Letter to the Editor
By Daily Bruin Staff
March 2, 2006 9:00 p.m.
Editor’s note: This post was updated on April 22, 2025, at 5:48 p.m. to provide retroactive anonymity to the author due to safety concerns.
Dialogue is futile without equality
Students for Justice in Palestine endorses any attempt to open
dialogue between Palestinians and Israelis (“Alum proposes
Israeli-Palestinian union,” News, Feb. 27).
The idea of Josef Avesar’s Israeli-Palestinian
Confederation is a positive step and offers hope.
But it is an ideal unattainable when you have a supposed
“democracy” violating the International Human Rights
Declaration as well as the Geneva Fourth Convention simultaneously
and without regard for the trauma that has taken root in the hearts
of the Palestinian people.
Their imprisonment in the West Bank is due to the barrier Israel
has established. Israel clearly no longer believes in negotiations
if it is going to jail an entire population, crippling its economy
and well-being.
As long as the apartheid wall remains standing, Israel is
rejecting any attempt to begin dialogue.
Instead, Israel simply points its finger at the Palestinian
population that has now resorted to the democratically-elected
Hamas.
As long as the Israeli government continues to exploit,
massacre, dehumanize and abuse the Palestinian people, nothing will
be accomplished except an exchange of empty words and,
unfortunately, some bullets.
Israeli dialogue has had no meaning to the Palestinian people,
especially as thousands have died since Ariel Sharon instigated the
second Intifada almost six years ago.
To the Israeli government, Palestinians are not considered
equals who can participate in such a confederation.
Nothing can be accomplished through the hateful destruction of a
government. Hopefully such a confederation would instill far more
clearheaded and rational beings than those now positioned in the
Israeli government.
Signed by a first-year English student and member of Students for Justice in Palestine, who was granted retroactive anonymity because of safety concerns.
