TORONTO — The North America Muslim Foundation held a discussion late last month at at the NAMF Centre mosque in Scarborough about the recent war in Gaza and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Yaen Vered
Yaen Vered, a shaliach for the Jewish National Fund who works for the Israeli Antiquities Authority, and Hicham Safieddine, a PhD student in Middle Eastern studies at the University of Toronto, each presented their opinions about the conflict to an audience of about 50 people.
Vered began his address by saying that when people talk about Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes after Israel’s War in Independence in 1948, people forget that 600,000 Jews were thrown out of their homes in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Yemen, and other Arab countries.
He said these Jews, who were forced to leave behind assets worth billions of dollars, were absorbed into the Israeli Jewish community.
“We absorbed them and we went into a very serious time of rationing… We split whatever we had with our brethren,” Vered said. “We built a country of refugees. There were 650,000 Jews in 1948 in the Land of Israel. In two years, we quadrupled that number.”
Vered said that the when Israel’s independence was declared, “Israel was attacked… It is a fact that some of the Arab countries were promising the Palestinians that if they got out of the cities that the Jews were living in, [they would] get everything back,” he said.
“When you begin a war… when you lose, you lose. When you win, you win… We took over parts of the country. [Arabs] took over parts of the country.”
Vered questioned why the leaders of the Arab countries didn’t help Palestinian refugees recover from the war.
“Why did they not take the initiative to come to help to absorb and help those poor people, the people who were expelled from their homes… to revitalize their lives?… Because they are used as a political cow and those people suffered all those years to remain political cows against the state of Israel.”
Safieddine prefaced his address by asking the gathering not to fear to speak out for the Palestinian cause and to consider that there is a distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.
“Every time we try to speak about the conflict, what happens is people who are aware that this might actually underline what is happening jump up and say anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is the same, and they try to suppress you,” Safieddine said.
“The two types of people who are uncomfortable with [the distinction]… are the Zionists, because they want to suppress the criticism of Israel, and the others are anti-Semites who want to use criticism of Israel largely to criticize Jews.”
Speaking about the three-week war in Gaza this past winter that killed an estimated 1,300 Palestinians and 13 Israelis, Safieddine said that there is “no doubt that there were war crimes committed by the Israelis.”
He added that “90 per cent of the time,” Israelis break the ceasefires between the two sides and that “every time there is organized political resistance by Palestinians, the Israeli government tries to destroy it.”
But Vered said that Hamas and its supporters were launching rockets aimed at civilian populations.
“There is no government in the world that would stand aside and not go into war in that case,” he said.
When it comes to alleged war crimes, Vered said that Israeli pilots and soldiers are instructed not to target civilians.
“Unfortunately, when you take children and civilians as human shields, there is no question that some of them are going to get hit with shrapnel. You can’t help it.”
He added that he is sorry for the loss of life on the Palestinian side, but said that the discrepancy in the number of casualties has to do with the fact that the Israeli government invests in shelters and infrastructure to protects its citizens and soldiers from rockets and mortars.
Vered said the war in Gaza wouldn’t have happened if Hamas put an end to the constant rockets aimed at Israel.
“Look how they live in Ramallah, how they live in Nablus, how they live in other parts of the West Bank. It’s a really nice place to live. Why can’t we do it in Gaza? Why should we and the Gazans be faced with such atrocities?”
Safieddine said he believes in a one-state solution and that what is now Israel should revert back to the way it was before 1948.
Vered said the concept of one state for two nations doesn’t work anywhere else in the world.
Safieddine countered by saying that it did work in Palestine before 1948.
But Vered, said that before Israel declared independence, there were wars, riots and uprisings against Jews in 1917, 1921, 1929, and between 1936 and 1939. “So to say that everything was quiet and serene and so on is unfortunately not true.”
He added that most Israelis support a two-state solution because “no Israeli would like to be in a position that the Hamas government would put them in.
“Hamas has enforced on the Gaza Strip a sharia law [Islamic religious law] and they are cutting off hands. They are killing their own people. There was a wedding of a Fatah person in Gaza… [Hamas] came in and shot 20 people. I don’t want to live in such a place,” he said.
Safieddine said Vered’s anecdotes are exceptions and only promote the idea that Palestinians are “backwards” and “evil.”
When asked by a moderator if the renunciation of armed resistance would help the Palestinian cause, Safieddine said that armed resistance is sanctioned by international law.
“If you are fighting an occupation, you have the right to use armed resistance, as long as you abide by the rules of the law… [it] is their right.”
Vered, who was asked about the treatment of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, said there are thousands of terrorists in Israeli prisons, some of whom “were caught with blood on their hands.
“They have visitation rights from their families, they have the right to study, they have the right to get phone calls… They have meetings in jail to have political discussions, and so on,” he said.
“[Israel] has one prisoner with Hamas. And you know what they say. He will not see the light of day… That soldier [Gilad Schalit] was kidnapped. That soldier is not getting anything…” he said, adding that he has not been seen by the Red Cross and only receives and sends one letter a year to and from his family.
Safieddine said that Schalit was captured as a prisoner of war and has rights as a prisoner of war.
