I do not support terrorism. I do not encourage the intentional murder of innocent civilians. However, I do support the Palestinian fight for basic human rights as defined by the United Nations. Now I ask you: Do you support state-sponsored terrorism? Do you support the intentional murder of unarmed innocent Palestinians? Do you support the Palestinian fight for basic human rights?
I am honestly very saddened to hear of Eric Bokobza's friend's experiences. There is no excuse for such violence against innocent people, as The Holy Quran and The Holy Bible (Palestinians aren't just Muslim, many of them are Christian as well) make very clear. However, I am not without my own stories.
One day, a five-year-old Palestinian boy woke up and went outside to work on his family's farm as he did every day. That day, however, the boy did not to return. It turns out that an Israeli settler put his recreational vehicle in that field of that same farm, claiming it for Zion. When the boy was out harvesting his crops that morning, the settler shot and killed the boy. Now I ask you, what did that poor boy do to deserve such a fate?
But you are right, you said that the Israeli army conducts investigations upon such matters and they did! The Israeli settler, who shot and killed a five-year-old boy with absolutely no reason was sentenced with nine months of community service: the worst punishment an Israeli settler has every received for killing a Palestinian.
And this is not an isolated incident. Over 90 percent of such incidents (according to The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs) don't even go to trial.
Such problems have gotten so bad, in fact, that human rights activists from all over the world (mostly Europe) will now stand between the Palestinian farmers and the Israeli settlers while the farmers work on their land. The settlers know that they can kill a Palestinian and get away with it, but they dare not kill an international. They'll leave that to the Israeli army (Remember Rachel Corrie, the American who was deliberately run over by an Israeli bulldozer in 2003?)
You can read more stories on Amnesty International's website, The Noam Chomsky Archives, and even the United Nation's Web site. You will also find other atrocious human rights violations committed by the state of Israel on these Web sites. A few other stories can be found in the opinion piece I wrote in The Spectrum entitled "The Night of Broken Glass" in 2002.
I also resent the implication that all or even most of the Palestinians are evil, anti-Semitic terrorists. The Palestinians as well as the Arabs want peace even more than the Israelis do! The ratio of Palestinian deaths to Israeli deaths is 1-3, according to the World Press Review Online. This, they say, is down from 1-10 during Ehud Barak's term, which is down from 1-15 in Binyamin Netanyahu's term as Prime Minister.
The Palestinians are sick of fighting, as the continuous attempts at ceasefires by Hamas shows. Sadly, Hamas continuously feels compelled to break their ceasefire after Israel takes advantage of such a halt in terrorism by bulldozing more houses and instilling their own forms of state-sponsored terrorism.
You cannot violate the human rights of people in such a manner and not expect at least some of them to stage armed revolution, be it in their best interest or not. Here in America, the Sons of Liberty would tar and feather a loyalist of the English crown, and that was just over taxes!
The Palestinian people are undoubtedly an oppressed people who are simply looking to end their pain and torture brought on by the Israeli government and certainly do not want to destroy Israel. They want to live peacefully, side by side with Israel as written in the Saudi peace plan (ratified unanimously by the Arab League) and also in the Roadmap to Peace.
