CPTnet
June 24, 2004

IRAQ REFLECTION: The next Palestine

by Greg Rollins

[NOTE: Greg Rollins worked with CPT's Hebron team in the West Bank for three
years and currently works with CPT's Iraq team. ]

Iraqis talk about becoming the next Palestine.

In general, the Arab world loves to harp about the issue of Palestine, but
they find Palestinian refugees a bother. Many Iraqis are afraid of becoming
the next bother. They are also afraid of becoming an endless smoldering
affair, of becoming another example of the politically sticky Western
interest in the Middle East.

     Iraqis have every right to be afraid of these things. Listening to
Iraqis talk about suffering under the hands of Coalition troops and policies
is like listening to Palestinians talk about the Israeli occupation. At the
hands of their occupiers, both experience similar ordeals.

Many Iraqi families, have a father, a son, brother, or even a cousin who
lives and works somewhere else in the Middle East or the west. He sends his
money back to Iraq so his family might eat, go to school or buy clothes.
This same thing has been happening in Palestine for over fifty years.

Right now, there is hope that Iraq will become its own, independent nation.
There is a future. There is a timeline and structure. There is the newly
elected Prime Minister and the cabinet he has formed, a cabinet that has
begun to criticize the U.S. and the unbalanced power structure it installed.

In the latter half of the 1990s, there was hope in Palestine. The Israeli
government gave the Palestinian Authority (PA) some hope of land, power and
status. Palestinians legally voted Yasser Arafat into office. The PA took
control of cities and set up ministries. Today, the Israeli government
ignores the PA. It uses its military to control the Palestinians and
achieve its goals in the West Bank and Gaza. If the U.S. so desires, at any
time it too could override--even dismantle--the new Iraqi government for the
sake of its own interests. It has announced that the international military
force wil remain under U.S. rather than Iraqi authority.

  There are other parallels: detention techniques used by the two
militaries, checkpoints, villages encircled with barbed wire, the rules and
regulations. But the Iraqi people are not the next Palestinians yet. Right
now, what separates them from the Palestinian people is their spirit. The
U.S. occupation has not crushed the spirit of the Iraqi people as the
Israeli occupation has crushed the Palestinians. Thinking like victims, many
Palestinians believe they cannot help themselves, that others must help
them. Most Iraqi people have yet to reach that point, but if no real change
appears, if they fail to obtain real independence from their occupiers they
may lose their spirit too.

     If they do not achieve real independence, the Iraqi people will
eventually declare their own Intifada (shaking off.) The tension and
fighting will continually grow and diminish like a tide. The news from Iraq
will become depressing and tedious. The world will look somewhere else. This
is what most Iraqis are afraid of: they are afraid of turning into a cause
people have forgotten.