As victims become victimizers, crimes cannot be forgotten

In reference to NYU's Israel Apartheid Week, the author of last Friday's op/ed asked the question: "How did the most humane state in the world become demonized and accused of apartheid?"

This is a very good question, though as a Jew, it is a painful one for me. I do not have an answer except to note, with deep sadness, that we have not been able to avoid history's dictum that victims become victimizers. I have asked myself a version of the above question at least once every day this past year, half of which I spent living in Haifa, the other half of which I spent living in occupied Palestine.

This is why:

Ahmed (I've changed names to protect the identities of the people described) was the son of the lady who did my hair. He was 14 and asleep when three Israeli soldiers invaded his home in the middle of the night, dragged him from his bed and forced him into a military vehicle. His mother's pleas to be given an explanation for her son's detention were never answered. Ahmed was held in "administrative detention" without trial or warrant for two years. I met him when he was released at the age of 16. Since 1967, 650,000 Palestinians have been filtered through the Israeli prison system, often without charge.

Hani was my roommate in Ramallah. One night two years ago, the IDF took him from his family's home without letting him dress. He and several other men from the village were brought to the town center in their underwear, a situation Hani found so absurd that he began to laugh. He was threatened with a beating if he did not stop laughing, but fear made adhering to the command impossible. The bruises went away in a few weeks. Hani still sleeps in his clothes.

Haatim is my best friend's boyfriend. Though a talented journalist, Haatim is unemployed. For unexplained reasons, he has not been allowed to cross out of Nablus for the past eight years. The Nablus checkpoint is one of more than 500 Israeli checkpoints and closure items within the West Bank. These daily barriers to movement separate Palestinians not from Israelis or Israel, but from each other.

Mohammed was the 16-year-old boy shot on my street corner in July with a "precisely targeted" Israeli bullet, identical to one that flew through my own window in June.

My 17-year-old friend Amin has not seen his mother in years because she lives in Gaza. Israel "disengaged" from Gaza in 2005 by way of a military blockade.

When he was 13, Osama, one my students, saw his parents shot in front of him.

I met Dalia because she had just graduated from NYU. After 21 years as a New Yorker, she is now afraid to travel outside of her family's tiny West Bank village because Israel will not renew her visitor's permit.

Jumla has seen her home in the South Hebron Hills demolished nine times, once for every year of her life. It has been deemed too close to a road which serves only Jewish settlers.

The author of Friday's article challenged readers to name a country that surpasses Israel's human rights record. He then cited the United States's abuses in Dresden, France's in Algeria and Belgium's in the Congo. These have been widely condemned as some of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century. Have we not progressed?

The author calls IAW "the greatest propaganda effort since Nazi Germany." This is simply absurd. The efforts of 10 student activists, many of them Jewish, should never be compared to the massive campaign launched to justify one of the most horrific genocides in modern history. Statements like the author's present a serious danger to the future of the Jewish people, far more than the IAW speaking events and hip-hop concerts the author finds so threatening. Such statements stifle open debate and allow existing anti-Semitism to be written off.

If the author insists on invoking the Holocaust, let us really look at what it taught us. There is only one way in which the Holocaust should ever be paralleled to the current situation in Palestine: it is in relation to the importance of public accountability. The world stayed silent as the Nazi regime implemented an ethnic state at the expense of millions of lives. In 1945 in the aftermath of this silence, a body of international law was established so that human rights abuses to such a gross degree would not occur again. The state of Israel currently stands in violation of the human rights treaties on which it is a signatory. Despite frequent attempts to do so, the international community has taken no disciplinary action, due largely to more than 60 U.S. vetoes.

The author cites the de jure civil rights of the 1.5 million Palestinian citizens of Israel in order to refute the comparison between Israel and apartheid South Africa. He fails, however, to note that Israel currently maintains the longest military occupation in modern history (the only one of its kind in the world today) over some 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and, arguably, over 1.5 million more in Gaza. This is de facto annexation. Thus, if all of the territories that Israel controls militarily and politically are taken into consideration, the picture of Israel changes from that of a (albeit discriminatory) democracy to that of an ethnic state that privileges a one group at the expense and great suffering of another. That is the definition of apartheid. Dare we stay silent?

Danielle Strandburg-Peshkin is a contributing columnist. E-mail her at opinion@nyunews.com.