MY
PARENTS left Europe just before the Holocaust and
they lost most of their family members in it. They
came to that part of the world which today is called
Israel, and used to be called Palestine, to promise
me a better life and the security of a state of our
own. After almost 60 years I cannot say that they
succeeded; on the contrary. It seems that my parents
and others who wanted to build the state of Israel
did not understand that it is impossible to build
a new future on the relics of oppression.
I've
been defending Palestinians in Israeli courts for
some 30 years and despite my efforts have still not
succeeded in making judges, whether in military tribunals
or the Supreme Court of Justice, understand this basic
truth. The situation deteriorates and last year, as
in all of the past 25 years, I took two or three steps
backwards for every one forwards.
The
well-known Israeli author David Grossman has written
about the laundering of language by the Israeli occupation.
"Occupation" became in Hebrew "release"
or "salvation". "Colonising" became
"peaceful settling". "Killing"
became "targeting". The Palestinians responded
to these euphemisms by radicalising their language.
My clients used to come to my office in Jerusalem
and talk about soldiers or settlers; today they talk
about al-yahud - the Jews. "The Jews took my
ID card", "the Jews hit me", "the
Jews destroyed this or that". This terrifies
me. If the state of
Israel becomes identified with all the Jews in the
world and all the Jews in the world are seen as soldiers
and settlers, we need to be very careful.
A Palestinian child who today says al-yahud, meaning
the Jews, meaning the people in uniform, will become
a fanatic and develop a nationalist fanaticism alongside
youthful religious fanaticism. But a similar, perhaps
worse, religious fanaticism is emerging on the Jewish
side. The young generation of Jews in Israel want
to banish Arabs. We see Hebrew slogans on the walls
of Israeli cities saying "Arabs out of the country"
or "Death to the Arabs". We are reaching
the stage where the Israeli government openly debates
what to do with Yasser Arafat, the elected president
of the Palestinians: shall we kill him? deport him?
call for the election of another, more convenient
president for Palestinians, weak enough to give us
whatever we want?
The
main victims of occupation and oppression are children.
In Israel the old British Mandate laws, dating from
before independence, are still in force. These are
laws of oppression enabling any occupying power to
impose collective punishments. Recently I lost a case.
I had tried to prevent the destruction of the house
of a young man, a Palestinian suicide bomber who had
killed himself and eight others near a military camp
outside Tel Aviv. According to British Mandate law,
the home of the perpetrator of a terrorist attack
should be destroyed. When I called the family to tell
them I'd lost, the bomber's mother said: "I knew
I had no hope. We have already evacuated the house."
Only
rarely do we even have time to go to court in such
cases. Demolitions usually punish not the offender
but their family. Very often they are carried out
without warning. "You have five minutes to get
out of the house!" is all the time given. The
demolishers smash everything - clothes, furniture.
I often ask families what they grab in those five
minutes and they answer "the children's school
certificates first". Their optimism is wonderful.
The
children of fighters, of "Palestinian terrorists",
will be marked for life. Under the military occupation
they will not be allowed to leave the country, to
move cities, to study elsewhere. They cannot visit
their parents in prison.
The
latest punishment for "terrorist" families
is to force them to move. Since the beginning of the
latest intifada, there has been a total curfew in
every Palestinian town and village in the occupied
territories, while Israeli tanks enter and leave as
they please. It is a sport for Palestinian children
to climb hills, mountains and the fences and obstacles
that Israel puts up to prevent the movements between
villages and towns.
Now
Sharon is building a fence - no, a wall - between
Israel and Palestine. This fence is not a border;
it does not run along the 1967 borders. It is a wall
intended to establish apartheid between the Jewish
and the Palestinian
populations and to deprive the Palestinians of any
small amount of arable land not already taken by Jewish
settlements in the occupied territories, and to bring
that land into the Israeli state.
Sometimes
you see funny or touching scenes, mothers climbing
concrete walls or fences. More often you hear sad
stories, like that about the young Israeli soldiers
who refused to allow through a Palestinian woman on
her way
to have a baby. The child died.
The
oppression and the humiliation are heavy burdens.
To see a doctor in a city hospital, a child from near
Ramallah may have to walk hours with his father, only
to encounter a roadblock. The father's culture has
taught him that he should be a patriarch, and it seriously
humiliates him in front of his son to have to beg
and plead with soldiers to be let through. What kind
of image of their parents do these children develop?
Then
there is the murder of children. Recently a 10-year-old
threw a stone at a soldier near a roadblock outside
Jerusalem and was shot. A one-ton bomb dropped by
an Israeli plane on Gaza City, the most densely populated
town in the world, killed 16 children. Mohammad Dura,
the child who died in his father's arms at the beginning
of the intifada three years ago, is more than a symbol:
he is an everyday reality.
Part
of this huge tragedy stems from the similarity between
the Palestinians and the Israelis. A European friend
said to me once, "I don't understand; everyone
is so similar. How do the soldiers identify who is
Arab and who is Jewish?" and I told him what
I heard: "The soldier stares into the eyes of
a person, and if they have Jewish eyes, they're bound
to be an Arab."
