[News] Amira Hass: Can you really not see?

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Can you really not see?

By Amira Hass

Haaretz
30 August 2006

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/756413.html

Let us leave aside those Israelis whose ideology supports the
dispossession of the Palestinian people because "God chose us."
Leave aside the judges who whitewash every military policy of
killing and destruction. Leave aside the military commanders who
knowingly jail an entire nation in pens surrounded by walls,
fortified observation towers, machine guns, barbed wire and blinding
projectors. Leave aside the ministers. All of these are not counted
among the collaborators. These are the architects, the planners, the
designers, the executioners.

But there are others. Historians and mathematicians, senior editors,
media stars, psychologists and family doctors, lawyers who do not
support Gush Emunim and Kadima, teachers and educators, lovers of
hiking trails and sing-alongs, high-tech wizards. Where are you? And
what about you, researchers of Nazism, the Holocaust and Soviet
gulags? Could you all be in favor of systematic discriminating laws?
Laws stating that the Arabs of the Galilee will not even be
compensated for the damages of the war by the same sums their Jewish
neighbors are entitled to (Aryeh Dayan, Haaretz , August 21).

Could it be that you are all in favor of a racist Citizenship Law
that forbids an Israeli Arab from living with his family in his own
home? That you side with further expropriation of lands and the
demolishing of additional orchards, for another settler neighborhood
and another exclusively Jewish road? That you all back the shelling
and missile fire killing the old and the young in the Gaza Strip?

Could it be that you all agree that a third of the West Bank (the
Jordan Valley) should be off limits to Palestinians? That you all
side with an Israeli policy that prevents tens of thousands of
Palestinians who have obtained foreign citizenship from returning to
their families in the occupied territories?

Could your mind really be so washed with the security excuse, used
to forbid Gaza students from studying occupational therapy at
Bethlehem and medicine at Abu Dis, and preventing sick people from
Rafah from receiving medical treatment in Ramallah? Will also you
find it easy to hide behind the explanation "we had no idea": we had
no idea that the discrimination practiced in the distribution of
water - which is solely controlled by Israel - leaves thousands of
Palestinian households without water during the hot summer months;
we had no idea that when the IDF blocks the entrance to villages, it
also blocks their access to springs or water tanks.

But it cannot be that you don't see the iron gates along route 344
in the West Bank, blocking access to it from the Palestinian
villages it passes by. It cannot be that you support preventing the
access of thousands of farmers to their land and plantations, that
you support the quarantine on Gaza which prevents the entry of
medicine for hospitals, the disruption of electricity and water
supply to 1.4 million human beings, closing their only outlet to the
world for months.

Could it be that you do not know what is happening 15 minutes from
your faculties and offices? Is it plausible that you support the
system in which Hebrew soldiers, at checkpoints in the heart of the
West Bank, are letting tens of thousands of people wait everyday for
hours upon hours under the blazing sun, while selecting: residents
of Nablus and Tul Karm are not allowed through, 35-year-olds and
under - yallah, back to Jenin, residents of the Salem village are
not even allowed to be here, a sick woman who skipped the line must
learn a lesson and will be purposefully detained for hours. Machsom
Watch's site is available for all; in it are countless such
testimonies and worse, a day by day routine. But it cannot be that
those who are appalled over every swastika painted on a Jewish grave
in France and over every anti-Semitic headline in a Spanish local
newspaper will not know how to reach this information, and will not
be appalled and outraged.

As Jews we all enjoy the privilege Israel gives us, what makes us
all collaborators. The question is what does every one of us do in
an active and direct daily manner to minimize cooperation with a
dispossessing, suppressing regime that never has its fill. Signing a
petition and tutting will not do. Israel is a democracy for its
Jews. We are not in danger of our lives, we will not be jailed in
concentration camps, our livelihood will not be damaged and
recreation in the countryside or abroad will not be denied to us.
Therefore, the burden of collaboration and direct responsibility is
immeasurably heavy.



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