Opinion
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Most Palestinians in Gaza don't support Hamas. So why do we rush to pick a side?
Bethany Rentsch
Thu, October 19, 2023
Nine years ago I was working in Palestine. It is a nation of people, not a country with borders. That’s why the United States, Canada, western European countries, and Australia do not recognize Palestine. The implication is that most do not recognize Palestinians, either. With or without recognition: This [Palestinian] nation exists; it is important to know about them.
You may wonder how a woman from Wisconsin is writing this. I studied terrorism as a graduate student at the University of Saint Andrews in 2010, visited Israel and Palestine in 2011 with the university, and resolved to return in some capacity to know the dynamics better than was shown on TV and the Internet.
In 2014, I was selected to volunteer as an English teacher in Nablus, a crowded and poor city in Palestine’s West Bank. Violence erupted in July 2014 and I landed at the end of August. Although I was afraid, I also remember my fear being outweighed by my need to see and hear and witness before judging – as it seems everyone else did.
Few Palestinians support Hamas or its terrorist ideology
What I learned – and what is most important for you to know about Palestinians – is that although Hamas is a terrorist organization, few Palestinians adhere to their terrorist ideology.
Qoseen is a gritty village outside Nablus. I was their first foreign teacher, and assigned to help their girls in grades 3-8. English may have been the language of my classroom, but social responsibility was the content. We picked up garbage together, I took them to a rescue to learn about being nice to animals, and – on one occasion – we all did the chicken dance. They thought I was foolish and couldn’t tell if I was serious. But they tried it, then looked like fools with me.
This included adults in the room, and there were more than a few. Parents of my students were dubious of me at first. I am tall with light eyes and a not-small nose. No one talked to me on the bus, either, which was hard for me. It took more than a month for villagers of all ages to get used to seeing me. There was routinely an audience of parents and other children outside my classroom, heads around the door like petals on a flower.
Two months in, moms and dads began to invite me to their homes for dinner – even the bus driver and local taxi driver. Those were generational events, like reunions. There I found girls like me, dads like mine, and families like ours who are curious and goofy and proud. No Palestinians ever threatened me and I was never hurt. I was safer as an independent foreign woman in Palestine than I was amid men from western militaries at NATO’s Kabul Headquarters a few years later.
Palestinians are a war-ravaged people. Of the world’s entire Palestinian population, about half still live within Israel’s borders. Some have Israeli passports (about 21 percent of the Israeli population), some live in East Jerusalem, and still others are confined to the former “Mandatory Palestine,” or Palestinian territories – the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Altogether, there are more than 7.5 million Palestinians inside Israel’s borders and millions more outside of them.
Most Palestinians are stateless – no passports or basic sense of belonging to a country. There are millions of Palestinian refugees in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. There are also internally displaced refugees within the Palestinian territories. Gaza alone is home to more than two million humans. That’s an area similar to Delaware or twice the size of Washington, DC. It is commonly referred to as one of the most densely populated places on the planet – and immensely poverty-stricken.
Without land, without acknowledgement or belonging, and without any actual rights, Palestine is in need. The Guardian ran an op-ed on October 11 by American college English professor Moustafa Bayoumi. He explains the double standard of this most recent war, specifically false-equivalence in the narrative we hear about Palestine and Israel. He writes: “They’re not equal. One dominates while the other is dominated. One colonizes. The other is colonized.” There is a double standard in place that “hides the massive asymmetry of power between the state of Israel and the scattered population groupings that make up the Palestinian people.”
Palestinians are scattered and they exist. And while different, they, too, are suffering from Hamas’ insidious violence and Israel’s latest bombardments. Like the lives of Israelis and Jewish people – and all souls – Palestinians deserve understanding and protection, too.
Bethany Rentsch is from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, USA. She has lived and worked in Germany, Palestine, and Afghanistan.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: As Israel-Hamas war rages, Palestinians in Gaza deserve our protection
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