Anti-Israel activists often draw unreasonable and overly simplistic comparisons between the Arab-Israeli conflict and social causes from police brutality to climate justice. Such conflations are often misleading and intellectually dishonest.
A recent column in The Daily Collegian titled Palestinian Perspectives: The double standards of war by Ruya Hazeyen proved no exception.
Hazeyen argues that the West’s condemnation of Russia and imposition of sanctions is evidence of a double standard because boycott and divestment measures have not been employed against the State of Israel.
Hazeyen begs the question, hoping that readers will accept her attempt to synonymize Russia, an autocratic state leading an aggressive war against a peaceful neighbor, with the State of Israel, a democratic state that has sought peace with its Arab neighbors and defends its citizens from genocidal terrorist organizations.
Ukrainians do not deny Russia’s right to exist, nor are they targeting Russian civilians in terrorist attacks. There are no Ukrainian-led bombings of train stations in Moscow or rocket attacks on kindergartens in St. Petersburg.
Palestinian “resistance,” as demonstrated by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, and many others, is hunting down Israeli civilians in bars, at bus stops, in nightclubs and targeting them for extermination through pay-for-slay, a Palestinian Authority program that rewards Palestinian terrorists or their families in the event of their death for the successful murder of innocent Israelis. The ultimate goal is the ethnic cleansing of Israelis, an antisemitic, genocidal campaign to wage war on the Jewish people. But don’t take my word for it, take it from Fathi Hamad, a leader of Hamas’s politburo and member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, who in 2019 said, “We must attack every Jew on planet Earth! We must slaughter and kill them.”
This is a deliberate attempt to whitewash the atrocities committed by Palestinian terrorists against Israelis.
I would like to know how murdering innocent civilians in cold blood is “resistance”?
Is the murder of Shalvehet Pass resistance? Shalhevet was a ten-month-old baby deliberately killed by a Palestinian terrorist using a sniper rifle.
Is the murder of Hallal Yaffa Ariel, a 13-year-old girl stabbed to death by a Palestinian terrorist in her bedroom while she was asleep, an act of resistance?
What about the recent terror wave in Israel that killed 14 people. Was the Palestinian who shot to death two Ukrainian nationals and several Israeli civilians in Bnei Brak carrying out an act of resistance?
Is the unprovoked move of Hamas firing over 4,000 rockets indiscriminately at Israeli civilians last May resistance?
The terrorism the author labels as “resistance” is a movement born from antisemitism. Haj Amin al-Husseini was the first prominent Palestinian nationalist leader who met with Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany and thanked him for his sympathies towards the Palestinian Arab cause, seeking to undue Jewish liberation during the Holocaust before the State of Israel was born.
The author goes further, making a confusing comparison of Israel’s security barrier to the Berlin Wall, without mentioning that Israel’s security barrier was erected in response to the Palestinian terrorism of the Second Intifada, where Palestinian terror plagued Israeli cities with Israeli civilians being the target of suicide bombings, shootings, and stabbings perpetrated by Palestinian terrorists. Ultimately, the security barrier has decreased these acts of violence by 90%.
Hazeyen also misleads her audience by implying the existence of a pre-existing Palestinian state. She claims that Israel was conceptualized on “occupied Palestinian land.” In reality, a Palestinian state has never existed. Before 1948, Jews and Arabs lived under British rule and various foreign powers, including Ottoman, Byzantine, and Roman empires, since 70 AD.
Thus Jews are not “settlers” or “colonialists”, they are indigenous people who liberated their people and land from colonial powers. It’s also important to note that in response to Israel’s establishment, neighboring Arab states launched an ethnic cleansing campaign, forcing over 850,000 Jews to seek refuge in Israel.
The sordid history of anti-Jewish violence and the oppression of Jewish communities in Arab lands is conveniently left out because it stands to challenge Hazeyen’s characterization of Jews as powerful, foreign invaders.
Aside from the lack of clear historical evidence to back up claims made, the author uses these grotesque falsehoods to promote the BDS movement, complaining that since the west is sanctioning Russia, there should be more widespread support for the antisemitic BDS campaign.
Sanctions against Russia seek to act as a pressure point for the Russians to pull back their military conquest, while BDS seeks to employ economic and propagandistic means to destroy the State of Israel while supporting attacks by Palestinian “resistance” to advance their goals. They deny the Jewish people the right to self-determination and Israel’s right to exist as a sovereign Jewish state, and they seek to deny and erase Jewish roots and history in the land. The author even points out that many US states seek to bar BDS for these reasons, and many have already done so.
Finally, these comparisons are counterproductive and only seek to incite hatred. It is especially egregious to use such a comparison to pass off terrorism as “resistance.” With such a defense, one wonders if the author is looking for a peaceful resolution to the conflict.
A slightly edited version of the article appeared in The Algemeiner.
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