Students Save Palestine

The main approach to solving the conflict between Palestine and Israel is the “two state solution” wherein Palestine would become its own state in the Gaza and the majority of the West Bank, with the rest of the land left to Israel.

Both sides are deeply divided as to how this would work.

Peace negotiations disintegrated last year in July/August, resulting in full-blown war between Hamas and Israel

If this solution by the students works, it could save countless lives.

                                                                   (photo/walltoyou.com)

In proposing that Congress Members boycott or walk out on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s planned speech to Congress, expected to push for sanctions if not war on Iran, activists are drawing on actions engaged in by college students in recent years, as they have boycotted or walked out on or disrupted speeches by Israeli soldiers and officials on U.S. campuses.

Netanyahu’s noodle-headed move — oblivious, apparently, to the U.S. government’s effective evolution into a term-limited monarchy — may provide a boost to both the movement to free Palestine and the movement to prevent a war on Iran.

Peace activists sometimes marvel at how young people have taken up environmentalist activism (with very little emphasis on the environmental destruction caused by militarism). Why, antiwar activists ask, don’t young people get active opposing wars?

Ah, but they do. They are increasingly active, organized, strategic, bold, courageous, and determined about opposing a particular war: the ongoing war that the government of Israel wages — with U.S. funding and support — on the people of Palestine.

Nora Barrows-Friedman’s new book, In Our Power: U.S. Students Organize for Justice in Palestine, tells their stories, often in their own words: What motivates them? How did they get involved? How do they view themselves in their activism? How do they relate to the non-activist world? We should all pay attention.

Don’t misunderstand the case. Most students, like most adults, do little or no activism. The movement to free Palestine is far from success and up against huge opposition. Movements against other wars exist, a movement against all war exists, and all of these movements overlap.

But, relatively speaking, students are far more engaged, I think, in opposing the Israeli occupation than in halting drone strikes or the U.S. wars in Iraq or Afghanistan (if they’re even aware that those wars haven’t ended).  Opposition to U.S. wars tends to come disproportionately from an older and whiter crowd — a result of the Vietnam era, of a less informed view of Israel, and/or of dozens of other likely factors. In Our Power doesn’t address this question, but it provides much food for thought.

It’s not clear that most advocates of Palestinian freedom think of themselves as opposing war or demanding peace. Hoda Mitwally, a student at the City University of New York, is quoted by Barrows-Friedman as describing the movement for Palestine as “one that amazingly has sustained itself in ways that other movements have fizzled out.

The antiwar movement fizzled out very quickly, for example.” It seems that many demanding justice for Palestine think in terms of demanding human rights, even if prominent among those is the right not to have your home bombed.

But human rights is how pro-waradvocacy is framed in the U.S. media and politics. We must attack Syria because we care. We must destroy Libya to save the Libyans. Wrecking Yemen is a model of humanitarian warfare. Of course this is all a pack of lies, but it is a prominent pack of lies.

Perhaps the movements for peace and for Palestinian justice, already intertwined, could still benefit from deeper exchanges of thinking, for war opposition must be a human rights demand, and unless a system of peace is created in Palestine/Israel, the human rights violations including those formerly known as war, will continue.

The peace movement has put an emphasis on the financial cost to the aggressor nation, the damage to U.S. troops, the trade offs in poor schools and parks, etc., assuming that people need a direct connection to a moral atrocity before they’ll act. I don’t believe that for a minute, not as an absolute law.

But the stories of Palestine activists do bear it out. Many of them have a direct connection and even personal experience on the ground, witnessing the horrors of what they oppose.

They are Palestinian Americans or Jewish Americans or other Americans who have visited Israel or Palestine or who have close friends who have done so. Many of them have been moved by the recent Israeli attacks on Lebanon or Gaza (“Cast Lead” and “Protective Edge”) or by the relentless construction of “settlements” and accompanying ethnic cleansing.

Many have experienced bigotry in the United States following 9-11 and have sought out a comforting community.

As Osama bin Laden came to favor anti-U.S. violence after experiencing such bigotry, many young people engage in constructive nonviolent activism instead. They gather as Palestinians or Arabs, and then they take up the Palestinian cause.

Story by David Swanson

TO CONTINUE, CLICK HERE ON RIGHT.IS

STAY INFORMED!!

Source: http://www.davidswanson.org/node/4650