A Plea from Palestine

The plea was painfully direct: "Please don't participate in killing kids."

After speaking articulately for more than an hour on the fine points of Israeli and international law, and after translating the stories of three young men just released from the wretched Ansar III prison, the eloquent Palestinian attorney wanted to give us this fundamental message to take home: "Don't participate in killing kids. We just want to live."

It was a message we had heard many times before, in Nicaragua, South Africa, and El Salvador. But to hear it again, from this person, in this place, was to hear it with new pain and compelling urgency. For in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, territories occupied by Israel, every day Palestinian children are killed, wounded, and imprisoned by the Israeli army, which is heavily subsidized by U.S. tax dollars.

We were 10 representatives of U.S. peace and justice organizations on a two-week fact-finding tour of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza Strip. Co-sponsored by the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), our delegation, which included Christians and Jews, had come to observe the realities of the Israeli occupation and the status of the Palestinian intifada, or uprising.

We arrived in the Occupied Territories at a time of great exhilaration and expectation, less than a week after the Palestine National Council had declared an independent Palestinian state. All the Palestinians we talked with were bursting with pride. Their intifada has radically altered the equation of the Palestinian-Israeli-Arab conflict.

Through tax resistance, boycotts, strikes, flag-waving, and stone-throwing, Palestinians in refugee camps, villages, and towns all over the West Bank and Gaza had been telling the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the world that they had had enough of the 21-year-old Israeli occupation. Through leaflets, popular committees, and grassroots organizations, they communicated the message: Palestinians want their own state, and they want to live in peace with the state of Israel. Everywhere we went we saw signs of the new state being born.

But we also witnessed the horrors of the Israeli occupation, a cruel and comprehensive system of oppression that grossly violates human rights and international law. And while such repression has certainly increased in response to the intifada, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have suffered under the same injustices of occupation for more than 21 years.

Every aspect of Palestinian life is affected. Palestinian land is confiscated; building permits are refused; travel is restricted or prohibited; jobs are denied; markets are closed to Palestinian products; schools are closed; medical care is restricted or denied; freedom of expression is curtailed or denied; unions and charitable organizations are banned; and Palestinian culture is suppressed.

Increased repression under the intifada has included random and arbitrary arrests; imprisonment without charge or trial; physical and psychological torture; deportations; random shootings and beatings; random destruction and confiscation of property; extended curfews, which include the cutting off of water and electricity; use of tear gas in enclosed spaces; collective punishment; constant surveillance; and general harassment.

And since we left the Middle East in early December, the situation in the Occupied Territories has grown only worse. The shooting and killing of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers increased so dramatically that even Israeli legislators were complaining. More than 492 Palestinians and 16 Israelis have been killed in the intifada; another 46,000 Palestinians have been wounded and more than 20,000 have been arrested and imprisoned.

IN SPITE OF ALL THIS, Israel receives more than $3 billion a year in U.S. aid, making it the No. 1 recipient in the world of U.S. foreign aid. Yet for the more than 21 years of the occupation, and even throughout most of the intifada, the American peace movement and American Christians have largely ignored the Palestinians' plea for peace and justice. Christians, in fact, have been among Israel's strongest supporters.

There are many reasons for our sins of omission in the Middle East. Many of us have been slow to respond to the Palestinian cause because we strongly disagree with the acts of terrorism committed by the PLO and other, more radical, Palestinian groups. Such actions have only magnified legitimate Israeli security concerns and exacerbated Israeli fears of annihilation, fears that must be acknowledged and addressed.

But terrorism, which must be unequivocally condemned in all forms and from all quarters, has too often been used to obfuscate the real issue in the Middle East: the violation of the human rights and the denial of legitimate political rights of more than 3 million Palestinians scattered throughout the Middle East.

Our concerns for justice in the Middle East have also been inhibited by a sense of collective guilt for the horrors of the Holocaust. This guilt often allows us to overlook misconduct by the state of Israel. But we must not allow our failure of the Jews in their darkest hour -- indeed, our very complicity with the Holocaust -- to justify our failure of the Palestinians in their oppression.

Anti-Semitism remains a deplorable reality in our world, but our fears of anti-Semitism, or of being perceived as anti-Semitic, have often distorted our sense of justice in the Middle East. We must come to realize that conflict resolution does not need to be a zero-sum game; a solution can be reached that benefits both sides. It is particularly important that we understand this reality as it applies to the Middle East.

In the words of Rev. Riah Abu El-Assal, an Arab Israeli and the rector of the Anglican church in Nazareth, "The only lasting peace Palestinians can have depends on the peace and security of the Jewish people. The peace of one depends on the peace of the other." Rev. Elias Chacour, another Palestinian Israeli and a Melkite priest, puts it this way: "If you care about Jews, you must work for justice for the Palestinians."

As the intifada continues and Israeli repression increases, our efforts on behalf of Israelis are even more vital. Abu El-Assal's opinion that "the Jews are losing part of their humanity in the Occupied Territories" has been verified by none other than Israeli soldiers, who recently complained to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir that the army's suppression of the uprising requires them to violate their basic values. "We hate these PLO people because they make us kill Arab children," Shamir responded. "But you must do that to survive."

WE HAVE ALLOWED all these reasons and others to excuse our general ignorance of Palestinian-Israeli history. This ignorance has also been fostered by the common feeling that the Middle East situation is "too complicated," and by the propagation of myths about the birth of Israel. Only recently have Israeli historians begun to tell the true story of massacres and expulsions of Palestinian villagers by Zionist forces.

For too long Christians have been part of the problem between Jews and Arabs. We who profess to be Christian peacemakers must commit ourselves to working for peace and justice for both Palestinians and Israelis. This commitment must include two broad goals, the first being the achievement of a peaceful two-state solution that will both acknowledge the rights of Palestinians by establishing a Palestinian state, and enhance the rights of Israelis by guaranteeing limited, secure borders for Israel.

The second goal requires more immediate and urgent action: We must stop the killing. We must hear and respond to the plea of the attorney in Gaza:

"Consider yourselves peace ambassadors to the United States. Tell your country that we want to live. We are not terrorists. We just want to live. Enough bloodshed; no more killing and detentions. It is enough.

"Watch your taxes. Don't participate in killing kids. Please don't participate in killing kids.

"Maintain your relations with Israel in any way you want. But think about us. We have kids. We have the right to live. We have the right to live as human beings. There is another way to live. Please try to do something."

Vicki Kemper was news editor of Sojourners when this article appeared.