Divestment: It's about real people

By Lina Saud '15

We grew up in a world intimately tied to the land of our parents and grandparents. Olive oil, in particular, has always been a staple of daily life. We ate bread soaked in olive oil with breakfast, lunch and dinner. We drank a spoonful of olive oil when we had a sore throat. We rubbed olive oil on our rashes, used it as a hair mask, and reached for it when our bikes have a squeaky wheel. Ours is an unexplainable cherishing of olive oil.

I only recognized where my Palestinian-American family’s obsession stemmed from in my travels to the West Bank to visit my grandparents. In this village near Ramallah, olive trees dot hills as far as the eye can see. To the right is Jerusalem, far in the distance. And a lone Israeli settlement stood a few hills away. Each summer we returned, and each summer it seemed that another hill was cleared of its olive trees, bearing another settlement on confiscated Palestinian land closer than the one before. When I was a teenager, my grandfather walked me to the olive orchards near his home.

“They’ve been annexed,” he explained in Arabic — this land, these olive trees, they were no longer his. I looked at the trees around me, and understood for the first time why olive oil was like gold to my family.

On April 20-22, University undergraduates will vote on the Princeton Divests Coalition’s referendum calling on the University to divest from multinational corporations that profit from the military occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of the Gaza Strip. As one of the few (or maybe only) Palestinian undergraduates on campus, my involvement stems from personal experiences above all else.

I have waited at Israeli-administered military checkpoints to travel throughout the West Bank: to get to Ramallah, from Ramallah to Bethlehem, and then crossing the border from Bethlehem to Jerusalem for Friday prayer. But it is not the hours spent at these checkpoints that make them contemptible as much as the humiliation exacted on Palestinian civilians who wait there. People are penned close together in a winding line, waiting to approach a metal detector surrounded by two soldiers with rifles and another soldier aiming a machine gun at the next Palestinian in line. Meeting the eyes of that soldier was probably the most disconcerting moment of my life — he saw no humanity in my eyes, the object of yet another security check. And I could certainly see none in his, aiming a machine gun at my chest.

Considering solely the experience at a typical West Bank checkpoint, it is no wonder that this conflict has not reached even the semblance of a solution. Forty-eight years of occupation have bred deep mistrust, scuttling hopes for a peaceful solution to the conflict. Dismantling this systematic oppression would create a space to improve relations. Divestment is a key step toward achieving this critical goal.

Perhaps the most antagonizing element of the occupation that I have witnessed is the constant Israeli patrol over Palestinian villages, aided by tools of discriminatory surveillance from which the referendum seeks to divest. A sniper tower stands at the outskirts of my grandparents’ village guarding a settlement highway that only Israelis—not Palestinians—are permitted to use, threatening anyone who comes close to it. A tank rides through the village regularly, backing up when children chase it and fling whatever rocks they could find at it. Once, when a group of teenagers were throwing rocks at the tank as it rolled down our street, they were blasted with a stun grenade. Coming from suburban New Jersey, I thought it was a bomb. Little did I know the unconventional tools of occupation.

I’ve known the occupation all too well, and I know that no Princeton student would support the repression it breeds. I speak here only to give perspective on an issue that has thus far been treated as a political debate and a set of statistics on this campus. The occupation of the West Bank is more than that. It is not the answer to Israel’s security concerns, nor does it make a peaceful two-state solution possible. It, instead, is the destruction of the Palestinian economy. It is the stifling of young Palestinians’ educational and employment opportunities by restricting freedom of movement via checkpoints and an arcane permit system, rendering a commute to work or school nearly impossible. It is the forced removal of Palestinians from their homes in al-Khalil (Hebron) to make way for an imported settler family. It is the confiscation of land and olive trees.

This is the Israeli military occupation that the divestment campaign hopes to bring to an end.

Lina Saud is a Wilson School major from Princeton, N.J. She can be reached at lsaud@princeton.edu.

Correction: Due to a reporting error, an earlier version of this article misstated the type of guns that Israeli soldiers use. They use rifles. The 'Prince' regrets the error.