The
other day, on the border between East and West Jerusalem,
I saw 150 older Palestinian men in a park. They were
all from the West Bank and the police would not let
them into the city - either they didn't have permits
or the police refused to recognise the permits they
had. I went over, with my usual optimism, thinking
I'm a woman, I'm white, I'm Jewish, I'm a lawyer,
I can solve everything, and tried to talk to the soldiers
and the police. The men just stood there quietly.
They had been forced to take the batteries out of
their mobile phones and ordered not to speak. I felt
stupid. They had understood their situation much better
than I had. They knew they would pay a price if they
answered me; they knew already that my intervention
was useless. The arbitrary powers of soldiers and
policemen are much greater than any legal system I
represent. I thought: how would Primo Levi have felt
if he saw this moment when other people are being
oppressed by Jews?
The
former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir said she
had nightmares because the Palestinians were multiplying
so quickly: 20 years ago her remarks provoked a scandal.
But on 29 August 2003 the Israeli Knesset passed a
law:
"In case of marriage between an Israeli and a
Palestinian from the occupied territories, the spouse
will not be allowed to come into Israel, and any child
from such a marriage will not be listed in the Israeli
register unless it is registered within a year of
its birth." We are trying hard to fight this
policy, which I can only call racist.
The
Palestinian children, the fruit of this war, provide
the suicide bombers. I represent those who failed
to die and I know about those who died, so I speak
with authority. They do not die for the 70 virgins
promised them when they become shaheed (martyrs) and
they are not forced or brainwashed. These youngsters,
from all sections of society, volunteer to die because
of despair. They feel they have little to lose and
perhaps glory to gain. It is terrible when a society
produces children willing to die; it is terrible when
our Jewish Israeli society produces, as has now been
revealed, settlers who left a car packed with powerful
explosives outside a Palestinian girls' school in
Jerusalem. The police found it only by accident.
Killing
children has become an obsession. From the last intifada
until today 700 Palestinian and 100 Jewish children
under 16 have died. In the past three years 382 Palestinian
children have been killed by the army or settlers,
and 79 Israeli children have died. It's a nightmare
to be an Israeli child - afraid to go on the bus,
to the market, to the shop. In every doorway there
are guards who open your bags and search you.
The
memory of the Holocaust - "the world hates the
Jews; we have always been victims" - - has blurred
into the new Israeli victimology - "we are victims
because the Palestinians kill us". This comparison
is unacceptable. It is not true. We were victims but
now we victimise others. After 35 years of occupation,
there is a second generation of settlers who invoke
the Bible when they say "how can you uproot us
from our homeland?" After 1967 a young generation
of Israeli soldiers questioned what they were doing
and asked "do we have the right to conquer another
people's land?" Now there are hardly any questions.
The 18-year-old soldiers are all tainted by the army:
they have all stood at a roadblock, all knocked on
the door of a house in the middle of the night and
woken up the family to arrest someone.
There
is a small minority, slowly growing, who refuse to
serve in the occupied territories. A small but increasing
number of Israelis say they are unwilling to get involved.
Hope
comes from heroic Palestinian parents who still, despite
the occupation, do not bring their children up to
hate, do not allow their children to see all Israelis
as demons, who speak about differences of opinion
between Israelis; those who teach the children to
judge people according to what they do and not according
to what they are or where they
come from.
I
would like to tell such Palestinian parents to be
patient, be optimistic. Mutual recognition is possible
- we got the PLO recognised in the end. And today,
unlike 35 years ago, there is a consensus all over
the world that there will be a Palestinian state.
Prepare the next generation because there is promise
in the future.
I
would like to remind Israeli parents fighting for
peace that they have already won one war. Israeli
mothers fighting in an organisation called The Four
Mothers, after Biblical figures, helped to get the
Israeli army withdrawn from Lebanon. Another organisation,
Women in Black, has demonstrated against the occupation
every week for 20 years. I tell them they will win.
Another group of women watch over roadblocks where
atrocities have been committed. They say to soldiers
and Palestinians: "We have no part in this racism;
we are against it."
Nourit
Peled, whose father was a general in the Israeli army,
is a peace activist. Her teenage daughter died when
a Palestinian youth blew himself up in Jerusalem.
Choosing peace over hatred, Peled joined with other
parents to set up an organisation bringing together
Israeli and Palestinian victims of terror in support
of anyone who fights for peace. When she received
a Sakharov prize in the European Parliament in 2001,
she gave a moving speech about Abraham, father of
Isaac and Ismail (symbols of the two nations of Judaism
and Islam). Abraham wanted to sacrifice Isaac to show
God how much he trusted God, and God forbade him to
do so; he provided a ram to sacrifice instead. She
said: "We don't want our planet to become a realm
of dead children. We have to raise our voices, the
voices of mothers, and silence all other voices. We
have to make everyone hear the voice of God saying
to Abraham 'Lay not thy hand upon the child'."
*Leah
Tsemel is an Israeli lawyer working in Jerusalem.
This is an edited version of her talk on childhood
and human rights at the Giorgio Cini Foundation in
Venice
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