Protest urges U.S. action in Palestine

  COURTNEY STEWART/Daily Bruin Palestine supporters march
down Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood Saturday. The protest
commemorates 53 years of Israeli occupation of land previously
known as Palestine.

By Marcelle Richards
Daily Bruin Senior Staff

Protesters marched at the Federal building Saturday to denounce
the U.S.’s complacency in the Israeli-Palestinian crisis.

The march coincided with the 53rd anniversary of Israel’s
acquisition of Palestinian lands.

Palestinians are now living under the rule of prime minister
Ariel Sharon, whom the marchers made part of their protest due to
his militant past.

“Today the prime minister ““ the butcher ““ is
invading the Palestinian cities and bombing them, killing children,
women and old people on a daily basis,” said Samir Twair,
president of the Arab-American Press Guild. “They’re
using Phantom-16s to bomb the Palestinians. We’re American
people; we should not allow American airplanes to kill defenseless
people.”

Shulamit Bahat, American Jewish Committee Acting Executive
Director, disagreed with the accusations in a statement released
May 18.

“Israel’s hand for peace is still outstretched. The
Palestinian leadership should grab it and join Israelis in the
quest for peace,” she said.

Several hundred people ““ many of Palestinian, Jewish and
Israeli descent ““ converged on the grassy flat in front of
the building, waving signs at passing cars on Wilshire Boulevard as
American flags waved above them.

“All these people are people of conscience,” said
Sabiha Kham, a 1999 psychology alumna.

Sitting silently on the curb were the victims of the conflict.
Most were under 18, all in wheelchairs. Mothers with infants
flanked signs with photos of dead children shown amid piles of
rubble.

All remained calm, hardly attracting the attention of nearby Los
Angeles County Sheriff’s Department officers hired to oversee
the event.

As protesters shouted “Free, free Palestine,” many
more stood embittered by the apathy in their own country.

“While the Israelis speak of peace, their actions are
directly opposite,” said Don Bustany, representative of the
American Arab Anti-discrimination Committee. “And the U.S.
totally unethically looks the other way, speaks a few words of
disapproval and does nothing.”

“Life there is horrendous. You can’t travel, you
have to go through army check points, if you’re sick you have
no hospital access,” Bustany said.

“Yesterday a woman gave birth at an army check point
because they wouldn’t let her through,” he said.

Though current conflicts are the reason most protesters took
time to organize, the beginning of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute
predates even the oldest generation present. Hundreds of years ago,
the area known as Palestine was predominantly Arab.

Christians and Jews were in the minority, and the state existed
as a unified culture with constituents in different houses of
worship.

The presence of Jews in Palestine increased during the late
19th-century Zionist movement, when the exodus of Jews in Europe
left to escape persecution.

The father of the movement, Theodor Herzl, organized the first
world Zionist congress in 1897, a move to better establish Jews in
Palestine, their “Land of Israel.”

“No one blames the Zionist Jews for looking for ways out
of persecution,” Bustany said. “But many Jews ““
including Albert Einstein ““ did not support a Jewish state.
They saw it as a religion.”

After World War I, British imperialism set in and Zionist
establishments flourished as a result of Britain’s promise to
establish a national home in Palestine for Jews.

In 1947, Israel was founded and a United Nations Partition plan
allocated 54 percent of the land to a Jewish state and the rest to
a Palestinian state.

But before the partition plan was implemented, the Gaza Strip
became the site of a civil war, during which Israel fought to
remove British troops from the land.

Israel gained control of West Bank and Gaza, which totaled 20
percent of the land designated to Palestinians.

In 1948, Israel expanded as settlements were plotted, Bustany
said. Some attest that the occupation was a violation of
international law when Israelis began occupying the
settlements.

“No conquering nation may place its citizens in the
occupied territories,” Bustany said. “Israel thumbed
its nose at the world.”

But some Jewish organizations disagree.

“The Palestinian leadership knows well that the
significant achievements in peacemaking ““ including
transferring to Palestinian control all major towns in Gaza and the
West Bank, and 98 percent of the Palestinian population ““
resulted from direct, face-to-face negotiations between Israelis
and Palestinians, not from violence,” Bahat said.

Bustany said many people are unaware about the progression of
events that led up to the present state of upheaval. In his youth,
he was among the blissfully unaware.

“It was 1948, I was 20 years old and the only things I
cared about were school, sports and girls ““ not always in
that order,” he said. “I didn’t know anything
about the Middle East. From the newspapers I was under the
impression Jews and Christian Arabs had always lived in Palestine.
In my ignorance I spent 19 years thinking that.”

And then war broke out in 1967 and the rest of Palestinian lands
fell under Israeli rule.

“It was then I began to learn,” he said.

Protesters said that military rule over the past 50 years is one
of the primary causes of displaced Palestinians who have lost their
homes or farm land.

“They are as cruel to the Palestinians as they are because
they feel guilty for taking their land,” Bustany said.

“It’s a common human trait ““ blame the
victims.”