By Paul Esau (The Cascade) – Email
Featuring: Dr. Steven Schroeder (UFV History Department)
Print Edition: June 6, 2012
Israel is a small country with a lot of history and a lot of problems. The history goes back thousands of years, and the problems are nearly as old and just as complicated. Places such as Gaza and the West Bank are constantly appearing in the media, and things always seem to be getting worse rather than improving. With Jewish Israelis one side, and Arab Palestinians on the other, it begs the question: “Why can’t Jews and Arabs just get along?”
UFV actually offers a whole course on the topic (History 335: Arab Zionist Relations) created and taught by Dr. Steven Schroeder, who also teaches History 320: The Holocaust. Schroeder had the unique opportunity during the winter semester to visit Israel for the first time, a visit that actually occurred while he was teaching the Arab-Zionist Relations course. The trip was part of a program organized by MCC (the Mennonite Central Committee) to educate participants in the issues faced by Palestinians and Israelis in the West Bank. As an expert on the modern history of Palestine, and both a member of and an authority on a diasporic community, The Cascade asked Schroeder to answer some questions about Palestinian-Jewish Israeli conflict, and his experiences in the occupied territory of the West Bank.
When I sat down to talk to Schroeder to discuss his trip, I asked him to describe two or three “shocking” things he had discovered about the reality of the West Bank. It wasn’t meant to be a loaded question, nor is Schroeder a man who allows himself personal bias on contentious issues, yet I could tell the question had hit a nerve.
“What struck me,” he began, “well I can think of two things. One is the intentional component of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. It became very clear that the barrier that is being set up is not to separate the people first and foremost for security reasons, which is what the IDF [Israeli Defence Force] will tell you. It’s not necessarily an either/or … sure maybe people sleep better at night with this wall up, but it’s certainly porous. But it’s being used to annex, to create facts on the ground, to annex West Bank territory as part of the Judaisation of the West Bank. That struck me.”
“Secondly,” he continued, “the pervasiveness and nature of the occupation, which is astonishingly cruel. Now I’m referring mostly to the experiences that were related to the Second Intifada*, with the collective punishments. We toured the Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem and we heard a number of stories and saw actual evidence of people being shot and killed just because they were Palestinians and they lived in the refugee camp, by snipers in the separation barrier towers.”
Schroeder then related the story of a Palestinian man living in the Aida camp in Bethlehem during the Intifada, who was shot and killed as he was leaning out the window to call his children to dinner. The meaninglessness of it was what most caught Schroeder’s attention.
“We see the suicide bombers,” he continued in a criticism of the western perspective, “and in the media we have the connection between Al Qaida and the Palestinians as this monolithic threat to western democracy, and [I] don’t really see these components in this way. We see the IDF confronting militants, arresting militants – and these are Hamas people, or Islamic Jihad people – and we think these things are understandable and maybe resonate with those security measures, but the [reason for these actions] is a different thing altogether.”
On the ground in the West Bank, Schroeder argued, the military rule goes beyond what is necessary for even the strictest safety measures.
“[The IDF] was everywhere,” he said, “Absolutely everywhere. It was unnerving, even though we as western internationals are privileged. We can walk through checkpoints rather quickly in most cases and aren’t questioned a lot as long as people don’t portray any overtly pro-Palestinian views. “
Schroeder said that the tight security from the military made him quite uncomfortable. “I’ve never had so many soldiers in high places in buildings looking at me and pointing their weapons in my general direction … As Canadians we’re not used to having M16s pointed at us on a regular basis. And it was everywhere. They were everywhere: on the streets, on the highways, in the marketplaces,” he explained.
“Any time you stopped or looked up there was someone looking at you with a machine gun. You really have to wonder, who’s paying for all this? And we know it’s coming from a lot of international aid.”
In fact, having seen the Israeli presence in the West Bank firsthand, Schroeder has fundamentally changed his perspective on what a peace settlement between Palestinian and Jewish Israeli camps would include. “I’ve seen pretty clearly,” he began, “at least from the evidence that I’ve come across and people with whom I’ve spoken—and by putting it through my own filters—that the two state solution has been manipulated by the Israelis to realize their goals and there will be nothing left of the state for the Palestinians. It’s really a non-starter.”
“I think it’s pretty unrealistic to count on the U.N. to declare a Palestinian state based on ‘67 borders when you have half a million Jewish settlers in that territory and you have a huge concrete wall that carves into that territory,” Schroeder continued. “It sounds great, you can say ‘they did it in Gaza.’ [But Gaza was] nothing compared to half a million settlers in the West bank. And that has been the war which has gradually crept over the decades since ‘67.
“It’s been ongoing. It’s been a slow takeover of the West Bank, making it basically impossible for a viable Palestinian state to exist. Where that leaves us I don’t know … I did meet some Israeli Jews who believed that one state could exist with equal rights, a bi-national state kind of along the ‘47 UNSCOP Proposal* with a shared economy and a shared parliament. It could be a long ways off, but we’ve seen the unthinkable happen in South Africa … so we can’t say it’s impossible.”
The big question, how much Schroeder’s experience will influence the way he teaches his course on Arab-Zionism, was given a mixed response. “I think that it won’t change fundamentally,” he said, “it’s terribly important to maintain as much objectivity as is humanly possible and you have to remember that I teach a history course so we are basing our examination on the evidence of the past.”
Schroeder maintained that his experiences and discussions with Israelis and Palestinians has essentially “shifted a few things from the speculative to the verifiable.”
“I am committed to objectivity, not to having a polarized view or skewing students’ interpretations,” he explained. “I’m not interested in doing those things; I think people can make their own decisions. As I make changes [to the course] I will always be searching for new Israeli-Jewish perspectives from a wide range of people to broaden that scope fairly across all perspectives.”
* The second Palestinian uprising which began in September, 2000 when retired Israeli general and politician Ariel Sharon visited the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The uprising includes protests, strikes, armed attacks, and suicide bombings,
** The nation of Israel was declared in 1948 amidst a period of intense fighting involving Arab and Israeli communities in Palestine, as well as Syria, Jordan, Egypt and irregulars from several other neighboring countries. The 1947 UN Partition Plan created by UNSCOP (United Nations Special Committee on Palestine) was voted through the UN and accepted by Jewish Zionists, yet refused by the Palestinian leadership. It became the basis for the resultant declaration of the Jewish state, as well as the ensuing conflict.
