Supporting Palestinian Rights Is Not Anti-Semitic!
Dear Editor,
New Paltz Women in Black holds a vigil every Saturday on Main Street in front of Elting Library, from 12:45 to 1:30. We stand for an end to all kinds of racism, including anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and white nationalism; for protection of the environment; for women’s equal rights, including the right to choose abortion; for LBGTQI equality; against U.S. militarism and bullying of countries around the world (and our 800 bases in 70 countries); and for human rights over private profit everywhere.
This includes Palestine and Israel, where the indigenous Palestinian population has been and still is being driven from its homes and lands, subjected to second-class citizenship, and oppressed by a brutal, degrading occupation that has lasted 73 years, not to mention Israel’s criminal blockade of Gaza, now in its 13th year.
International law recognizes the right of an occupied people to resist—if the Palestinians stopped resisting they would disappear as a people overnight. It does not recognize the right of the occupying force—Israel—to steal Palestinian lands and homes and resources, build Jews-only settlements on occupied land, refuse to vaccinate the occupied population against Covid-19—in effect, to try to eradicate the Palestinian people.
Were you shocked by the Tulsa Massacre of 1921, which wiped out an African-American neighborhood? Israel carried out such massacres on 500 villages in Palestine in 1948, killing thousands and expelling 750,000 people from their homes; and it continues to destroy Palestinian villages and neighborhoods throughout the region.
Do you think redlining and discriminatory mortgage practices to prevent racial integration in the U.S. were deplorable? In Israel and in the occupied West Bank, the Israeli government builds homes that can only be occupied by Jews. Because of these settlements, the dream of a two-state solution is dead. If you read the daily newspapers you can see that the current unrest was ignited by Israel’s evictions of Palestinians from homes in Jerusalem where their families have lived for generations, turning those homes over to Jews from Brooklyn.
Do you believe in religious freedom and separation of church and state? Israel invades mosques and other holy sites at will.
Do you believe that all people should have equal rights? In Israel, the law guarantees the right of self-determination only to Jews.
Israel’s right to exist is not being threatened. It has accords with all the major Arab countries, and enjoys a lively trade with them and with the rest of the world, giving Israelis the highest standard of living in the region.
But the right to exist of the Palestinians is at serious risk. Should they just shut up and submit to another 73 years of occupation, ethnic cleansing, and degradation?
Until Palestinian refugees have the right to return to the land of their birth, there can never be peace. The refugees of 1948 and 1967, and their descendants, still living in squalid refugee camps throughout the region, must be allowed to go home.
Israel’s systematic violations of Palestinian human rights must be called by the correct name—apartheid. The whole world can see this. Israel claims to speak for all Jews everywhere, but it does not speak for us, or for the increasing number of American Jews who reject Israeli human rights abuses and stand up for the rights of Palestinians.
Naomi Allen