"With friends like these, who needs enemies?"
The name of Operation Cast Lead is taken from a popular Hanukkah song. When your friends tear thousands of lives to pieces in less than a month, committing unspeakable atrocities in the hell on earth that is the Gaza Strip and proceed to name it after a famous children's song, you do not invite a retired British colonel to admire the technological prowess of their military force, impressive though it may be. That is not friendship, and in the face of the increasingly outrageous and indefensible actions of the Israeli government, it is certainly not the friendship a country like Israel requires.
We need to be slapped awake. It is not anti-Semitic to criticize 44 years of occupation. It is not disproportionately biased to condemn the ever-expanding legal and illegal settlements in territories that were never rightfully ours. And it is not pro-Israel — truly pro-Israel — to let us get away with anything, time and time again.
Israel needs friends. She needs friends that will tell her that nothing corrupts the human heart like the oppression of another. Friends that will point out to her that the terrible dehumanization that is the inevitable product of a brutal occupation has made her Jewish citizens utterly insentient to the suffering of others. Uncomfortable though it may make her, Israel needs friends who will remind her that the Nazi beast is not intrinsically German but intrinsically human.
My Israel, the one I grew up in, the one I love and hate with passion, has forgotten these things. When we think of the Holocaust, we tell ourselves with vengeance, never again. If by these words we mean "never again to Jewish people," then we have missed the universal lesson of that great tragedy. The kind of Israel I would like to live in should say, "Never again to anyone, never again by anyone." Yes, historically we have been victims, but in 1967, the tide shifted. Israel in 2011 is not a victim, and those who claim otherwise are kidding themselves.
Want to help us? By all means, do so. Change your name to Brown Students for Justice in Israel. Justice that extends its benefits not only to the members of a certain religion or ethnicity, justice that does not automatically revert to cheap "nobody loves me, everybody hates me" rhetoric that, let's face it, barely converts even the members of the choir. Most importantly, justice that recognizes that the real wrong lies not in the negative media attention that Israel receives and will continue to receive, but in the reasons for it, in years of oppression and discrimination in and out of Israel's legitimate borders.
If you wish to end the war of words, start by fighting the war of actions. Work to remedy a reality in which, in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, there are roads only Jewish settlers can use, different curfews for settlers and for the indigenous population and internal checkpoints, miles away from the border with Israel, in which children wait for hours to get to school and the sick and injured are detained on their way to hospitals.
Put pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cronies to evacuate all settlements, to make real concessions, to recognize the wrongs that have been done and that continue to be done to the Palestinians. Give President Obama the backing he needs to confront the Israeli regime about the illegal settlement construction in East Jerusalem. Stop blindly pouring American taxpayers' money into the industry of war and occupation.
Speak up when the Israeli government outlaws boycotting products from the settlements or when extremists in the Knesset propose to prohibit the commemoration of the Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948, two examples in an ongoing series of measures curtailing freedom of expression in Israel.
Until you do, I will continue to take offense with your name. To me, bringing Colonel Richard Kemp to tell us all the unfortunate truth that other war crimes receive little to no media attention as means of legitimizing Israel's thoroughly illegitimate conduct is to do us all a grave disservice. This is the work of Brown Students for the Justification of the Israeli Government, which mercifully is not yet synonymous with Israel, and I am writing to you to ask that you do your part to make sure the two do not become one.
Mika Zacks '15 is from Israel.
