Palestine, language and conflict

Daniel Hummel, Jakarta

Palestine is a land of great history and change. Jerusalem, in Hebrew the City of Peace, is considered holy to the three great faiths of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. The Muslims have Masjid Al-Aqsa, the Christians have the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and the Jews have The Wailing Wall.

The three faiths have co-existed in the holy land for generations with many events that shaped the course of the societies that embodied those faiths.

For the Jews, it was the destruction of the final temple by the Romans in (70 AD) that shaped its society. For the Christians, the Crusades forever marked their relationship with the Muslim world. For the Muslims, the present-day loss of Palestine to colonizers and now to Israel presents a very real and altering effect upon its society.

There is no doubt several factors contributing to this conflict. Religious reasons certainly are paramount, but racial, political, and economic factors are just as important. It is interesting to note that previous to World War I, when the territory was still held by the Ottoman Empire, Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived side by side without any problem.

Pilgrims to the holy sites saw easy passage to and from them and no one sought to create an exclusive state surrounding them, until the late 19th and early 20th century.

The problem is the language surrounding the conflict that drives it deeper into the mindsets of those living there and those observing it abroad. The Jewish extremists, who are often not mentioned in this conflict such as the Kach Movement, train teenagers who attend their camps to attack soldiers, retake homes when evicted such as seen in the Gaza strip recently, and survive police interrogations.

These extremists call for the total eviction of all Arabs from their territories and actually make claims that any territory outside of the biblical Judea and Samara is what is occupied by the Gentiles. Their language has come to embody a general attitude amongst Jewish Israelis so much so that Israelis of European descent are turning against even Arab Jews.

A recent poll conducted by Geocartographia, an Israeli polling organization on behalf of a Jewish Arab organization called the Center for the Struggle against Racism in Israel found that two-thirds of those polled in Israel not of Arab descent refused to even live in the same building as an Arab, 41 percent favored segregation, 40 percent favored programs to encourage Arab emigration, 63 percent consider Arabs a security threat, and 34 percent agreed that Israeli culture is superior to Arab culture. These results point to a phenomenon in Israel not just isolated to the extremist groups like Kach.

Amongst the Muslims and Christians world-wide the language is most commonly known. Hamas being the most popular to chastise obviously rejects the existence of Israel, but it is interesting to note that the Hamas organization was actually a creation of Israel to sow divisions amongst the Palestinians and now it is Israel's greatest rival.

The reaction by the world-wide community to the democratic election of Hamas was expected, which now leave Hamas bankrupt and the Palestinian people becoming more polarized in this conflict.

Another interesting note is that despite the fact that most of the world finds Israel to be the progenitor of this conflict in Palestine, and the UN assembly has passed resolution after resolution against it for its human rights abuses and bridges of international law, no action has been taken against it whatsoever.

The Christians find themselves on two opposing camps. Some Christians actively call themselves Zionists (an ideology that sees Jews capturing the famed Zion of the biblical David's time) and based upon their vague idea off of the book of Revelation in the Bible that if the Jews are in the holy land (Palestine) Jesus will return.

Other Christians, including a strong minority of Palestinians that are Christian, strongly oppose the state of Israel, either its existence or its policies. Also, some Christians bearing morality in mind oppose Israel on the grounds of the immoral treatment of the Palestinian people.

The fact that this polarizing language continues was recently highlighted in a syndicated column that was published in the Jakarta Post on July 7 titled Can the current Palestinian government stay in power by Shlomo Avineri, a Jewish professor in Political Science in Israel.

He runs through the typical Zionist rhetoric by stating "At every historical juncture, the Palestinians refused to accept a compromise and consequently failed in nation-building.

In 1947, they refused the UN partition plan, which called for the establishment of two states in British Palestine."

The truth is that both Israel and Palestine rejected the plan, not just the Palestinians, and his finger-pointing at Oslo later in the article as a failure on behalf of the Palestinians has contradicted most scholarly work on Oslo which saw Oslo as a similar initiative to Hendrik Verwoerd's Apartheid in South Africa.

Shlomo's statements coincide with millions of diehard Israelis and their supporters and can be seen as a regurgitation of its standard beliefs whether they coincide with reality or not. The language is not from a noted extremist, but from a respected university professor.

Can peace exist with this language? The assumption and reality is that it cannot. Given the circumstances in Palestine, the conflict may continue till one gains an unbearable upper-hand on the other. The Palestinians are far from giving up, and Israel's economy suffers because of it.

The writer is a Public Administration masters student at the University of Nebraska. He can be contacted at neworleans_la@hotmail.com.

URL: http://www.thejakartapost.com/detaileditorial.asp?fileid=20060713.E02&irec=1