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J Street U criticizes displacement of Palestinians in Susya

By JACOB TOOK | October 20, 2016

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COURTESY OF JACOB TOOK J Street U advocated for a peaceful, two-state resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

J Street U, a self-described “pro-Israel, pro-Palestine, pro-peace” organization, hosted “Stop the Demolition of Susya,” an expression of solidarity with the Palestinian village of Susya, that explored the greater context of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

The discussion on Thursday, Oct. 13 revolved around preventing the demolition of Susya, a Palestinian village in the West Bank that, under threat of demolition by the Israeli government because it was built without building permits.

J Street U co-president, junior Ben Gellman, spoke about the importance of speaking for the civilians of the village, who have been left without a voice in the scope of the larger conflict. He explained that part J Street U’s role is to provide a balanced conversation united by a concern for human rights.

“As people who care about human rights, we find it frustrating and tragic that people might have their homes destroyed,” Gellman said. “The dispossession that Palestinians face of their land and their homes and their livelihoods is so detrimental to peace that we can’t abide by it as people who value peace, and who want a two-state solution.”

Gellman highlighted the dispossession of Palestinian land in the West Bank, which attracts Israeli citizens with subsidized housing and privilege over the Palestinians, such as roads open only to Israeli motorists.

Though Gellman identified the settlements as a practice of Israel that is harmful to the prospect of peace between the peoples, some members of the J Street U board said that most Israeli citizens don’t support them.

Freshman Anna Gordon, who spent the last year in Israel, disagreed.

“A lot of Israelis themselves are pretty uneducated,” Gordon said. “They’re fairly recent immigrants from Arab countries. It’s often people who are uneducated, who come from very conservative cultures who support the settlements, [which] has become a right wing ideology in Israel, the same way we have right wing, left wing here in America.”

Gordon also expressed her belief that their discussion could be oversimplifying the issue by reducing the pro-settlement population in Israel to religious extremists.

“Why the average Israeli voter votes to keep settlements, votes to keep everything the same is much more nuanced than just saying they’re religious extremists,” she said. “There’s a lot of secular people in Israel who support the settlements, so stereotyping them as super-religious is an unhealthy part of the discourse.”

Gordon admitted that part of the reason we think of the conflict in terms of religious extremism is because this language is a functional simplification that is easy to understand, though perhaps not always accurate.

“It’s also something that’s easier to explain to Americans because it’s an easy stereotype; It makes sense,” she said. “There’s definitely a trend to use religious people as the people who are going to do crazy things in popular media, and it’s not always like that.”

Gellman used the analogy of two friends sharing a pizza. Israel has, in essence, taken more than half of the pizza by settling in the Palestinian land in the West Bank, promising to give the extra pizza back after negotiations are complete.

However, Gordon pointed out that the same analogy could go the other way. She identified the regular acts of terror committed by radicalized Palestinians in Israel, particularly bus bombings, as a primary inhibitor of finding peace. Gordon said that Israelis are reluctant to leave a government in Palestine that supports these radical acts.

Gellman explained that J Street U hoped to bring a balanced discussion to the controversial topics surrounding the Israel-Palestine conflict.

“We fight for strong United States leadership towards a diplomatically negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” he said. “We have, like any group in the middle, a dual role. We pride ourselves on that role, on bringing balance to a conversation that, in so many spaces, is far from balanced. I feel just as comfortable expressing frustration and sadness at the human rights violations as I do expressing hope for a future Israel that I can be proud of and love.”

Gordon clarified that she was by no means an authority on the conflict, but was simply furthering the discourse in the space of an open discussion.

“I know a lot, but there’s so many people who know a lot with very different opinions on both the right and the left,” she said. “There’s no right answer.”

She also said that J Street U is her favorite group on campus that is concerned with this issue because of their balanced approach to the issue.

Junior Jacob Klein, a board member of J Street U, explained the atmosphere of understanding and acceptance that they try to create.

“In other places, people can be alienated for being pro-Israel or progressive,” he said. “We’re in the middle, trying to create that space for people. We see the human rights issues in Israel’s policies, but we see the value of Israel as a country.


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