Had my only contact with Palestine Awareness Week been the formulaic reactions offered by Tammy Rubin and USAC President Emily Resnick, I would have tread carefully across Bruinwalk the following Monday, wary of falling into the gaping wounds in our campus rent by “loud screaming matches between students” and “phrases that were very disrespectful and rude” uttered by the bitter rivals in our very own Middle Eastern mini-conflict.
Luckily, as I attended as many PAW events as I could, I found them to offer a not-unexpected combination of education, rhetoric, and that feeling of instability that comes with any healthy dose of self-criticism. Confident in my ability to “get to class on time” despite the presence of a Wall that I could choose to either appreciate or ignore, I found PAW to be a worthy addition to the ever-complex texture of our campus community.
The comfort with which I attended PAW events escalated when I discovered that every time I went to one, I could expect to see some friendly faces on both sides. In fact, it seemed as though the “pro-Israel” and “pro-Palestine” establishments at UCLA collaborated with each other to ensure that every event during PAW — whether pro- or anti-Israel — was well-attended.
Then came the event that everyone was talking about for two whole days — the Walkout.
On February 29 — the last night of PAW — Bruins for Israel hosted a presentation called “Israeli Soldiers Speak Out.” The presentation, which was arranged by the pro-Israel advocacy powerhouse StandWithUs and has been performed throughout the country, features two former Israeli soldiers who share their stories with the aim of humanizing the actions of IDF soldiers and providing the context in which their decisions are made. This, too, would have been an invaluable source of information for anyone with an interest in fully grasping the complexities of this conflict. However, it seems that on that night, UCLA’s Students for Justice in Palestine and StandWithUs came to an agreement that this was information that the students present could go without.
The videos below depicts the StandWithUs speaker, Shai Bernstein, acknowledging the apparently overt plans of some students to stage a walkout in protest of the event and the actions of the Israeli government in Operation Cast Lead (which Israel carried out against Gaza three years ago). Shai then goes on to repeatedly insist that the students stay in order to “dialogue.”
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4kqMn2Xxv8]
Shai’s very vocal commitment to dialogue could only have been motivated by two things. The first is that Shai and the StandWithUs organizers are not familiar with SJP’s aversion to dialogue. The Palestinian student movement in the US has publicly resolved to eschew all activities that it designates as “normalization.” Perhaps, in his ignorance, Shai truly thought that he had a chance at sitting down with the SJP students and convincing them of Israel’s ineffable virtue.
The other, more likely possibility is that the persistent mention of dialogue was planned specifically for the purpose of producing a video that would “expose” the intransigence of Israel’s critics. A cute, little illustration shown at the end of the StandWithUs video quips, “Peace takes two.” With this strategically planned video, StandWithUs seeks to be able to convince audiences that unlike Israelis, Palestinians and their sympathizers are not committed to finding a just peace. These tactics seem to have had some effect. In the past few days, no less than three articles have appeared in the Daily Bruin that either denounced the Walkout as counterproductive or criticized the general antagonistic attitude toward Zionism that pervades our campus.
But StandWithUs is not the only group to have gained from this incident. SJP used some of the very same footage to deride the concept of dialogue in the Israeli-Palestinian context and to explain the grievances that motivate SJP’s activities on campus, including the 1,400 Palestinian casualties of Operation Cast Lead.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWLk7vm2Zkk]
It is truly beautiful to see that groups as historically contentious as StandWithUs, BFI, and SJP can cooperate with each other by sharing video footage in order to contribute their divergent narratives and objectives to an atmosphere of intellectual sharing on our campus.
Even more indicative of the bright future of cooperation between these groups are reports that when the plans of the Walkout protesters were uncovered hours before the BFI event, even when Hillel representatives offered to host the event in the relative safety of the Hillel building so as to avoid a dramatic incident, StandWithUs officials remained adamant in their commitment to bring their soldiers to campus, thus guaranteeing that a walkout would take place.
Given the commitment of StandWithUs to allowing a peaceful protest to occur even at the expense of its own event and the technical collaboration between “pro-Palestinian” and “pro-Israel” students to produce two effectively rhetorical videos for their own initiatives, it seems as though those who worried about campus climate had it all wrong. Using the same event to deliver two possibly contradictory messages, SJP and StandWithUs have succeeded in giving us a microcosmic metaphor for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a whole. Like the walkout, incidents that take place in Israel and the Palestinian Territories will never be interpreted in the same way by people who see the conflict differently. What better way to preach the importance of looking at multiple sides than by producing examples of those sides in a collaborative effort?
To roughly echo the annoying adage about making over the fence by reaching for the stars, it seems that when two groups strive with honesty and integrity to affect positive change on a situation 7,563 miles away, they just might succeed in bringing peace and understanding to the campus climate right here at home. And we all know that nothing is holier than campus climate.
beautifully written creative non-fiction. 🙂
Homie, I get the humour. It’s just not funny, not only because the ultimate source material for your humour is 1,400 dead Palestinians, but because it’s something you’re doing to get “us”, the “others”, to see that you are human.
