To the Editor:
Richard Harvell '03 published a statement ("Lost in the Viscera," May 28) in which he defended the position that Israeli settlers are "racist -- a hard claim to disagree with," and in violation of the Oslo accords. Mr. Harvell then repeated two further lines of argument that have been often quoted in the international media and in The Dartmouth, namely, that the Israeli government engages in acts of "violence and repression" and "that suicide bombers are the inevitable result of the poverty, misery and poor leadership of the occupied territories -- all a product of Israel's occupation."
Mr. Harvell's characterization of suicide bombing (I prefer the term "homicide bombing") as "inevitable" ignores the military and political realities of the conflict. While my statement may fly in the face of established armchair wisdom concerning the Middle East, the distinction between "inevitable" and "premeditated" is critical.
One needs only consult a national newspaper to identify literally hundreds of regions around the world fraught with poverty, misery and poor leadership. Such conditions are unfortunately the norm of human existence. Still, few people outside of the Middle East resort to suicide bombing.
Rarely, if ever, do people independently adopt the mechanism of suicide bombing to achieve their political goals. Rather, suicide bombings are the result of discrete and identifiable tactical decisions made by military cabals and ruling elites (in this case, leaders of Hamas, the Palestinian Liberation Front, Islamic Jihad, the Al-Asqua Martyrs Brigade, the Palestinian Authority and other Palestinian paramilitary groups). These groups have embraced the tactic of suicide bombing and indoctrinated their society with a culture of martyrdom to the detriment of honest political discourse, civil protest and compromise. In the process, these groups have also violently stifled civil opposition from within Palestinian society. Equating such premeditated actions with other grassroots, popular or spontaneous forms of protest (be they violent or pacific) does a disservice to those broad-based resistance movements that achieved victory without resulting to the targeting of civilians, and engenders consequences for any future Palestinian state.
I should also quickly note that the ongoing presence of settlements in absence of a political solution is not a violation of the Oslo accords. Those agreements explicitly allow for the construction of new homes and buildings by both parties, while U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 and historical precedent (for example, the continuous presence of Jews in Hebron for over 2,000 years until the 1929 pogrom) establish Israel's legal presence in the West Bank.
Finally, to get the root of the conflict, I would argue that Israeli settlement activity is not racist. Indeed, Dartmouth students who are routinely encouraged to welcome the ideals of a truly pluralistic society should not ask why Israeli Jews should wish to live in the West Bank. The more telling question, in my opinion, is why the presence of even a minority of Jews in the West Bank is apparently so abhorrent to Palestinians. Over 1 million Arabs live as citizens with equal rights in Israel. Meanwhile, not a single Jew lives as an equal citizen in any of the twenty-two nations of the Arab League or under the Palestinian Authority's civil administration. Thus I ask the question, who are the real racists?
