Gaza: Close Up - Reported by Raphael Frankl

I never thought I would be drawing parallels between Americans and Israelis, but when Raphael Frankl made the assessment that the majority of the Israeli population is not as extreme as its leader, President Moshe Katsav, I could not help but weigh the mighty differences between my views and those of President G.W. Bush. This was the only point in the hour-long discussion that the U.S. even crossed my mind. On March 5 at 7:30 p.m. in Plumas 201, Raphael Frankl, a freelance reporter and Chico State Alum, hosted “Gaza: Close-Up,” a talk centered around threats posed to leisure and recreational programs, which has come to include terrorism.

The focus of this discussion was the conflict between the Iranian Palestinians and the Israelis. Frankl claims that Israel’s problems start with Iran, which calls for Israel’s destruction. In response to the received hostility, President Katsav is anti-Iran, anti-democracy, and anti-civil society. He rules his country with an element of religious law.

Because the country is ruled under religious law, Israel’s conflict with Iran qualifies as a “holy war” or jihad. The people of Iran believe that the Israelis are not being true to their faith. This resulting jihad, which exercises a great amount of attacks deemed as “terrorism,” evolved out of a social movement that sought to bring Islam to the center of people’s lives through government. This movement was started by the Muslim Brotherhood, a group of Palestinians operating out of Gaza. The movement was an attempt to counter nationalism and militarism; it would have been effective if it weren’t for the fact that whenever peace between the two countries was approached, the Brotherhood would carry out suicide bombings as terrorist attacks against Israel.

What Iran is after is land. The Palestinians want to abolish the “two-state solution,” the contract that allows Israel to maintain its own state. To do this, Iran aims to de-legitimize Israel’s moral standing in the eyes of the rest of the world. The example Frankl used was that if 90 Palestinians die for a each one Israeli, then people will look at those numbers and have less sympathy for Israel. While I understand the point Frankl is trying to make, I don’t believe his example in this case is effective because I don’t deem it realistic.

I had a hard time following Frankl’s discussion, though I found it interesting, and took copious notes; Frankl spoke as if he was talking to an audience that already understood the origins and circumstances of the current conflict. I wasn’t able to fully get into what he was discussing until he showed us a documentary he made during his time overseas. In this documentary, he interviewed Palestinians of the younger generation.

Frankl presented the argument that the older generations of Iran are more inclined to think of the Israelis as people, versus the younger generation, who have had less contact with the people of Israel. It is this younger generation that is most inclined to perpetuate the war. The West Bank of Gaza is full of Israeli checkpoints, manned by vicious, violent Israeli soldiers. The younger generation associates the rest of the people with the hostility of these soldiers, because this is all they have known.

The most impacting clip for me was an interview conducted with a twenty-year-old female student of the Palestinian university. She admitted that when she saw Israelis on TV after being victims of a suicide attack, she felt sorry for them. “I see they feel pain, like us. They cry, like us. The prophet Muhammad in our religion talked about never hurting a tree, a man, a woman. I feel sorry for them. But it doesn’t mean I want to befriend [an Israeli].” In response, Frankl asked that if even a sympathetic yung woman like herself couldn’t even see herself being friendly to the Israelis, how could things get better? In painful exasperation she replied, “It’ll never get better! It’ll never get better.”