The following column is the first of two and takes a look at the Israeli point of view of the conflict in the Middle East. Next week’s column will deal with the Palestinian cause.
Speech sophomore David Cohen was once an Israeli soldier. He left Northwestern after freshman year to go back to Israel to serve a two-year stint in the West Bank. While he was trying not to get shot, I was here in Evanston, complaining about classes and sleeping most of the time.
Cohen went into the Israeli army on Aug. 1, 2000, about two months before the second intifada began. But he left the army a year short of completing his three-year duty because officials said he had an “inappropriate mindset.”
“Just like all the other people who’ve died in the last two years — I would just be another number, the lead in the news that so and so got killed, and I would just think about that while on guard duty.”
Sadly, Cohen is right. He would have been just another casualty in this never-ending conflict, another person killed a world away, and we at NU would go on with our lives, go to class and our world would keep on turning.
But luckily, Cohen didn’t become “just another number.” At NU, he’s following the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with a closer attachment than most.
“The ball is pretty much in the Palestinian court,” Cohen says. “Israel offered everything in 2000 (after Camp David II) — 100 percent of the land and said, ‘Here’s a state’ – and they rejected it like in 1948 when the U.N. said, ‘Here’s a state.’ Palestinians are never going to accept a Zionist state. It’s not a time for rejection, it’s time for acceptance.”
Cohen says that people forget the need for a Jewish safe haven. Remember the Holocaust? The right of return, which Arafat insisted on at Camp David II, would displace thousands of Jews and would make Israel not a Jewish state, but a Palestinian state. Cohen, who was friends with Palestinians while in Israel, says it’s Arafat’s insistence on the right of return combined with his radicalism that’s led to the state of today’s conflict. “Arafat was raised as a terrorist, lived as a terrorist and was the head of the PLO whose goal was to drive Israel into the sea. I don’t think he’s forgotten those ways.”
Is the offer from Camp David II still on the table? Probably not, says Cohen, since the situation from 2000 has completely changed. Even his mother-in-law, who used to be “super left-wing,” has changed her mind. “Hearing day after day after day, suicide bombing, suicide bombing, shooting, roadside bombing, soldiers killed, missile attacks makes a lot of people take a step back and say, ‘Wait a second, what are we about to do that’s gonna basically create what some would say is a terrorist state right within Israel.’ I think the offer’s still on the table if the Palestinians stop the violence.”
Cohen says he knows for a fact that Israel spends massive amounts of time making sure civilians aren’t killed during state-sponsored bombings, unlike the tactics of Palestinian suicide bombers. “Israel today is thinking, ‘Well are we going to retaliate or are we just gonna take the 15 people killed on a bus just going to work?'”
And most likely, Israel is going to “retaliate,” spawning more bombings that will lead to more retaliation that will lead to more bombings and on and on and on. And it’s a cycle of never-ending violence of which Cohen, luckily, is no longer a part.
Kristina Francisco is a Medill senior. She can be reached at [email protected].
