2009-01-13
If we were Palestinians,how would we react?
By Jenka Soderberg
Postmaster on January 22, 2009
US Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said, in introducing a bill
supporting the Israeli attack on
I have heard similar statements by other
In order to experience the reality of the daily life of Palestinians,
the following scenario would have to occur: our land would have to be invaded
by an army, the fourth-largest army in the world, and militarily occupied.
Checkpoints would be set up throughout the area, and all movement between
cities and towns would cease. Anyone who was employed would be unable to work,
and would be prevented even from going outside of their home for fear of being
shot by one of the tanks, armed personnel carriers, or humvees
that now line the streets.
All legal rights would be nullified, and passage from one town to
another would be at the whim of the soldiers manning the local checkpoint --
even if there were an emergency, if someone is hurt, shot, and bleeding and
needs to get to the hospital in the next town, the passage of the ambulance
through the checkpoint would be at the complete discretion of the soldiers.
Most of these soldiers would not speak our language, and would bark orders in a
foreign tongue that we are compelled to obey (or be shot). Soon, water and food
would become scarce, with the soldiers often shooting directly at water towers
and watching the water pour out of the gunshot holes onto the ground while
people who depend on this water to drink watch helplessly.
The government of the occupying country would pass discriminatory laws
against us, allowing their citizens to dig water wells 70 meters deeper than
our people, requiring a complex set of permits to build (or re-build) our homes
on our own land -- and then, when we try to go through the permit process,
denying 100% of the applications. The occupying country would use its superior
military might to take over much of our land, then would build housing
developments (settlements) on this newly-acquired territory and encourage its
own citizens, through housing subsidies and mortgage benefits, to move into
these housing developments.
One million of their citizens would eventually move into these housing
developments, which usually occupy the hilltops, the prime real estate of our
land. There would be walled-in highways going from the occupying country's land
to these housing developments, and only the occupying country's citizens would
be allowed to use these roads. Our people would be forced into smaller and
smaller areas, our houses torn down before our eyes as the occupier expands
their "security zone" further and further into our land. Our main
economy, which in this case would be the production of olive oil from olive
trees, would be completely decimated as the occupying army chops down grove
after grove after grove of ancient olive trees and then sells the wood as
firewood to their citizens living in the illegal housing developments on our
land.
Our people would undergo daily humiliation at the hands of the occupying
army. Many would be brutally beaten and jailed --sometimes for years-- without
charge. Periodically all of the men in a town would be rounded up and forced to
stand in the playground of a local school -- sometimes for up to 24 hours at a
time -- and be interrogated, humiliated and laughed at by the occupying
soldiers. The men would be so humiliated there would often be tears in their
eyes as they stood there being shouted at by these foreign soldiers. The
soldiers would sometimes break the mens' arms or beat
them on the head, while all the others watch (including children who peek
fearfully around corners at the sight of their fathers' humiliation). Children
would also be beaten and imprisoned, hundreds of them, often for the "crime"
of throwing stones at the tanks they see invading their neighborhoods. Some are
kept in jail with adults for years, with no trial and no legal recourse. For,
being an occupied territory, we would be a people without rights.
This humiliation, brutality, military control, and land confiscation,
would continue unabated for 60 years, despite attempts by the United Nations to
intervene. Our children would grow up under these conditions, constantly
terrified by the presence of this brutal foreign military in every aspect of
their lives. The occupying military would control residency rights, water
rights, airspace, sea borders, including control over fishing boats, land,
borders and travel abroad, internal movement between villages and towns,
construction permits, imports and exports, taxation, farmland, freedom to
worship, vehicle registration and licensing, ID cards, students' right to
education, court system and laws in every part of our land.
Do you think after three generations of this we would be pretty fed up
too?
Most people in the US forget (or never heard) that the first Palestinian
suicide bombing was in 1994, just after the US-born Zionist Baruch Goldstein
gunned down Muslims praying in a mosque in Hebron, killing 30 of them. 12
Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces who closed
in on the mosque after the massacre. The Israeli response to the massacre was
to take over the mosque and maintain control over it to this day --
transforming half of it into a synagogue, essentially giving the murderer what
he wanted. Two months later, the first suicide attack by a Palestinian
against Israeli civilians took place.
Most people in the US forget (or never heard) that the first Palestinian
uprising against the Israeli occupation, from 1987 to 93, was an uprising of
the youth, the children of those who had been disenfranchised and made into
refugees in 1948 when Israel was created on their land -- and that the youth
had no weapons whatsoever - no explosive belts, no homemade rockets, no guns.
They picked up stones from the earth itself and threw them at the tanks and
armored vehicles occupying their land. This was an act of desperate
resistance, from a patient and generous people who had just been pushed too
far, for too long.
So, how would we, as a people, react if we were in a similar situation?
If people in the US (most of whom are descendants of colonizers who committed
genocide against the indigenous people of this land) were put in the same
position as the Palestinian people have been put in since 1948, I doubt that it
would have taken the US population this long to fire off rockets across the
border with the occupying power.
- Jenka Soderberg
is co-editor, 
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