Cartoon Missed Heart of Issues in Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
By Elizabeth Moker
Contributing Writer

In the cartoon he drew for last week’s opinions section, Nathan Fisher criticizes Californians who avoid taking sides on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (“Neither side is right,” “Everyone’s acting so silly,” and “It’s easy to make an uniformed statement”), when it is clear that “only one side accepts billions in US aid and domestic tax $ to fund filthy, filthy colonialism.” Fisher (and others who criticize Israel’s current military politics) has a point; Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s hawkish government is harsh toward the Palestinians and sympathetic toward settler extremists.

However, Israeli politics have not evolved in a vacuum, and I would like to suggest that the Palestinians are in part to blame for the current right-wing government. The Israeli people have elected dovish political leaders in the past (lest we forget Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak) and have made sincere attempts at peace; yet they have found the Palestinian Authority and people to be unresponsive. After the proposed peace settlement of 2000 was rejected by Palestinian leadership and terrorism worsened, further concessions made by the Israeli government would have been interpreted as rewarding terrorism. The Israeli people have come to believe that these moderate political leaders cannot ensure safety, and that no peace treaty will truly be accepted by the Palestinians so as to end the endless hostility. In their terms, they feel that they have no “partner for peace.”

It is no surprise, then, that the Israeli people have elected a political leader with a strong hand and little vision for peace. The Palestinians have responded to Sharon’s policies by increasing terrorism, which, in turn, has increased support for Sharon (and some even more intransigent leaders). My family and friends in Israel, who for years have been active in peace movements, have begun to lose heart; they say they can no longer see how peace is possible, that the left is becoming increasingly unpopular as more Israelis begin to believe (with Sharon) that, to the Palestinians, nothing short of destroying Israel will end the violence. Thus, while many people in the US as well as in Israel agree that Sharon’s policies leave a lot to be desired, to say that it is easy to choose sides shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how complicated this issue really is.