We have no other land

We sat in a beautiful room, around 50 of us. Jews and Arabs together, as is usual wherever we go these days. It’s our normality, living in a shared and equal society.

We watched the Oscar-winning documentary, ‘I Have No Other Land,’ in the horrified silence it deserves. How many times have I heard from my students, from friends, from colleagues, from Israelis, ‘We’re not the terrorists here. We don’t intentionally murder Arabs.’ Well, my friends, I watched settlers shoot and kill a man who was simply running in the street, trying to defend his home. I watched soldiers (yes, soldiers, those people who are supposed to protect the people who live here) drag women away from their homes, shoot male protestors, push little children down to sit and watch their homes being demolished by bulldozers.

I recently told a friend about a primary school in the West Bank, burned down by settlers. What had the Arabs done to them? she asked. Sensible question. Because that’s what we expect of our Jews. To defend themselves against attack from the Arabs who hate us. And yet in the case of the Palestinians who have lived on this land for generations, it is very much the other way around. The Jews are attacking the Arabs, because they don’t want them ‘taking over’; the army tells them they need the land, it’s to be used for training. These people must leave their homes. But not only leave. Their homes are broken into, smashed, trashed, destroyed, sometimes with live chickens, furniture, full kitchens still inside. They sometimes don’t and usually barely have time to pack up and get out.

And every day, every night, because they rebuild their homes on the land their parents and their parents before them and their parents before them have lived on for hundreds of years, and they are not prepared to give it up, they wait again for the next demolition programme, the next set of teenagers (for isn’t that what these soldiers are?) to come in and tell them they cannot live there anymore.

Not just tell them. Shout at them. Yell. Shoot their guns. Set off grenades. Push and shove and kill. But apparently the Jews are not terrorists. Apparently the Jews are simply defending their land.

It is a good thing not to become a victim. It’s important. We have been persecuted throughout the world for generations, hunted down and killed, butchered, burned, hung, raped, slaughtered in all manner of creative ways. You name it, they’ve done it to the Jews.

But it does not give us the right to become the oppressors.

I had only one feeling when I came out of watching that film. That, in some measure, we brought it on ourselves, 7^th October. That, in some apocalyptic way, we were asking for it. That all this violence could only ever have a terrible ending. Or begin a terrible journey towards a terrible ending. Our country will never be the same again. And that’s partly because of the behaviour of us, the Jews.

I looked around that house as I sat there, a beautiful modern place in Tivon, North Israel, with its own cinema room and comfortable sofas, the abundance of food on the table prepared for our enjoyment. And then I saw the unsteady structures, built afresh, caving in each time the bulldozers came. And then the school, new and shiny, with fresh posters and desks and chairs for the children, being smashed to pieces by the bulldozers, with the villagers asking, ‘But why the school? The school is for our children!’

The children were crying.

Yuval is the co-director of the film; his dream was for Israeli Jews, and the world, to actually see, to watch what has been happening in these villages in the West Bank for years. To see, to watch, to know, to understand, to feel. And then to stop it from happening anymore. How many Israelis turn their heads away from this horror? How many Israelis went to see ‘We Will Dance Again’, the live footage of Hamas and the videos of the Israelis as they were brutally murdered at the Nova party, and yet will not go and see ‘I Have No Other Land’? They will not make the connection between the two, will not understand that the evil of Hamas has,  in some way, been vindicated because of our treatment of the other, of the Arabs, who we promised, in the Declaration of Independence, would be treated equally and justly?

Don’t spout that rubbish to me about Hamas’ charter. That they want to kill all Jews, take over the world. That the way Hamas attacked Israel on the 7^th October was so much more horrific, above and beyond anything we Jews have ever done. I don’t want to hear comparisons. Death compared with death is still death. I’m talking about hatred breeding hatred. I’m talking about Arabs, both Israeli and from the Occupied Territories, being treated like dirt, like objects, worse than animals, even killed, so that Israelis can have control over the Land of Israel, and I’m talking about the fact it is so easy to educate children to hate if all they’ve ever experienced is the hostility and aggression from the other side.

Why do Palestinians join Hamas? Because they want revenge. They are fed up of being treated like the underdog, without protection or hope of change. Why do Palestinians join Hamas? Because they want a different kind of life.

As I have always said, since I understood the complexity of the situation here, there is only one real security for Palestinians and Jews in this land. And it is peace. Hamas does not want peace. It wants us to stay as the enemy; it wants us to fight and destroy and kill. We play directly into its hands. Then it can say, see? They deserve it. They hate us. They have to be annihilated.

But if we prove to the Palestinians – through gaining their trust, through treating them with respect and humility – that we want to work with them, not against them, Hamas will not have anything to support it in its ideology of hatred and revenge. And then it will not have the support of the Palestinians.

In Gaza the morning I started to write this, there were hundreds of people protesting against Hamas, telling them to get out, asking for the war to be stopped. They are hungry. They want peace. They want friendship. They want a different future.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/hundreds-in-gaza-join-rare-protests-against-hamas-rule-call-for-an-end-to-the-war/

A week later it has grown into thousands!

How brave they are, like Yuval and Basel, the directors of ‘I Have No Other Land’, going against the flow, demonstrating against those in power, with the power to destroy, shoot, kill anyone they please.

Peace is more important to them. Even at the risk of death. https://www.timesofisrael.com/gazan-man-murdered-by-hamas-after-joining-protests-against-terror-group/

And it should be more important to us too. Each one of us should be doing all we can right now – from watching this film and talking about it, sending it to friends (because of course Netanyahu has forbidden its screening here in Israel) to going to local demonstrations and national demonstrations. And the little things too, they count. A yellow ribbon here and there. A sign on your car. A Facebook post.

The more were do, the more the Arab Israelis and Palestinians will know, we are NOT our government. We want, we believe in peace.

And when you believe in something, you can make it happen.