The “Wheels of Justice” bus pulled into Milwaukee Tuesday as part of its Wisconsin tour this week that included Baraboo, Madison, Sheboygan and West Bend.
This is a project involving members of Voices in the Wilderness, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition, the Middle East Children’s Alliance and affiliates of the International Solidarity Movement. It seeks “to challenge and educate North Americans on the occupation of Palestine and Iraq,” according to the project’s Web site.
The bus brought Mazin Qumsiyeh, a Palestinian-American associate professor of genetics at Yale University, author of “Sharing the Land of Canaan: Human rights and the Israeli-Palestinian Struggle” and co-founder of the Palestinian Right to Return Coalition.
In an appearance at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on Tuesday, Sept. 21, co-sponsored by the UWM Muslim Student Association and Peace Action Wisconsin, Qumsiyeh told an audience of about 40 the story of the Palestinian refugees, as the Palestinians see it, and blasted Israel for being responsible for denying Palestinians’ rights.
Qumsiyeh also contended that “the biggest obstacle to peace in the Middle East” is the U.S. government because it supplies Israel with military equipment and supports it politically.
He alleged that “Israel is the only country on earth that organizes itself as a country for a particular religion”; criticized Israel’s Law of Return, which gives all Jews the right to automatic citizenship; and said Zionism “creates the essence of the problem.”
He said that the usual account of Israel’s founding is “over simple.” He said the Zionist leaders in 1947 accepted only that part of the United Nations partition plan that called for creation of a Jewish state; but they didn’t accept the plan’s other provisions, including the Jewish state’s borders and the internationalization of Jerusalem.
He also claimed that the Zionist leaders sought “ethnic cleansing” of the Palestinian Arabs even before Israel was proclaimed in May 1948; and that of the 530 Arab towns and villages whose populations fled in 1947-49, half were emptied before May 1948.
Qumsiyeh also accused Israel, through its settlements and construction of the security barrier/fence/wall, of deliberately trying to “make sure the [Palestinian Arabs living in the Israel-administered territories] get as little of a normal life as possible, so they will leave.”
Although he said, “I personally am against any kind of violence, period,” Qumsiyeh said he believes “justice is the only way to peace.”
And “justice in this situation” means to allow all Palestinian Arab refugees “to go back to their homes and lands” and have full equality within what is now Israel, he said.
Kathy Heilbronner, assistant director of the Milwaukee Jewish Council for Community Relations, attended the presentation. She told The Chronicle afterward that she “was struck by what [Qumsiyeh] didn’t say.”
“He never talked about the terrorism that provoked the building of the [security barrier/fence/wall] in the first place,” nor about “the corruption of the Palestinian Authority,” she said.
The “most frightening part” of Qumsiyeh’s talk was that he seems to show that “the Palestinian mind-set is evolving” from support for a two-state solution — i.e., an Israel and a Palestine “side by side in security” — to a one state solution obliterating Israel as a Jewish state.
Heilbronner called Qumsiyeh’s historical presentation “revisionist history” containing “a lot of half-truths.”
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