Reedley writer says Palestinians have endured abuse for decades | Opinion
In 1995 my wife and I went to Israel to visit the Holy Lands and to see where Jesus walked and talked. We went to the Mount of Olives, the Sea of Galilee, Jerusalem and several other places in Israel.
We wanted to go to Bethlehem, but our Israeli driver said that he could not go into the West Bank; we would need to hire a Palestinian driver from the occupied area, and he said, “Don’t go there, it’s not safe.”
We found a Palestinian driver at the border and he took us to several cities in the occupied area. What we discovered was beyond our belief. We had never read about any of the the things we discovered or heard about them on the news.
In Hebron we hooked up with Christian Peacemakers (now known as Community Peacemaker Teams). They had been protecting a Palestinian woman who lived in the lower level of an apartment building. She had to put bars on her windows and doors. Jewish settlers routinely spit on her, threw garbage at her and broke her windows and doors. In Hebron, Jewish settlers took out all of the downtown Palestinian merchants’ buildings to create “a safety zone.”
Near Bethlehem, we met a beautiful Christian family at a farm they called the Tent of Nations. Their farm of olive trees and citrus was routinely bulldozed, with water and electricity cut off. The Jewish settlers dug up the family’s driveway and just recently had attacked the family, sending four of the six family` members to the hospital. The family put a boulder in front of their home that read, “We refuse to hate.”
We studied conversational Arabic and returned to the West Bank six times and once to Gaza. We helped at Bethlehem Bible College and at the Little Lighthouse School in Gaza. Next to the Little Lighthouse School was a bombed-out apartment building from the 2014 war. Israeli bombs came close to the school of Palestinian children.
In the West Bank, Palestinian children that throw rocks at Israeli tanks are routinely jailed. If a Palestinian does not In have his ID, he can be jailed. Men and women are often made to disrobe at checkpoints. Palestinians keep water tanks on top of their houses as a measure of rationing while Jewish settlers enjoy the luxury of swimming pools.
What will take a Jewish driver 15 minutes on their superhighways might take a Palestinian driver an hour on their roads in the occupied areas.
We witnessed a round up of Palestinians who tried to stop the storming of the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, and heard of an American named Rachel Corrie who was buried under an Israel bulldozer when she tried to stop Israeli Defense Forces from tearing down a Palestinian home.
The root cause of the Palestine-Israel conflict is clear. During the 1948 war, 750,000 Palestinians fled in terror or were expelled from their ancestral homeland and turned into refugees. The state of Israel then refused to let them return, and either destroyed their villages entirely or expropriated their land, houses, orchards and businesses. They then turned around and blamed the victims for resisting their dispossession.
If you run into someone’s car, for whatever reason, simple justice demands that you repair it. This is what the Jewish faith preaches — basic ethics. Any criticism of Israel is seen by Americans and especially American Zionist Christians as harmful to the Jewish people, and as anti-Semitic, even if the criticism is true.
But once one goes down the slippery slope where the end justifies the means, one leaves all claim to morality.
For decades Palestinians have waited for a life of dignity, but in vain. What they see now is a double standard. Those who stand with the occupied Ukrainians are standing with the Israeli occupiers. Innocent Gazan’s have experienced four wars that Israel has led against their narrow strip and left them with no hope. Israel has left them to perish slowly and surely as if they are a children of a lesser god.
The occupation is the reason for this war. No one, as we saw in South Africa, can relinquish a people’s quest for freedom. Without justice there will never be peace.
Stanley George of Reedley is a retired music teacher.
