Similarly, the assault against Jewish diners in Los Angeles by protestors carrying Palestinian flags was an act of ethnically-targeted violence. It goes without saying that attacking Jews is not activism: It is antisemitism. We urge our peers to practice extreme caution with inflammatory language that could inspire violence that you might not anticipate.
If Harvard students and faculty wish to improve the standing of the Arab citizens of Israel and advocate for Palestinian self-determination, they should follow in the lead of Dr. Rebecca S. Have a suggestion, question, or concern for The Crimson Editorial Board? Click here. Want to keep up with breaking news? Subscribe to our email newsletter. By Rebecca S. This is essentially the world in which we now live.
To flip it and answer that no, Jews are not a nation and Palestinians are a nation would be emotionally satisfying for supporters of Palestine, but the implications in the real world are equally awful. These are the answers of people who disdain complexity, righteous in their absolute views of the conflict. But what if the answer is yes to both questions——that both groups constitute distinct nations?
This is how American officials have implicitly treated the conflict and have thus found themselves frustrated by their inability to resolve it. Closely connected to nationalism is the question of religion, especially in the case of Zionism.
In fact, Zionism or proto-Zionism is deeply intertwined in the Jewish faith as it developed and evolved in the diaspora, presaging the intellectual work of even the people who laid the groundwork for Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism. But does the messianic attachment to Zion—Palestine—in the faith mean that Zionists and Jews have exclusive claim to the land?
Israelis and their supporters say yes, thereby rejecting the claims of Palestinians. To add an additional twist: does any of this even matter any longer? After all, there is an Israel with a distinct nationalism defined by a connection between Judaism and the land, but it is separate from Jews who are not Israeli, even the ones who support Israel. Still folks prefer their absolutes and self-righteousness.
Then there is the thorny question of the use of violence. Price was unable to answer the question. Israeli officials like to tell everyone who will listen that Palestinians in Gaza are victims of Hamas. That is true, but I suspect that first and foremost they feel victimized by Israel.
And thus, even for those Palestinians who do not support Hamas and Islamic Jihad, what they are doing amounts to legitimate resistance. The current round of fighting began because of the anticipated evictions of Palestinian families from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah. Protests and violence ensued.
At the time, Hamas was not firing rockets. From the Palestinian perspective, this is legitimate self-defense. Israeli forces have occupied and controlled the West Bank ever since. It withdrew its occupying troops and settlers from Gaza in , but maintains a full blockade of the territory, which has turned Gaza into what human rights organizations sometimes call an "open-air prison" and has pushed the unemployment rate up to 40 percent.
Israel says the occupation is necessary for security given its tiny size: to protect Israelis from Palestinian attacks and to provide a buffer from foreign invasions. But that does not explain the settlers. Settlers are Israelis who move into the West Bank. They are widely considered to violate international law, which forbids an occupying force from moving its citizens into occupied territory.
Many of the , settlers are just looking for cheap housing; most live within a few miles of the Israeli border, often in the around surrounding Jerusalem.
While Israel officially forbids this and often evicts these settlers, many are still able to take root. In the short term, settlers of all forms make life for Palestinians even more difficult, by forcing the Israeli government to guard them with walls or soldiers that further constrain Palestinians. In the long term, the settlers create what are sometimes called "facts on the ground": Israeli communities that blur the borders and expand land that Israel could claim for itself in any eventual peace deal.
The Israeli occupation of the West Bank is all-consuming for the Palestinians who live there, constrained by Israeli checkpoints and foot walls, subject to an Israeli military justice system in which on average two children are arrested every day , stuck with an economy stifled by strict Israeli border control, and countless other indignities large and small.
Music breaks like this are usually an opportunity to step back and appreciate the aspects of a people and culture beyond the conflict that has put them in the news.
And it's true that there is much more to Israelis and Palestinians than their conflict. But music has also been a really important medium by which Israelis and Palestinians deal with and think about the conflict. The degree to which the conflict has seeped into Israel-Palestinian music is a sign of how deeply and pervasively it effects Israelis and Palestinians. The Arab Israeli experience, typically one of solidarity with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and a sense that Arab-Israelis are far from equal in the Jewish state, comes through in their music, which is highly political and deals with themes of disenfranchisement and dispossession in the great tradition of American hip-hop.
Christiane Amanpour interviewed DAM about their music last year. Now here is a sample of Israel's wonderful jazz scene, one of the best in the world, from the bassist and band leader Avishai Cohen.
Cohen is best known in the US for his celebrated instrumental album Continuo, but let's instead listen to the song "El Hatzipor" from 's Aurora. The poem translated here expresses the hopeful yearning among early European Zionists like Bialik to escape persecution in Europe and find salvation in the holy land; that it still resonates among Israelis over years later is a reminder of both the tremendous hopes invested in the dream of a Jewish state, and perhaps the sense that this dream is still not secure.
