Palestinian and Jew join to protest Israeli actions
04/07/2002
BY KAREN LEE ZINER
Journal Staff Writer
PROVIDENCE — Brown University sophomore Lara Harb is a Palestinian. Last week, she learned, her father spent five days trapped in the Ramallah hospital where he works. Israeli soldiers on a raid interrupted him during surgery, and shoved him to the floor.
The soldiers “were interrogating the wounded — they were looking for people,” Harb said. They sacked computers, her father told her, and “stole all the hard drives with patient documents.”
Zina Miller, a Brown senior, describes herself as “the daughter and granddaughter of Zionists from way back.” She said her grandfather smuggled Jews into Palestine before Israel was founded.
Last Wednesday, Harb and Miller, Palestinian and Jew, united to protest Israeli actions in the West Bank. On the campus green, they and half a dozen other friends pounded signs demanding an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
Harb called it “a cry of help for the Palestinians.”
“Occupation is when your house may be demolished for ‘security reasons,’ ” one sign said. “We see the only solution as being the end of the occupation,” said another.
The signs compared death tolls of Israelis and Palestinians in the past 18 months — by those accounts, the Palestinians have suffered 1,200 fatalities, and Israel, 352.
The placards, posted for two days, also condemned suicide bombings.
“We feel that especially in the States, America is blindly supporting Israel and holding Arafat responsible for everything that is going on, which I find ridiculous,” said Harb.
“The Israeli violence is a million times more violent than the Palestinian violence,” Harb added. “. . . The more Israel invades and occupies and violates the basic rights of Palestinians, then Palestinians are not just going to accept an occupation by force.”
The response?
“A lot of people have come up and congratulated us and supported us. A lot of people expressed that they think the American media doesn’t show all this stuff, and that something like this does make people think and question.”
But Harb said some people found the signs offensive.
While they were putting the signs up, a man swore and spit at them, she said. Another sign was “torn to bits and pieces.”
Those who took offense found the signs “suggestive that Israel is the bad guy,” said Harb, “but in fact, with what’s happening now, Israel is the bad guy. It’s occupying. It is violating the human rights of Palestinians.”
Miller, whose senior thesis is on “the failure of the peace process in Israel, and creating a more sustainable peace process,” got involved in the protest with her friend, Harb, because she opposes the occupation.
“I am shocked and appalled and just unable to support what the state (of Israel) is doing right now,” said Miller. “It’s an illegal occupation and violation of the human rights of the Palestinians.”
She feels torn, she said, “being Jewish and dealing with these things . . . but my point of view, is that the Israel that I was brought up to love and support in many different ways is not a state that would perpetrate these kinds of actions, and these types of human-rights violations.”
Miller advocates United Nations intervention at this time. “I don’t think that the parties that are participating right now can sort it out for themselves.”
Raised on Israeli politics in a family where “the need for a Jewish state was never questioned,” Miller said she believes in a Jewish state, but “I also believe in a Palestinian state. I think the history is a series of repeated faults on both sides. It’s very complex and not reducible to the black and white issues that people try to reduce it to.”
Other students involved included three members of the Brown Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and three other international students.
Harb, who has been in phone contact with her family, said her father eventually made his way home after being trapped for five days. The house is one mile from the hospital where he had been trapped.
But now, “my parents are stuck in the house,” she said. “Even ambulances are getting shot at. Anything that moves is getting shot at. People are running out of food, literally.” The Israelis have shelled water pipes and “parts of the city are without water.”
Online at: https://www.projo.com/news/content/projo_20020407_brown7.343607d0.html