A moral response for Palestine

Mexico City — As I write this, the violence in Israel and Palestine continues, and each day brings some new and nefarious detail: Israel bombs building housing media offices; At least 58 children killed in Gaza air strike; Netanyahu says strikes to “continue at full force.”

News reports point to a number of proximate causes: Israeli aggression at Al-Aqsa mosque; authorities blocking the Damascus Gate during Ramadan; the eviction of families in Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem. However, all of these are but instantiations of longstanding grievances at the heart of the crisis, chief of which has been discrimination and subjugation of Palestinians—including citizens of Israel (i.e., “Arab Israelis”)—in a land they have long claimed as their own.

Some downplay the Palestinian position by saying that “both sides are to blame,” but this attempt to paint an equivalence flies in the face of the gross asymmetry of power in the Holy Land. Like the “nanlaban” narrative of the Duterte administration that justifies the killing of innocent people accused of being involved with drugs as acts of “self-defense,” the Netanyahu government has perpetrated violence in the name of what Joe Biden and other American politicians disingenuously call “Israel’s right to defend itself.”

Now it cannot be denied that Israeli Jews have likewise been victimized by the violence as Hamas rockets continue to fall upon Jerusalem and Southern Israel, targeting civilians for which they should be condemned. However, Hamas neither speaks for nor encompasses the millions of Palestinian civilians in Gaza or elsewhere. Moreover, its appeal lies in the fact that nonviolent demands for social justice have been ignored by Israeli governments, while peaceful protests have been met with violence. In the face of hopelessness, Hamas resonates with Palestinians who have faced what a growing number of organizations are calling an “apartheid” by the Israeli state.

Some years back, I had the opportunity to visit Israel and the Palestinian Territories, and I saw how exclusion and discrimination have become a lived experience for many Palestinians. “We are treated like second-class citizens,” as one student in Nazareth put it, referencing bureaucratic restrictions, lack of economic opportunities, and the everyday burden of suspicion.

On the other hand, I also saw how Israel’s worldview of being an ethnic nation under perpetual threat is reflected in everything from strict airport security to the messages in their museums and memorials.

To some extent, Israel’s existential fears are understandable as one of the peoples in the world who have actually faced genocide, lest we forget the horrors of the Holocaust; even today, anti-Semitism persists around the world. However, the Jews’ historic experience of exclusion is not an excuse for the Israeli state to inflict the very same experience on another people.

Many Israeli Jews—over 40 percent, according to recent surveys—would actually agree with the proposition that Palestinians deserve a state of their own, and amid the violence today, there is a movement within Israel clamoring for peaceful coexistence. As in many parts of the world, however, politicians—Hamas and Netanyahu included—have been quick to fan the flames of division. With no way out of the dispiriting status quo in sight, younger generations seem more polarized than ever.

Mirroring this polarization are attitudes to the conflict around the world. While Muslim countries are quick to identify with Palestine, Evangelicals in America and elsewhere have traditionally sided with Israel, seeing the Jewish nation as holding some theological or eschatological significance. Even in the Philippines, I see “I stand with Israel” posts on social media. Such “Christian” beliefs, however, often get in the way of Christian values, just as America’s apologetics on Israel’s behalf are undermining its claims to moral leadership.

As the Philippines’ pivotal support for Israel in 1947 shows (we were the only Asian country to vote for UN Resolution 181), every nation’s position counts. Today, it is the Palestinian people who need our solidarity. If, as the past decades have made clear, peaceful coexistence in the Holy Land can only happen on the basis of equal standing, then the world’s moral response should be full support for the Palestinians to have a land of their own, and to enjoy the same rights as those of their Jewish counterparts.

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glasco@inquirer.com.ph