At the recent Wendell annual Town Meeting, I prepared a statement in support of Article 27: Resolution Declaring the Town of Wendell to be an Apartheid-Free Community. Because it was overlong, I was encouraged to curtail my comments. Below is what I would have liked to have said:
I hope to speak here with respect and compassion for my fellow Wendell citizens. It is a privilege to live in a place where we know one another, help one another, and participate in true democracy, together.
I know that some of my Wendell neighbors are afraid that this resolution, if passed by our community, will possibly result in greater antisemitism. Some have said they fear for their own personal safety as hate crimes in general, and antisemitic-fueled crimes are on the rise. Some say that there are people who will conflate criticism of the state of Israel to be justified criticism of all Judaism.
Many other Jewish people tell me they do not agree with this point of view. They feel that the Israeli government’s actions make them less safe; that the excesses of violence and cruelty inflicted on the Palestinian people still living in Gaza and the West Bank, by the Israeli government — and supported by billions of our taxpayer money — that these criminal actions trigger more hatred and a desire for vengeance… that is, that the never-ending spiral of violence begets more violence.
I also strongly disagree with not criticizing the state of Israel. Decades of squelching criticism of Israel has resulted in the relative lack of awareness of Americans as to the history and context of Israeli occupation and domination of Palestinians and Palestinian lands and resources. Without the U.S. condemning Israel’s actions, and with no loss of U.S. financial support, Israel has been given a green light to escalate their destruction, and theft, of Palestinian land, infrastructure and resources, and now to have escalated their violence toward Palestinian civilians to the point which genocide scholars say that this is a genocide.
But, we are not here to condemn genocide. We are here to discuss whether we, as a community, want to stop supporting an apartheid system. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the Israeli human rights group Bet’selem, and many others have declared Israel to be an apartheid state, which is deemed a crime against humanity by the U.N. Apartheid Convention. In 2014, South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu said “I know first-hand that Israel has created an apartheid reality within its borders and through its occupation. The parallels to my own beloved South Africa are painfully stark indeed.” Apartheid has been carefully defined and documented. Many Americans do not know about the elaborate system of control, institutionalized over the occupied Palestinian people, and that it more than meets the definition of apartheid.
Israel has instituted a comprehensive apartheid system, where Palestinians are not afforded the same rights as Israeli citizens, codifying into law, separateness based on identity. Being Muslim determines where one can live and work. Villages are cut off from other villages, sometimes villages themselves split in two. The entire West Bank is carved up by an elaborate system of Israeli-only roads and highways, military installations, and illegal settlements. Twenty-foot tall walls ensure that Palestinians enclosed within — in what many describe as “an open air prison” — are denied freedom of movement. Identity documents must be carried at all times and presented at endless checkpoints. A daily humiliation and often flashpoints of danger, there are checkpoint lines to travel to work, to get to a hospital, or even in some cases, to access one’s own property. Apartheid denies one group of people access to land, schools, protection from violence, while also denying political rights, denying equality, liberty, and justice under law. For instance, thousands of Palestinians are being held in “administrative detention” in prisons without charges, for weeks, months, or years.
So while I have deep compassion for my friends and neighbors who express real feelings of fear, I hold, next to their fear, the daily, realized fear that Palestinians live with every day: the bombs that continue to fall despite a supposed cease-fire, the targeted killing of children, aid workers, doctors, ambulance drivers, other medical workers, journalists — it must stop. This pledge is a modest effort to possibly add to the cascading efforts to move our country to stop fueling this madness and cruelty.
Laura Doughty lives in Wendell.