On the surface, this is just the latest round of fighting in 27 years of war between Israel and Hamas , a Palestinian militant group that formed in seeks Israel's destruction and is internationally recognized as a terrorist organization for its attacks targeting civilians — and which since has ruled Gaza. Israeli forces periodically attack Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza, typically with air strikes but in and with ground invasions.
The latest round of fighting was sparked when members of Hamas in the West Bank murdered three Israeli youths who were studying there on June Though the Hamas members appear to have acted without approval from their leadership, which nonetheless praised the attack, Israel responded by arresting large numbers of Hamas personnel in the West Bank and with air strikes against the group in Gaza. After some Israeli extremists murdered a Palestinian youth in Jerusalem and Israeli security forces cracked down on protests, compounding Palestinian outrage, Hamas and other Gaza groups launched dozens of rockets into Israel, which responded with many more air strikes.
So far the fighting has killed one Israeli and Palestinians ; two UN agencies have separately estimated that plus percent of the fatalities are civilians. On Thursday, July 17, Israeli ground forces invaded Gaza, which Israel says is to shut down tunnels that Hamas could use to cross into Israel. That get backs to that essential truth about the conflict today: Palestinian civilians endure the brunt of it.
While Israel targets militants and Hamas targets civilians, Israel's disproportionate military strength and its willingness to target militants based in dense urban communities means that Palestinians civilians are far more likely to be killed than any other group. But t hose are just the surface reasons; there's a lot more going on here as well.
Palestinian youth throw stones at an Israeli tank in The simple version is that violence has become the status quo and that trying for peace is risky, so leaders on both ends seem to believe that managing the violence is preferable, while the Israeli and Palestinian publics show less and less interest in pressuring their leaders to take risks for peace.
Hamas's commitment to terrorism and to Israel's destruction lock Gazans into a conflict with Israel that can never be won and that produces little more than Palestinian civilian deaths. Israel's blockade on Gaza, which strangles economic life there and punishes civilians, helps produce a climate that is hospitable to extremism, and allows Hamas to nurture a belief that even if Hamas may never win, at least refusing to put down their weapons is a form of liberation.
Many Palestinians in Gaza naturally compare Hamas to Palestinian leaders in the West Bank, who have emphasized peace and compromise and negotiations — only to have been rewarded with an Israeli military occupation that shows no sign of ending and ever-expanding settlements.
This is not to endorse that logic, but it is not difficult to see why some Palestinians might conclude that violent "resistance" is preferable. That sense of Palestinian hopelessness and distrust in Israel and the peace process has been a major contributor to violence in recent years.
In the early s, there was also a lot of fighting between Israel and Palestinians in the West Bank. This was called the Second Intifada uprising , and followed a less-violent Palestinian uprising against the occupation in the late s.
In the Second Intifada, which was the culmination of Palestinian frustration with the failure of the s peace process, Palestinian militants adopted suicide bombings of Israeli buses and other forms of terror. Israel responded with a severe military crack-down. The fighting killed approximately 3, Palestinians and 1, Israelis. It's not just Palestinians, though: many Israelis also increasingly distrust Palestinians and their leaders and see them as innately hostile to peace.
In the parlance of Israel-Palestine, the expression for this attitude is, "We don't have a partner for peace. This sense of apathy has been further enabled by Israel's increasingly successful security programs, such as the Iron Dome system that shoots down Gazan rockets, which insulates many Israelis from the conflict and makes it easier to ignore. Public support for a peace deal that would grant Palestine independence, once high among Israelis, has dropped.
Meanwhile, a fringe movement of right-wing Israeli extremists has become increasingly violent, particularly in the West Bank where many live as settlers, further pulling Israeli politics away from peace and thus allowing the conflict to drift.
The Dome of the Rock at left with gold dome is one of the holiest sites in Islam and sits atop the ancient Temple Mount ruins, the Western Wall of which at right is the holiest site in Jerusalem. You can see how this would create logistical problems. There are three ways the conflict could end. Only one of them is both viable and peaceful — the two-state solution — but it is also extremely difficult, and the more time goes on the harder it gets.
One-state solution: The first is to erase the borders and put Israelis and Palestinians together into one equal, pluralistic state, called the "one-state solution.
After generations of feeling disenfranchised and persecuted by Israel, the Arab majority would almost certainly vote to dismantle everything that makes Israel a Jewish state. Israelis, after everything they've done to finally achieve a Jewish state after thousands of years of their own persecution, would never surrender that state and willingly become a minority among a population they see as hostile.
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