Muataz and I had a long discussion about peace. I said, “as long as people keep killing each other they are both in the wrong.

This is Muataz’ reply:

Did you get the image of the death of the boy in his fathers arms? Did you see their punishment, not for what they did, but for what they are? If you for a moment imagined that you were this child's mother could you describe your feelings towards who did this to you?  Lets be honest with ourselves and not try to distain ourselves because of race and religion!!

If you do that you may understand the feeling of most Palestinians as they face this all their lives? So lets be real about our expectations of this nation to understand peace after all.!

The biggest mistake that Palestinians have made is that they thought for a second they may be liked or be recognized as people worthy of rights if they decide to stop fighting and sit and talk peacefully It has been noticed that when they did this, even harder punishment and bigger denial was realized. 

All that I am saying is, the problems between the two people are not a misunderstanding or difference in belief that can be solved by talking!

I am a believer of peaceful resolution. But in this case I think it is legitimate to stand up and answer them with the language that they understand. From my experience living among Palestinians, I think Palestinians have started to see death or living as the equal! So why not fight with what they can rather than die quietly!

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I am not aware of a nation that has achieved their liberty by peace talks. If no one cares if Israel refuses to acknowledge 42 UN mandates, I do not see how else this can be resolved. 

I have attaching an article that I wrote in Dalhousie University Newspaper about Zionism! It may help.

His Dalhousie article follows:

By:MUATAZ NOFFEL

mnoffel@is.dal.ca

Zionism as Larry Riteman defined it in his letter to the Editor in the Gazette's Feb 1st issue is "a colonial exercise and a national liberation movement, a people returning to an unrelinquished home." The racist element of this definition is yet to penetrate the Western ideals of human rights. Zionism has rationalized the denial of present reality in Palestine with some argument about a "higher" interest, cause, or mission. These "higher" things entitled their proponents to claim that the natives of Palestine are not worth considering and, therefore, nonexistent. Why these natives could not impress the Zionists, much less the rest of the world, with their presence is something I cannot understand, although one can see parallels between Zionists and nineteenth-century European theorists of "empty" territory in Asia and Africa.

For Jews after 1948, Israel not only realized their political and spiritual hopes, it continued to provide opportunities guiding those of them still living in Diaspora, and keeping those who lived in the former Palestine on the frontier of Jewish development and self-realization. For the Arab palestinians, Israel meant one essentially hostile fact and several unpleasant corollaries. After 1948 every Palestinian disappeared nationally and legally. Some Palestinians reappeared juridically as "non-Jews" in Israel; those who left become "refugees" and later some of those acquired new Arab, European, or American identities. No Palestinian, however, lost his "old" Palestinian identity. Out of such legal fictions as the nonexisting Palestinian in Israel and elsewhere, however, the Palestinian has finally emerged-and with considerable amount of international attention prepared at last to take critical notice of Zionist theory and praxis.

The outcry in the West after the 1975 "Zionism is racism" resolution was passed in the United Nations was doubtless a genuine one. Israel's Jewish achievements-or rather its achievements on behalf of European Jews, less so for the Sephardic (Oriental) Jewish majority-stand before the Western world; by most standards they are considerable achievements, and it is right that they are tarnished with the rhetorical denunciation associated with "racism." For myself, a Palestinian Arab who has studied the procedures of Zionism toward him and his land, the predicament is complicated, but not finally unclear. The Palestinian knows that the Law of Return allows a Jew immediate entry into Israel, just as it exactly prevents him from returning to his home; he understands, without perhaps being able to master, the intellectual process by which his violated humanity has been transmuted, unheard and unseen, into praise for the ideology that has all but destroyed him. Racism is too vague a term: Zionism is Zionism. For the Arab Palestinian, this tautology has a sense that is perfectly comparable with, but exactly the opposite of, what it says to Jews.

True to its roots in the culture of European imperialism, Zionism divided reality into a superior "us" and inferior, degenerate "them." Today if you are an Arab in Israel, you are a third-class person. You cannot ever be equal, so far as landowning and immigration rights, free movement, and state institutions are concerned. Recently, there has been no secret about state sanctioned torture, illegal detention without trial, and occasional murder. Above all, it is religion or race understood in the least universal sense that defines political attitudes.

Zionism and Israel were associated with liberalism, with freedom and democracy, with knowledge and light, with what "we" understand and fight for. By contrast Zionism's enemies did not understand the glorious enterprise that was Zionism, because "they" were hopelessly out of touch with "our" values. It did not seem to matter that the backward Muslim had his own forms of life, to which he was entitled as a human being, or that his attachment to the land on which he lived over centuries was greater than that of the Jew who yearned for Zion in his exile. All that really mattered were ethnocentric ideals appropriated by Zionism, valorizing the white man's superiority and his light over territory believed to be consonant with those ideals.

From the moment that Khomeini returned to Iran, Menachem Begin (Israel prime minister at that time) was warning the world of this return to the Middle Ages and to religious fanaticism, without so much as a pause in his remarks when he went on to justify holding "Judea" and "Samaria" on the basis of Old Testament promises. What is interesting to note here is how the old Zionist world-drama can no longer hide its less savory accomplishments. After all, Israel is not responsible for settlements in the Gaza and West Bank by chance.

To criticize Zionism now, then, is to criticize not so much an idea or a theory but rather a wall of denials. It is to say firmly that you cannot expect millions of Arab Palestinians to go a way, or to be content with an Israeli, or an American idea for their destiny, their "autonomy," or physical location. It is to say that the time has come for Palestinians and Israeli Jews to discuss all the issues outstanding between them: rights of immigration, compensation for property lost, and so on, all in the context of a general discussion of future peace, and all too in the intellectual context of a Zionist acceptance of the fact that Jewish national liberation (as it is sometimes called) took place upon the ruins of another national existence, not in the abstract. It is finally to recognize that the question of Palestine is not simply a debate between Zionists as to how Zionism and Israel are to conduct themselves in theory on the land of what was once Palestine, but a vital political matter involving Arabs and Jews, residents in a commonly significant territory.

Perhaps we ought to remember that the artificial tranquility induced by the Oslo agreement on limited autonomy cannot transform the real conflict between Zionism and Palestinians into simple misunderstanding. The millions of Palestinians men and women in the refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, or those in Jerusalem, or Detroit who by standing before the world and before Zionism can ask the question Are you going to eradicate me to make way for someone else, and if so what right do you have to do so? Why is it right for a Jew born in Chicago to immigrate to Israel, whereas a Palestinian born in Jaffa is a refugee? We need to distinguish between surface explanations of the Middle Eastern problems and the underlying realities. In Israel, two generations of men and women have been reared on the ideas like security, protection against extermination, minority sovereignty, an unappeasable need for weapons and their symbolism Yet unless the pitiless logic of these concerns yields to some understanding of their human origins, the future will be still more murderous.