BYU NewsNet - Viewpoint: A fight for freedom

Nabil Sharaf

Jerusalem

Freedom is what 3 million Palestinians will never experience.

The first time I felt free was during my freshman year at BYU. Since I was five-years-old, I knew that "the men in green," Israeli Soldiers who roamed the streets of every neighborhood, could some day kill me because I am a Palestinian.

When I became a teenager, I was taught by my parents to switch sidewalks if I saw Israeli soldiers on my sidewalk. I remember being scared and praying that they wouldn't notice me as I passed. I didn't want to be slapped around and humiliated like my friends. I didn't want to be detained, because my neighbor never returned home after being detained. I wished I was 80-years-old, because old men were seldom harassed.

I remember the swat team storming our house when I was 12, as part of a "routine search" of the neighborhood. I remember my nine-year-old sister hiding behind me, and losing control of her bodily fluids, as I tried to gather courage to face the masked men and tell them that only my sister and I were in the house.

Liberties taken for granted by Americans were only a dream to me. Freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom of the press, freedom of travel, freedom of commerce, and freedom of assembly were forbidden for Palestinians. I couldn't even be a Boy Scout, because it was forbidden for Palestinians.

Today, more than 2 million Muslim and Christian Palestinians are not allowed to go Jerusalem to worship at their temples. Only residents of Jerusalem are allowed to do so.

While the concept of military tribunals is shocking to some Americans, it has been the norm for Palestinians for the last 35 years. Many are incarcerated for a period of six months with no trial, simply for expressing their views, or breaking the censorship laws outlined for the press.

The Israeli parliament passed a law allowing security agents to exert "moderate physical pressure" on Palestinian detainees, during interrogation. Many detainees never make it back from interrogation.

Palestinians are not terrorists, nor do they want to kill Jews. They merely want to have the God-given right of freedom. They want to be treated as human beings, and not as second-class citizens.

Palestinians have been left with no other choice than to fight for their freedom. No college graduate can sit at home and watch television, after working hard for his degree. No man can watch the government confiscate his land and demolish his house for "security reasons" without taking action. No father can watch his children starve without taking action.

Unfortunately some have taken the extreme, and have sided with Hamas or other organizations that carry out suicide bombings. Many Palestinians are against the targeting of civilians, and are appalled by such acts, but at the end of the day, the Palestinian civilian death toll is three times as large as the Israeli death toll.

Amnesty International said the following in its latest report: "Human rights violations and grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions over the past 18 months have been committed daily, hourly, even every minute, by the Israeli authorities against Palestinians. Israeli forces have consistently carried out killings when no lives were in danger. More than 600 Palestinian homes have been systematically demolished, making thousands homeless, the vast majority children. The closures of towns and villages deny freedom of movement and appear to be set up to harass, collectively punish, intimidate and humiliate the Palestinian people."

With their towns in ruins, and an Israeli prime minister accused of committing war crimes by the International Court of Justice, the Palestinians decided to do what the Americans did against the British, and what the French did against the Nazis. Resist the occupation and fight for freedom.