Alan Peres contends that Israel does not focus excessively on its own security [Israel’s concern for security is justified, Viewpoints, Nov. 20] and that suicide bombings and rocket fire from the Gaza Strip justify Israel’s border wall as a self-defense measure. I agree that Israel isn’t excessively concerned with security. Rather, it’s entirely concerned with seizing all useful land in the West Bank.
A nation focused on the safety of its civilians does not use them to snare land beyond its borders. Nor does it dispossess the land’s indigenous population from villages, orchards and water supply. Approximately 500,000 Israelis occupy territory beyond Israel’s recognized border, and 20,000 new West Bank settler housing units are planned.
Also, a vulnerable country does not sear resentment into its neighbors’ memories by humiliating them at checkpoints, demolishing their homes and letting its settlers torch their crops.
As for Gaza, it is the Palestinians who need greater security. Gaza has no army, navy or air force to challenge Israel’s world-class military machine. And Israel strictly blockades Gaza’s coastline, as the killing of international protesters floating humanitarian aid to Gaza vividly demonstrated.
Israel also controls the Israel-Gaza land border and enforces a “no-go” zone on the Gaza side. Farmers and children have been slain on their own land for approaching the border. When a small militia captured an Israeli soldier in 2006, Israel punished the entire strip with a ground invasion and aerial bombardment (hitting residences and Gaza’s sole power plant). Israel re-invaded in 2008, killing approximately 1,400 Palestinians. Israel’s true Gaza agenda is not security, but ousting Hamas, which won’t accept Israel’s West Bank territorial demands.
Unsurprisingly, the Apartheid Wall faces the West Bank, not Gaza. And it doesn’t adhere to the Green Line that demarcates Israel internationally. As the UN International Court of Justice concluded, the wall illegally annexes almost 17% of the West Bank (including critical water resources. As for the pretext of self-defense, the ICJ found that the wall strands 237,000 additional Palestinians on the Israeli side (but without citizenship rights or freedom of movement). The wall is a land-grab, defining the minimum territory Israel will accept as a state.
Mr. Peres’ dogma is that Palestinians harbor a congenital anti-semitism that periodically explodes in terror, justifying Israeli “self-defense.” For Mr. Peres, Palestinians are defined by the sporadic violence in their resistance to Israel, not by the justness of their aspirations or the hopelessness of their circumstances.
What hypocrisy. Before Israel’s creation, Jewish militias blew up crowded hotels, buses and public places and assassinated, among others, the U.N.’s mediator. Perpetrators of that terror were later elected prime ministers of Israel (Shamir and Begin).
What then defines Israel?
There are many courageous and compassionate Israelis (I’ve been privileged to meet several), who refuse to demonize the Palestinians. They don’t, as Mr. Peres says, “live thousands of miles away” (as Peres does). They are there, using their work, creativity and criticism to craft better solutions to the Israel-Palestine dilemma than violence, tribalism and propaganda.
May they come to define Israel.
David Gilbert is an Oak Park resident and Jewish American.