Achieving a lasting peace

I don’t know what happened afterwards. As a non-resident American citizen, I went through checkpoints unscathed. But to the 3.5 million Palestinians living in the West Bank, crossing from one part of the territory to another is humiliating, time-consuming and unpredictable, as they are only permitted to move at the arbitrary discretion of the Israeli Defense Forces.

Ori Daniel wrote a column published on March 31 titled “Why the Defensive Shield is Justified.” I agree with him: barrages of rockets and missiles fired indiscriminantly at Israeli civilians is unacceptable. No one should have to live in an environment of insecurity and fear. I, and the members of the Princeton Committee on Palestine, condemn such acts and urge for them to end immediately. It is completely understandable why Israel would want to take action to stop them.

Yet, for every narrative of an Israeli running to a bomb shelter, there exists a parallel anecdote of an innocent Palestinian civilian family fleeing from their home with minutes’ notice to escape an Israeli airstrike, or a college student living in Nablus who is withheld passage through a checkpoint to attend university in Birzeit.

Unfortunately, Israel’s intensifying occupation of the West Bank and de facto occupation of Gaza are perpetuating the problem. By making Palestinians’ lives more difficult, Israel is only doing itself a disservice by fueling extremism. This underscores the point that a permanent end to the conflict will only come by creating a legitimate two-state solution. Yet with Israel setting illegitimate borders along a barrier that encroaches into the West Bank, and with an ever-growing Israeli settlement presence, the West Bank continues to be fragmented more each year, making a viable two-state solution almost impossible.

Security-wise, the wall is a short-term, band-aid type of a fix, at best. A wall went up around Gaza in 1994 for the same reason Israel now claims to have put up a wall throughout the West Bank. Yet now, extreme elements have resorted to going over that wall, and now one may encounter reports of dozens of rockets being fired on a given day.

In his PCP-sponsored visit to campus last year, Noam Chomsky noted that if the wall were truly for security, Israel could have built it on its side of the official border and patrol it on both sides, forming an impenetrable barrier. This wall would be within Israel’s right to build. The wall we see today is intrusive, obstructive and a flagrant violation of international law. According to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, the separation wall has torn apart the communities of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. On March 25, The Princeton Committee on Palestine protested against this wall and the extensive repercussions it has had on the Palestinian people.

Daniel wrongly accuses PCP of committing the “ethical offense” of distributing false information. PCP engaged in no such fabrication of facts. Daniel claims that PCP falsely attributed a quote in our pamphlet — “But we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians” — to Nelson Mandela, but Mandela made this statement in a speech at the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People in Pretoria, South Africa on December 4, 1997. Daniel also accused PCP of falsely stating when the wall was built. In our pamphlets, PCP mentions that the wall first began going up in 1994. The first concrete slabs which would eventually form the current wall did go up shortly after the Oslo Accords in 1994.

Daniel claims that Golda Meir’s quote, “Peace will come when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us” is still relevant today. Dehumanizing Palestinians and characterizing them as moral inferiors only prolongs unrest. The truth is that most Palestinians — like most Israelis — are only interested in living a decent life in their own state, free from occupation and humilitation. Public opinion polling from 2009 shows that 78 percent of Palestinians and 74 percent of Israelis would support a two-state solution.

It is imperative that Israel take steps to put an end to the decades-long siege against Palestinians. I join with Daniel in condemning the unnecessary and unjustifiable loss of life in the region, and PCP urges him to join us in opposing the policies that will inevitably ensure the perpetuation of such tragedy.

Randy Khalil is a Wilson School major from Richmond, Calif. He is the vice president for advocacy of the Princeton Committee on Palestine. He is also a former staff writer for the 'Prince.' He can be reached at rkhalil@princeton.edu.