By Audrey Jacobs and Michael Lurie
SAN DIEGO — The Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues to intensify. This past Sunday, protesters from Palestine and surrounding Arab nations marched on Israel’s borders on all sides and Israeli troops fired in response when the boundaries were breached. Locally, last week pro-Palestinian student groups such as the Muslim Student Union and Students for Justice in Palestine held their annual weeklong event at UCSD to present their views on the conflict.
From our perspective as principals in the new San Diego chapter of StandWithUs, an Israel education and advocacy organization, it was good to see less of the blatant hate speech and anti-Semitism that have characterized Palestine Week at UCSD in past years, Still, it was disheartening to witness a simplistic and one-sided presentation of a complex situation.
Pro-Palestinian groups attempted to position this conflict as one between oppressive, racist, colonialist Jews and democratic, peace-loving Arabs. Pro-Palestinian materials expressed no recognition of the human, national, historic and religious rights of the Jewish people in the land of Israel.
This year, the pro-Israel student group Tritons for Israel held its own event, presenting different views alongside the pro-Palestinian groups. The pro-Israel students distributed materials supportive of democracy, human rights and an enduring peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
For 3,000 years, Israel has been the heart and soul of Judaism and the Jewish people. For Jews, national self-determination meant becoming once again a free nation in our homeland. For Palestinians, though nationalism was far more recent, dating to the post World War I settlement, it has no less an aspiration. This simple reality – two nations aspiring for self-determination in the same land – was and remains the true cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The solution reached by the League of Nations in 1921, the United Nations in 1947 and the large majority of the world ever since, is to share the land between the Jewish people and the Palestinian people. The core problem, in our view, is that while Jews have accepted this approach, Palestinians have not.
Over the last 63 years, Israel has evolved into a thriving, multicultural secular democracy, with human rights and justice for its citizens, regardless of race, religion, gender or national background. A quarter of Israeli citizens are not Jewish. All have the same rights. For all these years, Israel has expressed a willingness to Palestinians and the other Arab states to live in peace and friendship, pursuing a dream of a thriving, democratic, free Middle East.
The Palestinians and other Arab states have followed a different path. As has become clear in recent months, the Arab states became autocratic regimes, stifling the rights and potential of their peoples, leading to economic stagnation, poverty, oppression and extremism. In part to deflect responsibility for these problems, the Palestinians and Arab states have conducted a campaign of hatred, war and terrorism against the state of Israel since its rebirth in 1948. To this day, the Palestinians balk at sitting down with Israel and negotiating a peaceful resolution to the conflict.
The way to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is through genuine peaceful negotiations toward a mutually agreed solution. Israelis have accepted the reality and rights of Palestinian national aspirations. It is time for the Palestinians to recognize the reality and rights of the Jewish nation and return to the negotiating table without pretexts and preconditions.
Perhaps our campuses here in San Diego could play a constructive role in this regard. Perhaps, instead of one-sided and divisive campaigns against Israel on campus, professors and students interested in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could work together in a spirit of civility to promote dialogue. Maybe our universities could help model ways in which students might be able to reach out to each other and to find ways to host productive discourse. Perhaps next year, instead of dueling events on San Diego campuses about Israel, faculty and students could work together to encourage productive programming. Surely such an approach would be far more constructive. Interested students and faculty would have much more to offer the broader campus community, and may in some small way contribute to bringing peace to a land that is one of the most loved and most beautiful in the world.
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Lurie is president and Jacobs is regional director of the San Diego chapter of StandWithUs. This article appeared as an Op-Ed in the San Diego Union-Tribune and is reprinted here at the request of the authors.