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By Amira Hass
Haaretz.com
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/756413.html
see also: Silent Transfer - Letter from Sam Bahour
Let us leave aside those Israelis
whose ideology supports the dispossession of the Palestinian people because
"God chose us." Leave aside the judges who whitewash every military policy
of killing and destruction. Leave aside the military commanders who
knowingly jail an entire nation in pens surrounded by walls, fortified
observation towers, machine guns, barbed wire and blinding projectors. Leave
aside the ministers. All of these are not counted among the collaborators.
These are the architects, the planners, the designers, the executioners.
But there are others. Historians and mathematicians, senior editors, media
stars, psychologists and family doctors, lawyers who do not support Gush
Emunim and Kadima, teachers and educators, lovers of hiking trails and sing-alongs,
high-tech wizards. Where are you? And what about you, researchers of Nazism,
the Holocaust and Soviet gulags? Could you all be in favor of systematic
discriminating laws? Laws stating that the Arabs of the Galilee will not
even be compensated for the damages of the war by the same sums their Jewish
neighbors are entitled to (Aryeh Dayan, Haaretz , August 21).
Could it be that you are all in favor of a racist Citizenship Law that
forbids an Israeli Arab from living with his family in his own home? That
you side with further expropriation of lands and the demolishing of
additional orchards, for another settler neighborhood and another
exclusively Jewish road? That you all back the shelling and missile fire
killing the old and the young in the Gaza Strip?
Could it be that you all agree that a third of the West Bank (the Jordan
Valley) should be off limits to Palestinians? That you all side with an
Israeli policy that prevents tens of thousands of Palestinians who have
obtained foreign citizenship from returning to their families in the
occupied territories?
Could your mind really be so washed with the security excuse, used to forbid
Gaza students from studying occupational therapy at Bethlehem and medicine
at Abu Dis, and preventing sick people from Rafah from receiving medical
treatment in Ramallah? Will also you find it easy to hide behind the
explanation "we had no idea": we had no idea that the discrimination
practiced in the distribution of water - which is solely controlled by
Israel - leaves thousands of Palestinian households without water during the
hot summer months; we had no idea that when the IDF blocks the entrance to
villages, it also blocks their access to springs or water tanks.
But it cannot be that you don't see the iron gates along route 344 in the
West Bank, blocking access to it from the Palestinian villages it passes by.
It cannot be that you support preventing the access of thousands of farmers
to their land and plantations, that you support the quarantine on Gaza which
prevents the entry of medicine for hospitals, the disruption of electricity
and water supply to 1.4 million human beings, closing their only outlet to
the world for months.
Could it be that you do not know what is happening 15 minutes from your
faculties and offices? Is it plausible that you support the system in which
Hebrew soldiers, at checkpoints in the heart of the West Bank, are letting
tens of thousands of people wait everyday for hours upon hours under the
blazing sun, while selecting: residents of Nablus and Tul Karm are not
allowed through, 35-year-olds and under - yallah, back to Jenin, residents
of the Salem village are not even allowed to be here, a sick woman who
skipped the line must learn a lesson and will be purposefully detained for
hours. Machsom Watch's site is available for all; in it are countless such
testimonies and worse, a day by day routine. But it cannot be that those who
are appalled over every swastika painted on a Jewish grave in France and
over every anti-Semitic headline in a Spanish local newspaper will not know
how to reach this information, and will not be appalled and outraged.
As Jews we all enjoy the privilege Israel gives us, what makes us all
collaborators. The question is what does every one of us do in an active and
direct daily manner to minimize cooperation with a dispossessing,
suppressing regime that never has its fill. Signing a petition and tutting
will not do. Israel is a democracy for its Jews. We are not in danger of our
lives, we will not be jailed in concentration camps, our livelihood will not
be damaged and recreation in the countryside or abroad will not be denied to
us. Therefore, the burden of collaboration and direct responsibility is
immeasurably heavy.
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