This week Columbia students will once again be subjected to the uninvited—yet ever-present and monotonous—propaganda of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This week, the Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine will promote its Right to Education Week, the focus of which will not be education, but the distortion and mischaracterization of Israeli security against terrorism as a system of oppression against Palestinians. Those of you familiar with the back-and-forth swinging of the pendulum between the two sides on campus may be surprised to find that, this time, one of the sides will be taking a different approach to the debate.
The discussion on campus has fundamentally shifted in the last two years—in that it simply no longer exists. The two sides cannot be aptly described as pro-Israel vis-à-vis pro-Palestine. Rather, the dichotomy has become pro-Israel versus anti-Israel. When one side promotes dialogue, conversation, and mutual recognition, and the other side preaches occupation, oppression, and apartheid, there is a clear disparity of issues and a break in the direction of the discussion. The two sides are no longer parallel in path. I could bore you with a lengthy diatribe of facts and figures, but I propose a different way of determining this new dichotomy: Ask members of C-SJP a series of questions.
Ask them if they support a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with two states for two peoples, living in peace and security and full mutual recognition. Ask them if they support the establishment of a Palestinian state, a Palestine as an independent, democratic state side-by-side with Israel. Ask them if they accept the legitimacy of systematic historic resolutions and declarations calling for the creation of two states for two peoples, such as the 1937 British Peel Commission, the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan, and the 1993 Oslo Accords. Ask them if the majority of Palestinians living in Israel, some who identify as Israeli-Arab, would prefer to live in a State of Palestine over the State of Israel. Ask them if Jews would be permitted to live in a State of Palestine. Ask them if they are referring to 1948 or 1967 when they say “occupation.” Ask them if they denounce Hamas and Hezbollah, two internationally recognized terrorist organizations—both have American, Israeli, and even Palestinian blood on their hands, both have stated unequivocally their wish to obliterate Israel, and both have threatened Jews around the world. Ask them if they will recognize the State of Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people, as the land where Jews the world over have a shared history, language, culture, and religion. Ask them why the Palestinian Authority continuously rejects engaging in direct negotiations with Israel to reach peace. Ask them.
