Let academics, intellectuals, school children, and every single individual and human being who professes to be concerned with the situation in Israel-Palestine act to try to understand what is really behind the conflict, and to understand the attitudes, hopes, fears, dreams and insecurities of all the actors on all sides. Let us be critical, as necessary in order to be honest, but let us also be creative in coming up with solutions and suggestions for what can be done. Let us demand equality of Palestinians and Israelis, and recognise that equality cannot be built on oppression or exploitation. Let us protest against the killings, and also against international support for the State of Israel's apartheid system, for US Congress funding of the building of settlements, for the betrayal of even the Oslo Accords, themselves a horrible prescription, promoting a foundation for violence, not peace. And let us reassert the authority of the relevant UN resolutions.
Peace is a struggle.
It is not something that will simply fall into our laps or appear because we close our eyes and wish the violence will go away. For too long our eyes have been closed. This is why we are seeing the violence that is exploding today. The number of Palestinians that have died since Oslo because of lack of access to proper medicines, because of poor health and economic situations in the occupied territories, because of the slow death of structural violence, far exceeds the number of those killed in the last weeks. This is a question we must be willing to ask ourselves, for the people of Palestine, and of Israel, because if we truly believe, as we should, that Israelis have the right to live in peace, to not fear car bombs and 'terrorism', than we must recognise that this can only happen, if Israelis and Palestinians are willing to work for a true, a just, and an honest peace.