palestinian rhetoric or combat Palestinian attacks on Israel.
This focus on Israeli misdeeds comes through in the statement JVP sent out on Thursday, which mourns all of the deaths that have occurred recently but then goes on to emphasize Israeli wrongdoing while all but dismissing Palestinian attacks on Israelis. The statement seems pretty reflective of JVP’s view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I’ve copied most of it below, adding my comments throughout:
Any act of violence, especially one against civilians, marks a profound failure of human imagination and causes a deep and abiding trauma for all involved. In mourning the nine lives lost in Gaza yesterday, and the one life lost in Jerusalem today, we reject the pattern of condemning the loss of Israeli lives while ignoring the loss of Palestinian life. We do not discriminate. Life is life. One lost life is one life too many-whether Palestinian or Israeli.
I would agree with almost all of this, though the second sentence is problematic in that it cannot “mourn” Israeli life without also leveling a critique on the pro-Israel community. It’s very true that loss of Israeli life gets far more media coverage in the US than loss of Palestinian life, and that’s a huge problem that must end. But mourning, if sincere, should stand alone.
Within the context of 44 years of the Israeli occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, in the past two years ( Jan 31, 2009 – January 31, 2011), over a thousand Palestinians have been made homeless by home demolitions, hundreds have been unlawfully detained, and over 150 men, women and children have been killed by the IDF and settlers, according to the Israeli human rights group B’tselem (1) . Many acres of Palestinian land were taken and orchards uprooted by armed settlers. Countless hours were lost at checkpoints, often fruitlessly, while Palestinians attempted to get medical care, jobs, and access to education. One and a half million Gazans have been living with a
limited food supply, lack of electricity and dangerously toxic sewage.
The major problems begin here. This began as a statement mourning loss of life on both sides, but abruptly turns into yet another anti-Israeli occupation press release. This paragraph implicitly provides “context” for Palestinian violence while providing no “context” about terrorism against Israel, violent rhetoric against Israel, the peace process or the larger Arab-Israeli conflict. If JVP means to condemn violence on both sides, it should condemn misdeeds on both sides as well–not just focus on the wrongdoings of Israel.
This is occupation: daily, persistent acts of structural violence. These acts don’t reach our headlines because they are so habitual, so we learn not to see them. But Palestinians live them everyday, and we must keep that in mind, even as we ponder the terrible events of the past few weeks:
More of the same. What about tensions and missiles that Israelis live with everyday? What about the persistent barrage of qassams on Sderot?
– Someone or some people (we don’t know who) bombed a bus stop in Jerusalem, injuring 30 and killing 1 Israeli civilian;
– An Israeli bombing killed 3 children and an older man in Gaza;
– Someone or some people, (we don’t know who), murdered 5 members of a family, including three children, in Itamar, an Israeli settlement in the West Bank;
– The Israeli government suddenly tightened the siege of Gaza and escalated military attacks, killing a total of 11 Palestinians and injuring more than 40 since mid-March;
– Palestinians fired over 50 shells and rockets from Gaza into civilian areas in southern Israel.
Really, JVP? We don’t know who? It’s true that technically, no terrorist group had yet taken responsibility for the bombing, but this list makes it seem as if we aren’t reasonably sure that Palestinian terrorists perpetrated these attacks. JVP is fooling itself if it cannot make that assumption. The purposefully ambiguous language JVP uses when describing the attacks on Israelis–as opposed to the specific language it uses when describing attacks on Palestinians–implies that there is no one we can blame for those murders–again emphasizing the blame on Israel.
The statement goes on to say that the best hope for ending the conflict is ending the occupation; that support for BDS helps to end the occupation; and that the Israeli government “deploys anti-democratic measures and military repression.”
I’ve argued before that JVP is not explicitly anti-Israel. But it is anti-Israel to turn a statement mourning Israeli death into an opportunity to blame Israel and dismiss Palestinian violence. If it intends to stand by its mission statement, JVP should heed its own advice and “not discriminate. Life is life.”
