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Tuesday, November 14, 2023
Volume 161 No. 36 WWW.SJSUNEWS.COM/SPARTAN_DAILY
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DOMINIQUE HUBER | SPARTAN DAILY
Economist Salem Ajluni speaks at the San José Peace and Justice Center panel event about the Israel-Hamas conflict and potential solutions held in its office on Thursday evening.
SJ talks Israel-Hamas conflict By Dominique Huber SENIOR STAFF WRITER
The San José Peace and Justice Center hosted a panel of speakers to discuss the context and root causes of the IsraelHamas conflict on Nov. 9 in its office on Seventh Street. The panel of speakers included Wendy Greenfield, Salem Ajluni, Donna Wallach and Sharat G. Lin, all of whom have personal and professional connections to Palestine and Israel. “We really need to understand the full context of this so that the statements that are being made by our government and also by a lot of the media are not taken out of context,” said Sharat G. Lin, a political economist and expert on the Middle East. On Oct. 7, Palestinian armed groups fired at southern and central Israel, and breached blockaded areas, killing and capturing Israeli civilians in small towns, after which the Israeli military retaliated with bombings on the Gaza Strip, according to one United Nations webpage. One of the Palestinian armed groups was Hamas, an Islamic-Palestinian group that currently rules Gaza, committed to the destruction of Israel and is considered a terrorist group by the United Kingdom, the United States and many other countries, according to a Nov. 3 article from the BBC. Salem Ajluni, a Palestinian-American, said he spent five years in Gaza as an economist for the United Nations and that there have been uniquely heightened tensions in Gaza for decades. “I visited Palestine for the first time in the mid ’80s and going to Gaza was always . . . kind of an adventure, but also kind of a dangerous thing because everybody knew that the levels of tension in the air were always greater in Gaza,” Ajluni said. He said one factor behind the intensity of conflicts in Gaza is the demographics of the area. Seventy percent of Gaza’s population is made up of refugees, most of whom are descendants of Palestinians, according to a United Nations webpage. “Because Gaza is overwhelmingly refugee, that means they’re overwhelmingly dispossessed, poor and working class,” Ajluni said. Ajluni said this creates an environment that is prone to higher tensions between the Palestinian refugees and the Israeli authorities. Donna Wallach, a Jewish activist from
the 2008 Free Gaza Movement, said she was in Gaza at the time of a siege in 2002 when Israeli occupation forces arrived in tanks and damaged infrastructure, homes, businesses and government offices in the area. “They urinated and shat in the government offices and in people’s houses, and when they did invade people's Palestinian homes, they stole their money and the other valuables,” Wallach said. “They also wrote in marker pens really racist comments on the walls.” This is one of the many stories she told describing what she said were Israeli acts of abuse against Palestinians that she witnessed or heard of during her 19 years living in Palestine.
We really need to understand the full context of this so that the statements that are being made by our government and also by a lot of the media are not taken out of context. Sharat G. Lin
political economist
Wallach said the Israeli government spread a narrative about Palestinians that not only spurred a lot of racism against them, but also made a lot of Israelis fear them. “Most Israelis are terrified of Palestinians and believe what the Israeli government tells them, that the Palestinians and all Arabs wanna kill them and push them into the sea,” Wallach said. Wallach said as a Jewish person with Israeli citizenship, she was always treated with kindness, generosity and love by Palestinian people. “Palestinians do not hate Jews,” Wallach said. “I was always warmly welcomed, even though I had more rights than they did.” Lin said Israel has the right to defend itself. “If Israel, in fact, is actually attacked and that attack is the starting point of a conflict, then that would be the basis for saying that a country has the right to
defend itself,” Lin said. “But what about Palestine? Palestine has been under assault, Palestinian people have been under assault for 70-some years.” Lin said there is good reason to believe that what Israel is doing is genocide. Genocide is the mass harming and killing of a group of people of a certain ethnicity, race, religion or nation with the intent of getting rid of them completely, according to a United Nations webpage. Lin said considering the recent Israeli attacks on Gaza ambulances, hospitals, water supplies and residential areas, as well as their use of white phosphorus bombs, it is clear that the intent is to harm and kill people of a certain ethnicity, Palestinians. “The only reason for using white phosphorus is not the damage that it does to buildings, it is that when it touches a human being, it burns through your skin to the bone. It does not heal. It is an antipersonnel weapon,” Lin said. Wendy Greenfield, a representative from the Jewish Voice for Peace in the South Bay Chapter, said the idea that people who are anti-Israel are automatically anti-semitic is incorrect and has been used to squash criticism of Israel’s actions and policies. Zionism is a political movement based on the idea that the only solution to anti-semitism is for Jewish people to establish a Jewish state in Palestine/Israel, according to the University of Michigan College of Literature, Science and the Arts. She said considering the long history of discrimination Jewish people have faced, it is understandable to want a safe haven that is solely for them. However, Greenfield said, Israel has not done a good job of being a safe haven, which she said is clear from its arms industry and the size of its military. Greenfield said the most important thing is for people in the United States to put their differences aside and work in solidarity against Israel’s acts of violence. “This is an important issue for all of us to work on,” Greenfield said. “All of us as U.S. citizens who are sending our tax dollars to make all of these abominations happen – and really without U.S. support – they would not happen. They just would not happen.” Follow the Spartan Daily on X (formerly Twitter) @SpartanDaily