FAQ

What does it mean to say that Palestinians live under military occupation?

What are Israeli settlements and why are they important?

Who are the Palestinian refugees and why are they important?

Isn't Israel the only democracy in the Middle East?

Hasn't Israel sought a peaceful solution through negotiations?

What about the suicide bombings against Israelis?

Lots of countries violate human rights. Why single out Israel?

Aren't you being anti-Semitic?

What does it mean to say that Palestinians live under military occupation? [top]

In the June 1967 war, Israel attacked its neighbors, and conquered the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. These are Palestinian areas that had previously been under Jordanian and Egyptian rule. All these areas remain under Israeli military occupation to this day, in direct violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 of 1967. This resolution emphasized the "inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war" and called for "withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict."

Today 3.3 million Palestinians live under military occupation. They have no citizenship, no civil rights, and no political rights. The Israeli military government controls their daily lives through a system of military checkpoints, color-coded identity cards and license plates, and often arbitrary closures and curfews. As in apartheid South Africa, the Israeli authorities require Palestinians to obtain permits to move, to work, and to build, subjecting their lives to the whims of Israeli military officials. Palestinians are subjected to torture, imprisonment without charge or trial, land confiscations, house demolitions, and a variety of collective punishments. The Israeli army routinely uses excessive force against peaceful Palestinian demonstrators, targets Palestinian ambulances and medical personnel, and assassinates Palestinian leaders.

All this is well-documented in the reports of leading international human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and Israel's B'Tselem. It is also in clear violation of international humanitarian law, particularly the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, also known as the Fourth Geneva Convention. This 1949 treaty, which Israel has signed, requires the occupying power to protect the human rights of the civilian population under its control. The convention applies even during wartime, so Israel cannot use the excuse that it's involved in a conflict to evade its human rights obligations.

What are Israeli settlements and why are they important? [top]

After Israel conquered the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in 1967, it embarked on a massive campaign to confiscate Palestinian land and construct Jewish-only settlements there. Today, some 400,000 Israelis live in over 150 settlements in these areas. Settlement construction has consistently been among Israel's highest priorities, consuming a significant portion of the budget regardless of whether Labor or Likud was in power, and continuing apace throughout the period of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and until today. The settlements are not "natural" population centers -- the government builds the settlements first, then uses generous subsidies to induce Jewish Israelis to move there. The settlements are connected to each other and to Israel by a network of high-quality roads which only Jews can use. Settlers living in the occupied territories are not subject to the Israeli military government, and enjoy the full rights of Israeli citizens.

Israel's settlement program aims to create "facts on the ground" which will solidify Israeli control over the occupied areas and make it more difficult for Israel to give them up as part of a negotiated solution to the conflict. For this reason, successive U.S. administrations have condemned settlements as an "obstacle to peace," though unfortunately none have conditioned U.S. aid to Israel on halting settlement construction. Israel's colonial intentions were clearly manifested in its negotiations with the Palestinians, when the Israeli side consistently refused to dismantle any of the major settlements as part of a land-for-peace deal, all the while continuing to expand the settlements. The settlements are illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention, which plainly states that "[t]he Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies" (Art. 49).

Who are the Palestinian refugees and why are they important? [top]

Palestinians are the indigenous people of Palestine. During the 1948 war, 700,000 Palestinians were driven out of the part of Palestine on which Israel was then established. Zionist forces expelled many Palestinians from their towns and villages at gunpoint. Other Palestinians fled in panic at Zionist attacks or because of the climate of fear created by deliberate Zionist massacres of civilians. The newly-established state of Israel then closed its borders to prevent the refugees' return, razed over 400 Palestinian villages, and confiscated the refugees' land and property for use by Jewish immigrants. Israel's supporters claim that all the Palestinians fled voluntarily, but even if this were true Israel would still bear responsibility for the refugee problem, because it forbade their return and took their property. Either way, the 1948 war is a clear-cut case of ethnic cleansing.

United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194 of 1948 affirms the right of Palestinians to return to their homes and lands, and to receive compensation for any losses incurred. Israel has refused to recognize or implement this resolution, even during the negotiating process. Israel prefers to perpetuate the current situation, in which it gets all the land with none of the people, and doesn't have to pay compensation to those it dispossessed. Today the Palestinian refugees number 4 million and make up over half of the entire Palestinian population worldwide. Many lack citizenship in the countries where they reside, and over 1 million live in poverty-stricken refugee camps in the countries and territories around Israel. The Palestinian refugee problem is the world's oldest unresolved refugee problem, and resolving it within the framework of international law is essential to achieving a just peace in the region.

Isn't Israel the only democracy in the Middle East? [top]

Israel is a democracy for Jews only, the same way apartheid South Africa was a democracy for whites only. As explained above, there's no democracy for the 3.3 million Palestinians who live under Israeli military occupation. On top of this, the 1 million Palestinian citizens of Israel (nearly 20% of the country's population) face rampant institutionalized discrimination. Israel defines itself as a "Jewish state," and political parties that call for complete equality for minorities can be disqualified. For the first 18 years of Israel's history, from 1948-1966, Palestinian citizens were placed under military rule. Arabic-language publications are subject to special censorship rules. No Palestinian party has ever been included in any coalition government in Israel.