We get that you’re a human!! We get it!!! We get that BFI/StandWithUs/Young Americans for Freedom/All Zionists are all consistent of human beings, too! We’re not stupid people, man. We’re not hateful people. We just want to see an end to the occupation of Palestine and the racist policies of the State of Israel and the failure to acknowledge the Right of Return. Many (most?) of us would like to see one state with equal rights for everyone. It’s a really simple thing, man. We’re all humans, we get it. Now please let us move forward and work towards actual justice.
This snarky post does nothing for justice, it just tries to strip away the meaning of a material reality to turn it into this “two perspectives” dichotomy, because it draws attention (and maybe a guilty conscience) away from the fact that the project of political Zionism, the idea that the Jewish people need a State in Historic Palestine that is of a distinct Jewish character and not of any other kind of character, has required prolonged and everyday violence to maintain itself since 1948.
This violence manifests in the form of enforcing demographic control (and thereby resorting to physical violence to expel the native population and structural violence to refuse them from getting back in), suppressing anti-Zionist activists (the colonizers who refuse), and propagating distortions and half-truths in the media and at universities to justify the maintenance of apartheid in Israel, settler-colonialism in the West Bank, and military control over Gaza. There are countless other acts of violence that could go on in a list exponentially longer than all of what I can write to you.
It is unfortunate, because the same sort of tactics have been used to suppress Jews for thousands of years. It is really awful to see them employed against other human beings, in this case Palestinians and their sympathizers, especially in the name of a people that have been subjected to a vast history of atrocities. You, as a liberal Zionist, probably understand that on some level, because liberal Zionists are Zionists who are aware of the humanity of their “others”. What you’re not aware of is how what you’re doing is basically making this all seem ok with humour. This makes me sad, as humour is one of the only things that keeps me going and I feel like what you’re doing is an insult to humour itself, because it’s making apartheid some kind of “funny” thing with two “perspectives” instead of a reality that must be ended.
This article comes off as saying “Look at this thing Botha said! It’s just like this thing Biko said! LOL!”. You’re equivocating, and even though you present this equivocation in the form of humour, the article is still a statement in defence of violence and a testament to the banality of evil.
Sometimes, the sort of ideology you promote is even more abnormal, reflective of the discourse employed by more hawkish Zionists. I’ve even heard you describe the word “massacre” as “a colloquial term”. I’ve heard you publicly describe Jordan as an apartheid state, but not Israel. That’s actually racist. (Jordan is more or less apartheid for Palestinians, but that neglects the fact that the whole reason the Palestinians are there in the first place is because of Israel, which has 30 laws that discriminate against Palestinians). These two quotations were from the two conversations I’ve had with you, so I imagine if I kept up “dialogue” with you, I’d be able to hear more. I have a low tolerance for people who make concessions to state violence, as I consider such an act even more hateful than punching someone in the face (which is something you would never do or never defend anyone else for doing, so why defend a state that kills civilians, kidnaps kids, steals people’s land and water, cuts down their olive trees, etc?).
Maybe you’re programmed to respond to that, “but what about Hamas?! What about their violence??”. I think it’s safe to say that that no one here is asking you to defend Hamas. I think it would be a good start of you tried supporting equal rights and ending the violent occupation of Palestine and the Golan Heights, as well as allowing the Right of Return. None of that has anything to do with Hamas, Fatah, the PA, or any other political institution in Palestine.
I mean, I get it… you want Palestinians to talk it out with you, which is understandable. The thing is that they no matter how much talking they do, Palestinian students here have absolutely no control over whether or not they can return to their home, or whether or not their relatives can go from their houses to work or school without being stopped at a checkpoint, whether or not the water or electricity will be on today at their cousin’s house. What you also don’t get is that your persistent efforts to talk it out with them, as a Jewish American with none of these struggles, is condescending. How did you get to that position to step to the table with them to discuss the fate of their people from a university campus in Los Angeles?
I’m sorry, but your entire article reads like “S*** Liberal Zionists Say” on tumblr, which is a blog written by a former Liberal Zionist who realized he was defending the indefensible. I hope, for your sake, you change your mind, but I recognize that it’s your choice. You’re young enough and talented enough to do real meaningful work for something like a JVP/YJP. I’m not trying to be condescending and say “come to our side, kid!”. I’m trying to speak to you as an equal (isn’t that what you’ve wanted us all to do all this time?) and tell you that you are on the wrong side of history.
I don’t know why you defend Israel. I don’t know whether or not it’s a performative thing that you do as a way of showing love for your faith. Everyone has their reasons, and as you know, many Zionists are atheists. But I’d just like to speak to you as a person who presumably holds his religion and his culture deeply; there are other ways to be Jewish, and those ways are beautiful and in keeping with the rich history of Judaism. Don’t give in to the harmfully reductionist conception of Judaism as being inextricably linked to unquestioning support for a specific nation-state, Israel, a recent phenomenon in the vast and rich history of the Jewish people.
Speaking for myself, there have been many more atrocities committed in the name of whiteness than in the name of Jewishness, so I have even more of my work cut out for me than you do.
End of dialogue.
I agree. Palestinians are right and Israel is wrong. Stop pretending like there is another narrative. There is only one narrative. If anyone in Israel is suffering from terror it is their own fault for stealing land. No dialogue should be permitted until all the concessions are made. Liberal zionists try to have dialogue to make them feel better for being lazy and ignorant. Also, I respect you (but your ignorance makes it hard for me to continue to respect you).