I am sure if you follow Palestinian pages on Instagram or Facebook, or if you visit Etsy, you’ve seen advertisements for t-shirts with a Palestinian flag superimposed over a map of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank.
Or the one where a watermelon, a symbol used by the Palestine movement, covers all of these lands.
Or you’ve seen Palestine necklaces featuring a “charm” in the shape of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank.
If you follow Israel-related pages, you likewise have seen the same necklaces advertised as Israel necklaces. A jeweler I know in Jerusalem actually sent me a WhatsApp message offering a special deal on these necklaces.
What the Israeli and Palestine charms and shirts have in common is that they are asserting a claim to every inch of the land as their own.
The Palestine flag draped across the entire State of Israel is nothing less than a call for all of Israel to ultimately be Palestine.
For Jews, the necklaces are the same.
By including the West Bank and Gaza as part of the “Israeli” nation, territories that by any measure would have to be part of a Palestinian State, they’re essentially saying “no” to Palestinians. That they prefer a solution where Israel encompasses all of these territories and Palestinians never get their own nation-state.
Our words and symbols matter. They educate and instruct our thinking.
When we employ the all-of-the-land-is-mine approach, we’re necessarily encouraging only non-peaceful solutions to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
When people shout, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which literally means all of Israel, they’re just using this necklace approach to the conflict.
That’s why the recent campus protests, rather than ending the war, are having the opposite effect.
They aren’t calling for peace. There aren’t many peace signs. There aren’t chants demanding a two-state solution. Or co-existence. There’s no mention of the children and elderly hostages. Or condemnation of rapes. Indeed, some of the chants actually call for Israel’s destruction. Some of the students are wearing Hamas headbands.
Others call for an “intifada,” which in Arabic means “uprising,” and has been used to describe periods of intense violent resistance to Israel.
I visited three campuses to see for myself.
The protests have done nothing more than convince otherwise peace-loving people to entrench into defense mode.
We of course can stay in our corners and beat our righteous chests with indignation.
Non-peaceful Palestinians can scream “colonizers!” at the Jewish people in the land of Judea-Israel. Their supporters can chant slogans demanding Jews “go back to where they came from.” They can continue to advocate for the abolishment of Israel, chanting about the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
And right-wing, non-peace-loving Israelis like Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir can claim the Palestinians aren’t a real people anyway. That the Muslims are the ones who colonized Israel, not the other way around. They can refuse to ever negotiate a Palestinian state. Even confiscate more and more land.
But all of that only gets us to one place.
More conflict. More war. More terror. More innocent lives lost.
How about we change the paradigm altogether and protest for a region that isn’t advocating more war, but instead is demanding peace, security and self-determination for Jews and Palestinians living there?
Stop sporting those violent “It’s our nation” t-shirts. Stop wearing the rejectionist “It’s all our land” necklaces. Demand peace instead.
Jews and Palestinians aren’t going anywhere, so advocating for anything less than co-existence only guarantees another generation of violence.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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Photo credit: Taylor Brandon on Unsplash
