amateur ramblings

Yesterday, members of the Students for Justice in Palestine staged a “mock-checkpoint” on Sproul Plaza to illustrate the disruptive and abusive nature that the several dozen checkpoints scattered throughout the West Bank have on the daily lives of Palestinian civilians. One of our members prepared an educational flyer which was handed out to passersby to put our event in the proper context of reality.

My criticisms of the event aside (just briefly, I thought we could have done with less theatrics and that some of the agent provocateurs should not have been engaged in useless screamfests), members of the Israel Action Committee began to distribute “rebuttal” flyers which were nothing more than a copy-and-paste of material from the Jewish Virtual Library.

I put “rebuttal” in demeaning quotes because I mean just that. The response does not address the points raised in the flyer we put together and, in fact, clouds the issue with many flat out lies and flawed arguments. Step-by-step:

It is not unusual for nations to guard their borders and to establish checkpoints to prevent people from illegally entering their countries. The United States has checkpoints at its borders and airports and, as Americans saw on September 11, these are necessary but not foolproof security precautions.

Our flyer, in fact, pointed out the distinction between checkpoints that are located ‘between’ the West Bank and Israel and those that are located between villages, towns, and cities that are completely interior to the West Bank. This assembly of “facts” distributed by the IAC unfortunately runs roughshod over this distinction and implies that all checkpoints are along the ‘border’ (in fact, there is no state border between Israel and the West Bank because Israel has never declared its own borders–there is only the Green Line, which is recognized by the international community, and the newly constructed Wall, which runs on the Palestinian side of the Green Line).

In the case of Israel, the necessity for checkpoints has been created by the Palestinians. By pursuing a violent campaign of terror against Israel’s citizens, they have forced Israel to set up barriers to make it as difficult as possible for terrorists to enter Israel or travel through the territories to carry out acts of violence. The checkpoints are an inconvenience to innocent Palestinians, but they do in fact prevent terror and save lives.

Actually, the necessity for a vast majority of these checkpoints has been the ongoing and illegal construction of Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank. These checkpoints are strategically placed to protect those settlements, and Israeli citizens do not have to go through them. They have special ‘bypass roads’ access to which is restricted to Jewish Israelis.

The flyer then presents 3 anecdotes of Palestinian attacks on checkpoints or Palestinians being caught with weapons at checkpoints. Little information is given regarding the location of the checkpoints in question (except the second one from The Jerusalem Post, which is located at a border crossing between the West Bank in Israel at Tulkarem) so it is impossible to draw any meaningful conclusions. If the persons were stopped at checkpoints between Israel and the West Bank, then this is not what our protest was about in the first place. These are not the checkpoints to which people object. If, however, the incidents occurred at checkpoints within the West Bank: (1) the suicide attack was just that–an attack on the position of an occupying military force, (2) the Palestinians stopped with light arms [pistols, ammunition] do, in fact, have a right to arms and it is not within the rights of an occupying power to disarm the people that are occupied, and (3) considering that all Palestinians who want to move beyond their homes must at some point travel through one or more of these checkpoints, overlooks the fact that these 3 incidents do not speak for the vast majority of Palestinians.

Commercial goods, food, medicine, ambulances, and medical crews continue to circulate freely, hampered only by continuing attacks. Palestinian workers going to jobs in Israel also may pass through the checkpoints with the proper identification; restrictions are only imposed when necessitated by the security situation.

This, actually, contradicts fact that has been well-documented by more honest and noble organizations like B’tselem and Machsom Watch.

Barriers are not set up to humiliate Palestinians, but to ensure the safety of Israeli citizens. Unfortunately, every time Israel has relaxed its policy and withdrawn checkpoints, Palestinian terrorists have taken advantage of the opportunity to launch new attacks on innocent Israelis.

Whether or not they are intended to humiliate Palestinians, they do. The occupation and checkpoint systems in and of themselves are humiliating, and they have a suspicious relationship with the expansion of settlements and other illegal activities Israel has taken upon itself. This hand-out unfortunately implies that checkpoints equal security and that they are the only option–the others, of course, are for the Israeli government to make an honest and effective effort to end the occupation and the settlement enterprise.

As for the Israel Action Committee, it would be nice to see material passed out that was less ill-advised and more relevant to the issue at hand in the future. I have rarely seen the IAC distribute and produce original material or take a unique approach to the issue of the Israeli occupation. Most signs tend to revolve around the same mantras that the national movement likes to forward. I have noticed that IAC and other such organizations are so heavily dependent on an up-down ‘this is the plan you should follow’ scheme that it tends to stifle the organic development of material and dialogue, and even leads to identity crises where members of said organization personally are against the occupation and its crimes, but continue to distribute justifications and other apologia for it. An IAC chair once went so far to print a heavily plagiarized letter in the Daily Cal. Given the way the organization and others like it seem to function, is it really that surprising?