Nowhere is the racism toward Palestinian citizens clearer than in the Israeli government's land policies. The government has confiscated 80% of all land owned by its Palestinian citizens and continues to establish Jewish-only towns without providing parallel ones for Palestinians. 93% of all land in Israel is controlled by the government and reserved exclusively for Jewish use. The government systematically allocates more funding per capita to Jewish localities than to Palestinian ones, with many Palestinian villages receiving absolutely no municipal services (schools, electricity, running water, etc.). These are just some of the ways Palestinian citizens of Israel are rendered second-class citizens in their own country, separate and unequal. Democracy and institutionalized racism don't mix, and Israel can't claim to be a democracy when its citizens don't have equal rights.

Hasn't Israel sought a peaceful solution through negotiations? [top]

While all Palestinians and Israelis want peace, they do not agree on its meaning. There is an international consensus on peace in the Middle East that has been consistently expressed in international law, in countless United Nations resolutions, and in the policies of nearly all governments except the United States. This consensus calls for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem as its capital, compensation for Palestinian refugees, and dismantling of Israeli settlements. For decades, the Palestinian national movement has embraced this vision as the best way to realize the Palestinian goals of freedom, security, and self-determination. Unfortunately, the Israeli government has consistently rejected it.

For a long time, Israel refused to negotiate with Palestinians, branded all Palestinian leaders as terrorists, and vowed that a Palestinian state would never come into being. Only after a series of major unilateral concessions by the Palestinian side did Israel reluctantly agree to come to the negotiating table. Once there, it rejected the application of international law and sought to use the negotiations, and its superior bargaining position, to consolidate its control over the occupied territories. It refused to dismantle the largest settlements, or to share Jerusalem meaningfully, or to provide compensation to the Palestinian refugees. Its territorial proposals would keep Palestinians confined to isolated enclaves that could be shut down at Israel's whim. In effect, Israel offered the Palestinians a state in name only. That is why we say that Israel has refused to negotiate in good faith, and that Palestinians await a true partner for peace.

What about the suicide bombings against Israelis? [top]

We condemn all attacks on civilians unequivocally. They are abhorrent and unjustified and their perpetrators should be brought to justice. In this context, it's relevant that the number of Palestinians killed during the current intifada is over 2.5 times greater than the number of Israelis killed. Most of the Palestinian deaths result from disproportionate use of force by the Israeli military and carelessness in protecting innocent bystanders from harm. For example, in one Israeli assassination attempt against a Palestinian activist, an Israeli F-16 dropped a one-ton bomb on a crowded residential neighborhood of Gaza City, killing 15 people (including nine children) and wounding 80 others. Israeli soldiers have shot dead Palestinians for violating the paralyzing Israeli-imposed curfews on their towns and villages, and have killed Palestinian civilians inside their homes. Other Palestinians were killed when Israeli forces deliberately targeted Palestinian ambulances. The number of innocent Palestinian civilians killed by the Israeli military far outnumbers the number of Israeli civilians killed by Palestinian suicide bombers.

As Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have repeatedly pointed out, the fact that individual Palestinians commit atrocities like suicide bombings does not negate Palestinian human rights. A Palestinian does not lose her right to vote or to own property or to move freely just because some other Palestinian commits a crime. Israel can't use the suicide bombings to justify its denials of Palestinian rights or its illegal occupation, confiscation and settlement of Palestinian land. To say that suicide bombings justify collective punishment of Palestinians is like saying that the entire Stanford community deserves to be punished whenever any Stanford-affiliated individual commits a crime, however heinous it may be. Nor can Israel use the bombings to excuse Israeli violations that predate the suicide bombing phenomenon, such as the expulsion of Palestinians in 1948, the military occupation since 1967, and Israeli intransigence at the negotiating table. Fixating on suicide bombings and ignoring the bigger picture obscures the real issues that lie at the heart of the conflict.

Lots of countries violate human rights. Why single out Israel? [top]

We're not singling out Israel. We think Israel should be held to the same standards of human rights and democracy as everyone else, not placed on a pedestal and exempted from scrutiny. There are plenty of groups that raise awareness about human rights violations and political repression by various regimes all around the world. We're one of those groups. If some people feel that other countries' human rights violations deserve more attention than Israel's, they're welcome to raise awareness on those issues. But the fact that other governments behave badly doesn't justify Israel's continued wrongdoing, or provide a reason to turn a blind eye to it.

That said, there are good reasons why we as Americans should scrutinize Israel's policies. First, the United States plays an active role in supporting Israeli human rights violations. In addition to U.S. military and political support, Israel receives nearly one-third of all U.S. foreign aid -- more than all of Africa combined -- even though Israel is a small country with one of the world's highest per-capita incomes. Unfortunately, the United States fails to use its influence to get the Israeli government to respect human rights or to bring about a negotiated solution to the conflict.

Second, there's a wide gap between the public misconception of Israel as a peace-loving democracy and the reality of Israeli military occupation, colonial settlement, institutionalized discrimination, ethnic cleansing, and acquisition of land by force. This gap doesn't exist with other human rights-violating regimes. Nobody believes that, say, China or Saudi Arabia are democracies that respect human rights, yet people do seem to believe this about Israel. We think that correcting this misunderstanding will help bring a just peace to the region.

Aren't you being anti-Semitic? [top]

No. It's hard to see how advocating for human rights and against racism could possibly be anti-Semitic. Our efforts are directed against the policies of the Israeli government, not against Jews or Judaism. Many of us are Jews, and our activities support those working in Israel and elsewhere to end violence and injustice in the Middle East, in the best interests of both Israelis and Palestinians. Unfortunately, many supporters of Israel are quick to slander as anti-Semitic anyone who dares criticize the Israeli government, even when this criticism is based on human rights treaties that Israel itself has signed. Such tactics aim to stifle debate and deflect attention away from the real issues.