Jonathan Kraft

It’s all about how you see it. To some, the way to deal with the “Palestinian problem” is to wall the problem off, to have the Palestinian people “deal with themselves.” Part of this justification comes from security. Because terrorist attacks inside Israel proper have all but stopped since the erection of the Security Barrier, the facts on the ground speak for themselves. Segregation is necessary to protect Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

But to others, this is a false solution. To build a giant barrier in order to pretend that the problems on the other side do not exist is not acceptable. To forcibly enclose Palestinians inside a concrete barrier, in a place where living conditions are substandard at best, third-world at worst, is no better than what the Nazis did to the Jews in Warsaw, Lodz, Auschwitz.

So what, the other side would respond. Israel must concern itself with its own security first. Israel certainly has no obligation to support the Palestinians, the very people who are trying to kill us! Why should we care that they are incapable of building a viable state? It’s their own ineptitude and greed which leaves them in such a position.

The answer, the other side would respond, is two-fold. Number one, Israel is an occupying power. Regardless of the religious argument that Eretz Yisrael includes Judea and Samaria, and the entirety of the land from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, or of the nationalistic argument, that Israel won this land in the 1967 war, and if America isn’t giving back Texas to Mexico, why should Israel give back the West Bank to the Palestinians, Israel maintains a military occupation over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. To frustrate the lives of those under this occupation by hampering freedom of movement, obstructing the building of the Palestinian economy through trade restrictions and bureaucratic red tape and by not allowing the Palestinian government to function as an autonomous body, is a failure of the obligation of a democratic state to provide basic human rights to those under its auspices.

The second argument is a more complex one. Instead of simply walling ourselves off, why don’t we try and build trust with the other side? After all, we are all human beings, and cousins, really, when one considers how both Issac and Ishmael came from Abraham. Rather than leave the West Bank and Gaza to rot in the sun, Israel should support every initiative to build up the infrastructure and economy of the Palestinian territories in order to help create a viable, peaceful state. People who have jobs, who have basic human services such as regular garbage collection and plenty of clean water, who have a sense of pride in their well-functioning government, these are people who will not fire rockets into Israel, who will not sacrifice their bodies to kill club-goers in Tel Aviv or Haifa. These are not people who will take the radical step of voting for Hamas just because the services they will provide are that much less awful than those provided by the Palestinian Authority.

But unfortunately, this is not the state that the West Bank and Gaza find themselves in. Unemployment is very, very high, 25% in the West Bank and close to 50% in Gaza, with unemployment rates among young men disproportionately high. When people are, in fact, employed, they are generally underemployed, earning far less than they should. The amount of doctorate degrees per capita is among the highest in the world in the Palestinian territories, yet it is rockets, and not computers, which are exported. Promising developments do occur, as we learned recently on a trip to the region’s headquarters of the World Bank, but not frequently enough, because it is difficult to do anything in a place that is occupied by another.

The other side might listen to this argument, perhaps for the entirety of it, more likely not, but would be quick with a response in either case. How can we trust these people? These people want to kill us! They want to return to Israel and multiply in numbers so great that we are no longer a Jewish state! And, more than anything, they…are…Arab. You never trust an Arab!

Such blatant racism seems ridiculous, but I can promise that it is rampant here, even among some in the mainstream. There are valid points that are brought up here, though. How can an Israeli trust a Palestinian when it is the Palestinians who started the Intifada? And how can a Palestinian trust an Israeli when it is the Israelis who ransack (and sometimes bulldoze) their houses in seemingly random fashion?

So, then, solving the conflict is a matter of building trust, this much is clear. But when each side of the conflict has elements that are completely unwilling to bend, even a little, such trust seems very far away.