Paper, its readers should be aware

I was glad to read that UCLA is having a consciousness-raising
Palestine Awareness Week. Two points are worth mentioning regarding
Monday’s Daily Bruin.

First, Oren Lazar’s submission, “Awareness week
should stress positive progress” (April 12), makes one good
point, but otherwise misses the boat. It is true that there are
both Jews and Arabs in Israel/Palestine who are working
cooperatively for peace, and it is important that people understand
this. Anyone who does not should visit the Web sites of Gush Shalom
and the Refuseniks’ Combatant Letter.

However, Lazar, like most direct and indirect apologists for
Israel, finds fault with Israel’s critics, but not with the
Israeli government. He suggests a focus on art and culture but
prefers to ignore the vandalism by the Israeli Defense Forces of
the Palestinian Ministry of Culture offices in Ramallah. American
Jewish friends who went there tell me that vandalism included
throwing red paint on children’s pictures, shooting of
computers and video equipment, and defecation in desk drawers.

How can we speak of “positive progress” when we look
at the home and crop destruction, the number of deaths and injuries
on both sides, and the wall which is designed to scoop up
Palestinian land, separate Palestinians from each other and natural
resources, and legitimize settlements?

Lazar refers to the Palestine Right to Return Coalition
(Al-Awda) as “a radical group focused on maintaining one of
the greatest obstacles to a peace agreement between Israel and the
Palestinians.” The right to return to your land, once
hostilities are over, is guaranteed by the fourth Geneva
Convention. On what basis, other than racism, should Palestinians
be excluded? Readers should visit the Al-Awda Web site and decide
for themselves whether this is a “radical” group, or
whether it is the Israeli government and its apologists who are the
radicals.

My second point is that Dmitri Pikman’s article
“Palestine Awareness Week kicks off today” (News, April
12) is good, solid reporting with one minor issue: He writes of the
plan by protesters to stand beside a wall, and build a wall out of
cardboard boxes, but when he refers to the wall that Israel is
building, he adopts the Israeli government’s spin and calls
it a “security fence.”

This structure is, over most of its span, a wall by any
definition. It has the same function, in some senses, as the Berlin
Wall. It segregates a population and prevents free movement.
Moreover, if the wall was really being built for
“security,” Israel would build it on its own territory,
inside Israel’s 1967 border.

This wall sweeps into the West Bank, destroying homes and crops
in its path, separating growers from their crops, separating
Palestinians from one another, encompassing water aquifers, and so
on. It is not designed for security, and it will not result in
security.

In my view, without Washington’s “help,”
providing tanks, helicopters and vetoes against criticism of
Israel, the Israelis and Palestinians would have come to a peaceful
agreement long ago. We have been doing things Washington’s
way for a long time, and the result is continuing violence,
increasing injustice and growing numbers of people worldwide who
resent the United States. We need to get our leaders on a new path,
or we need new leaders.

Clark is a staff member at Duke University.