FHSU student and Israeli native Mayan Paz presenting at a panel earlier this month
By ELLINOR COUCHMAN
Tiger Media Network
The Israel-Palestine conflict reached a boiling point earlier this month after nearly a century of animosity, and students at Fort Hays State University are still familiarizing themselves with the situation. Pi Sigma Alpha sponsored an information panel about the war on October 16 featuring Assistant Professor Jay Steinmetz and Israeli freshman Mayan Paz. Nearly 50 people attended, and Steinmetz said the high turnout was pleasantly surprising. For Paz, however, the panel was about much more than mere statistics.
“My best friend was fighting in the front for the first few days, and my other friend lost his unit commander and many friends from within his unit”, Paz said during the presentation.
Paz concluded the panel with a condemnation of the ruling Hamas within Palestine’s Gaza Strip.
“Israel has to retaliate. There is no achievable peace with Hamas. Hamas has to be destroyed completely in order to even think about possible solutions”, he said.
Beyond the podium, though, Paz said the situation has blame on both sides.
“Israel, in my opinion, has to get out of the West Bank. That is one of the important steps in order to achieve peace,” he said. “I think the settlers in Israel are a danger to the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. They provoke a lot of violence against Israelis who are not settlers.”
Paz’s family has lived in Israel for four generations, but supporters of Palestine often consider Israel a settler-colonial apartheid state. This sentiment dates back to the foundation of Zionism, when activist Theodor Herzl wrote of Israel, “You are being invited to help make history […] It doesn’t involve Africa, but a piece of Asia Minor; not Englishmen, but Jews. How, then, do I happen to turn to you since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial.”
Before the 1947 United Nations Partition, much of the Jewish presence in Israel was composed of organizations like the “Palestine Jewish Colonization Association.” Modern settlement of occupied territory in the Palestinian West Bank has also been described as a war crime under Article 8 of the Rome Statute.
This is relative to the territory having a Jewish population of 25,000 in the late 19th century, about 4,000 of which are situated around Jerusalem. It’s a criticism that Paz, a Jerusalem native, says he’s familiar with.
“I wouldn’t say it’s an apartheid state really, although in the West Bank, it’s a problematic area because the Palestinians don’t have civil rights, but in Israel itself, about 20-25 percent of the population is Muslims and Arabs”, he said.
The Gaza Strip’s autonomy represents a lynchpin for the Palestinian cause. Hamas has been the sole power within the Gaza Strip for nearly 20 years after the Israeli settlements’ 2005 disengagement. Regardless of historical claims, numerous countries, including the United States and Israel, deem Hamas a terrorist group. This sentiment has only grown since the Hamas-led Simchat Torah Massacre initiated the current war.
“You can be supportive of the Palestinian right to have an independent country, but you can’t be supportive of Hamas,” Paz said. “If you support the massacre of 1300 innocent people, including babies and children, you are wrong; that’s it.”
While Paz supports the Israeli cause, he considers himself an atheist. Conversely, Sophomore Lua Bennight considers herself a reformed converted Jew, and she maintains a critical perspective of the war.
“I do not agree with Israel and what Israel did. I get it because Israel was bombed by Hamas, but I still don’t think that’s a valid reason for them to go bomb Gaza”, Bennight said.
Both of Bennight’s parents are Christian pastors, and her ancestors spoke more Swedish than Hebrew; however, she still claims to read the Torah every day, pray three times a day, and do what she can to understand Israeli history.
“I learned how much it means to Jewish people and how basically any Jewish Synagogue kind of reports back in a way. A lot of Jewish birth records are also held in Israel, even if you’re born in the United States”, she said.
Her resulting perspective considers the ultimate cost of war, as well as what a century of antagonism has done to the Holy Land.
“Think of the people instead of the governments. Think of the Palestinian people when you say that Israel should take it over, and think of Israeli people when you say that Palestine should take over”, she said.