Israel/Palestine

Israeli-Palestinian conflict requires cooperation, context

As co-president of Dawgs For Israel, I first want to commend Anna Baltzer for relating her experiences in the West Bank to the University community. Regardless of where one stands on the Arab-Israeli conflict, human rights should never be isolated as a political issue.

I commend Baltzer for clarifying the distinctions between the Zionist political ideology, the Jewish religion and the Israeli nationality. It’s important to understand being one does not give you the moral authority to speak for another. Baltzer’s religion does not validate her position, her experiences and education do.

Wednesday’s article (“Jewish author lectures, defends Palestine”) fails to push the reader to follow Baltzer’s suggestion, which she stressed throughout her presentation: Do your own research. If one does his or her own research, he or she will find there are two sides to the story.

Understanding one does not minimize the horrors the other side experiences – it puts the debate in a greater context of what’s happening in the region. Although most of her facts were correct, the facts Baltzer failed to present would have done better justice to and given the audience a more complete picture of a complex situation.

Being pro-Israeli doesn’t mean being anti-Palestinian. Peace takes cooperation from both sides of the issue, as well as a willingness to understand each other’s concerns. Focusing solely on one side’s suffering leads to better understanding of its conditions, but it doesn’ t move dialogue to any kind of just or equitable path to a solution.

Jonathan Arogeti
Freshman, Atlanta
History