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Submission: Israeli-Palestinian conflict hurts all, Bruins should model peace

By Ben Nosrati

Nov. 28, 2016 12:25 p.m.

In October 2015, a 13-year-old Israeli boy was riding his bike near East Jerusalem when two Palestinian boys, aged 13 and 15, stabbed him and a 25-year-old Yeshiva student with kitchen knives. The 15-year-old Palestinian was shot and killed after charging at Israeli police following the initial attack. A year later, an Israeli court sentenced the 13-year-old Palestinian to 12 years in prison, finding him guilty of two counts of attempted murder.

The purpose of my rehashing of the details is not to talk about who’s right or wrong, nor is it to encourage readers to take “sides,” or to justify anyone’s actions. I simply want to bring people’s attention to something so obvious and hidden in plain sight that we casually pass it over and have become numb to it: A 13-year-old stabbed another 13-year-old with the intent to kill. These are kids.

How mature were you when you were 13? What issues were you struggling with? What circumstances would compel 13-year-old you to pick up a kitchen knife with the intent of physically harming someone else?

In the wake of Bruins for Israel’s “What Does Peace Look Like To You? A Tribute to Yitzhak Rabin” event, there is perhaps no better time to ask ourselves the big questions: What does peace look like to us, and would we be willing to put down our guns and our posters long enough to see it become a reality?

We cannot be so blind as to be oblivious to the harsh reality that this conflict between parents has deep and harmful impacts on their children. On our children. Regardless of what “side” you’re on, we can all agree our kids are our future, and we have to be very careful how and what we teach them. Children learn whether they are in a classroom or in a living room. As students, we can attest that we learn just as much outside the classroom – if not more – as we do in it.

On our campus, we focus all too much on the fighting and not enough on the conflict’s impact on the people we believe we are fighting for. We have to humanize this conflict. Amid the fighting, it is easy to forget that the person on the other side of the table also has a family and people he/she cares about. We are not so different. This incident was a victory for nobody. Nobody wins when a 13-year-old stabs another 13-year-old with a kitchen knife.

Parents cannot afford to teach their children to hate. Leaders within the Israeli and Palestinian communities on campus cannot afford to teach their communities to hate, either.

As individuals, we get to decide what legacy we leave behind – both at UCLA via resolving the friction between student groups and setting valuable precedents for future Bruins, and in the world via providing our kids with a well-rounded education encompassing compassion, open-mindedness and skeptical optimism. The choice is ours.

On a prestigious college campus, we have the opportunity to model what nuanced education, mutual recognition and reconciliation can and should look like. Whether you’re in an Israel group, a Palestine group or anywhere in between, we must at the very least be able to agree that a world in which 13-year-olds are stabbing each other is not a legacy we want to leave behind.

Nosrati is a fourth-year psychobiology student.

 

 

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