Palestinians and Israelis alike are victims of the Israeli aggression and occupation. Israel sends its soldiers to repress the Palestinians and arms the settlers, who in turn subject Palestinians to humiliation and even pogroms.
For this reason, we urge Israeli Jews and other Jews who object to Israel's claim to act on their behalf to demonstrate their compassion to the Palestinian victims and thereby help break down barriers between Arabs and Muslims on the one hand and Jews on the other.
Israeli aggression feeds anti-Semitism throughout the world.
For Jews to support the Palestinian struggle against Israeli repression
and occupation would do much to break the association between
Jews in general and the deeds of the Israeli state which feed
anti-Semitism. In our view, the most effective way to challenge
anti-Semitism is for Jews clearly to distance themselves from
the actions of the state of Israel.
To be sure, the prospect of support for the Palestinian struggle
would present many Jews with a dilemma, for among the indirect
victims of Israel's aggression and occupation have been Jews who
have died at the hands of Palestinians.
Indeed, campaigners for a just and durable peace in Palestine/Israel are often criticized for not giving Israeli Jewish fatalities the same emphasis as Palestinian ones.
But while on the human level we recognize the tragedy of each life lost, our starting point should not be a general lament on the pity and waste of war - which is true for every war. Rather, we should seek to challenge prevailing myths about this conflict and to do all we can to bring about the conditions for a just resolution of it.
One myth is that of Israel as victim, despite it being the aggressor and despite the huge disparity in casualties in conflicts with the Palestinians. Although this myth is under strain at the moment, it still has a lot of power and needs to be challenged.
To present a false symmetry between the dead soldiers and settlers, who are carrying out the policy of expropriation, and the Palestinian dead, who are opposing it, would be to equate the victim (the Palestinian people) and the violator (Israel), and to apportion equal blame to the aggressor and the victim.
It is for this reason, and not out of any disrespect for the Israeli victims of this conflict, that we - Jews and Arabs together - should in fact draw attention to the huge scale of Palestinian fatalities. To do otherwise, that is, to imply equal blame and responsibility on both sides, would only help to reinforce Israel's propaganda campaign, which seeks to present it as the victim rather than the aggressor, and could thus prolong rather than shorten the conflict and increase the casualty list on both sides.
The strength of the myth of Israel as victim, in combination with other myths, is why Israel has been able to perpetrate so many outrages against the Palestinians and escape effective sanctions. It uses these myths to justify its actions both to itself and internationally.
We support courageous solidarity actions within Israel - that of the the imprisoned young Israeli conscientious objector, Eyal Rozenberg, for example - that challenge these myths. And we support the actions of groups such as Jews Against the Occupation, who have signed a worldwide petition against Israeli occupation and have staged dramatic events, such as the "die-in" in London on 10 December 2000, to highlight the scale of Palestinian casualties.
By focusing on the Palestinian dead we are saying that this is not a conflict between equals. Israel is the transgressor, the powerful predator, the plunderer and expropriator. The Palestinians are the victims, the powerless, the plundered. To treat the deaths unequally illuminates the truth about the conflict. To treat the deaths equally would merely perpetuate the shadows and the confusion.