Gathered around the table in a conference room in the
UCSD Cross-Cultural Center on Jan. 8, students scribbled the addresses of Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer onto the fronts of envelopes and stuffed them with letters urging the senators to up pressure on ending the conflict in Gaza.
After 16 days of fighting, the war between Israel and Hamas shows little sign of slowing. Air raids and ground forces continue to operate in the Palestinian territory; rockets continue to be fired toward Israel.
Since the current conflict began, at least 885 people have been killed in Gaza, including 275 children; in contrast, 10 Israeli soldiers and three civilians have been killed in combat or in rocket attacks by Palestinian militants, according to ABC news.
Revelle College sophomore Wafa Ben Hassine organized a letter-writing campaign, in hopes of seeing an end to the conflict, after the idea came up in a discussion with a friend from North Carolina.
‘I kept watching the news and I felt like I couldn’t do anything,’ Ben Hassine said. ‘I am a really sensitive person, and I wanted to channel that positively.’
Ben Hassine and her friend started sending out messages over Facebook and soon saw the movement spread nationwide. Ben Hassine received offers for sponsorship from UCSD student organizations, but wanted to keep the event unaffiliated so all students would feel comfortable participating. Approximately 1,300 letters were written to Congress members, 110 of those from UCSD.
‘I think it is symbolic; I don’t think the senators will change their policies,’ Ben Hassine said. ‘It’s more about the gesture.’
The Muslim Student Association held a bonfire vigil directly after the letter-signing at La Jolla Shores, where students discussed the conflict.
After receiving such positive feedback in response to Ben Hassine’s event, a new organization on campus, Students for Justice in Palestine, is looking into holding another letter-writing session this week.
SJP has already started off their first quarter as an official org by staging a protest on Jan. 5 from 12 p.m. to 1:30 pm. The protest was a peaceful demonstration in which students from SJP joined fellow Tritons in marching up and down Library Walk. Several passersby stopped to ask questions, and after the march, students were read a firsthand account of the conflict in Gaza.
‘We got a lot of positive response,’ Thurgood Marshall College senior and SJP co-President Ali Abugheida said. ‘This is an issue extremely linked to the U.S., our taxpayers are paying for this war and we want people to question what they say in the media and think critically. … I think we corrected a lot of misconceptions.’
SJP has been looking into holding another letter writing session next week, after hearing positive responses about Ben Hassine’s event.
Because the protest was calling for an end to the conflict in support of the Palestinian cause, several students in support of Israel staged a simultaneous demonstration on Library Walk.
‘There are lots and lots of different voices about what is going on,’ Hillel Rabbi Lisa Goldstein said. ‘There are some students who will be focusing more on the fact that Hamas is sending rockets into Israel and will put more emphasis on where [to] put the blame, and other students [want to] find moderate Palestinians to enter into dialogue with and how to end violence across the board.’
‘Its such a complicated issue,’ Goldstein said. ‘The tendency is to really simplify it, and as soon as you [make the issue] good, bad, black, white ‘mdash; the more you do that, the more you lose the real truth of what’s happening there.’
Ben Hassine has been actively working to create a safe place for dialogue on the Israel-Palestine debate since arriving at UCSD. She helped institute a nonprofit based on campus, the Middle East Cooperation Initiative. The organization is meant to be just the kind of place students can bring diverse and opposing viewpoints to create progress rather than aggression. While the organization is currently inactive, Hassine is busy laying out plans how it too can help bring an end to the conflict.
Though students at UCSD continue to be affected by the happenings in Israel and Palestine, some have found themselves particularly close. Several students visited Israel over winter break through the Birthright program, and at least two students are studying abroad this quarter in Jerusalem, giving them a different perspective on the conflict than those of us safe in California.
‘It is obviously different to actually be here while something like this is happening, to see my Israeli friends in the reserves being called up to defend their country,’ Thurgood Marshall College junior Myra Meskin, studying abroad at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said in an e-mail. ‘Think about it, would the U.S. tolerate this constant attack on its citizens that’s lasted for many years? Here we realize that this attack on Hamas was a response to their breaking of the cease-fire, but I fear that many people around the world will simply blame Israel for everything that’s happened.’
While several sources stateside reported early in the conflict that the cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, which took effect on June 19, 2008, was broken by Hamas, Rick Sanchez of CNN ran the most popular conflicting report: On Nov. 4, six or seven Hamas operatives were killed in combat with Israeli forces. How the cease-fire was broken is still hotly contested.
Michael Province, associate professor of modern Middle East history at UCSD, urges students to not only follow the news actively, but also to question and critically examine reports. He notes the American media’s tendency to try and sell the issue as unbiased. Newsweek ran two full-page photo spreads in its Jan. 12 issue: two funerals, one of a young Palestinian boy, the other set in Israel.
‘There are 700 [deaths] on this side and 10 on this side; the idea that [coverage] needs to be equal is absurd,’ Provence said. ‘Things have never been equal. The imperative for ‘balance’ is a distortion that doesn’t suit us well.’
Provence, a staunch supporter of Palestinian rights, feels the media’s chacterization of the situation in Gaza has been continuously misleading.
‘The phrase ‘the world’s biggest open-air prison’ is appropriate [for Gaza],’ Provence said. In an attempt to provide a forum for opinions about the conflict and to discuss the issue, the Institute for International, Comparative and Area Studies will be holding a town-hall meeting Jan. 14, from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. in the I-House Great Hall, entitled ‘Perspectives on the Gaza War.’ Provence, along with communication professor Gary Fields and IICAS Director Gershon Shafir, will serve as the event’s featured speakers.
So while disagreements over cause and effect continue to plague the discourse over the conflict in Gaza, those equally eager for peace both on and off campus are trying to come together despite conflicting positions.
‘[In Israel], the news lets us know about some of the operations of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), and most often focuses on the actions and reactions of foreign leaders in the UN and the EU, as well as the circumstances under which a lasting peace agreement could be made ‘mdash; because ultimately, peace is the goal here,’ Meskin said in an e-mail.
‘It doesn’t matter if you’re pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli ‘mdash; it is just about condemning violence,’ Ben Hassine said. ‘It may seem skewed because of the numbers, but we condemn violence toward Palestinians or Israelis. I don’t care about politics anymore; innocent people are dying.’
Readers can contact David Harvey at [email protected].