Washington Week: Student Voices (O)

Milligan College speaker probes 'the real terrorists' in the Middle East
By Amanda Moore
The Stampede (Milligan College)
01/02/2007

(U-WIRE) MILLIGAN COLLEGE, Tenn. — Palestinians are a misrepresented people. That's the message Mike Rivage-Seul presented in Convocation Tuesday morning in his lecture, "The Middle East: Who are the Real Terrorists?" at Milligan College.

A Catholic professor of religion and general studies at Berea College, Rivage-Seul traveled to the Middle East this summer for a three-week faculty development project. The situation he found was almost exactly opposite to the story Americans hear through the media and through the Bush administration, he said.

"That story would have it that vastly out-numbered, basically peace-loving Jewish Israelis find themselves under attack by insane, blood-thirsty Palestinian terrorists. The truth is nearly the opposite," Rivage-Seul said. "And that's the thesis I want to develop today. It argues that vastly outgunned and basically peace-loving Palestinians find themselves under attack by land-hungry Jewish Israeli terrorists."

Rivage-Seul supported his thesis with three considerations drawn from simple logic, history and elementary morality.

Beginning with simple logic, Rivage-Seul said it basically comes down to a simple analysis of power.

"Who in Palestine is threatening whom?" he asked.

Supporting his claim that Palestinians are the victims, he said that while Israel is a nation-state, is part of the U.N. and is intimately involved in global mass media, Palestine has none of these benefits.

He also said that the U.S. never criticizes Israel, not even about the construction of a 20-foot wall to enclose Palestinians in a small area, cutting them off from their families, work and all of Jerusalem.

Explaining the history of Israel and Palestine, Rivage-Seul said Israelis are illegal occupiers of the Palestinian land. Their current claim to the Holy Land stems from the 1880s, when the Zionists began a movement to find a homeland for the Israelis and decided Palestine would be "a land without people for a people without land."

Palestine was not a land without people, though, Rivage-Seul said. There were 660,000 Arabs, 590,000 Muslims, 89,000 Christians and 84,000 Jews living in Palestine, according to a 1920-census.

After WWII, the U.N. cut Palestine apart and gave 55 percent of the land to Israelis, Rivage-Seul said. Massive protests from Palestinians caused the U.N. to postpone this partition, but Israel defied the postponement, driving out the British and Palestinians from the land.

Since Israel's occupation of the land, Palestinians have been fighting to keep what little land they have left, he said. Although the U.N. has ordered Israel out of the land they have gained during their battles, the U.S. has supported Israel's occupation of the land.

"Since when are illegal occupiers victims and those whose land is being occupied victimizers?" he asked.

In his lecture, Rivage-Seul also addressed the role suicide bombers play in the violence of the Middle East. He argued that instead of initiating the violence, they are responding to the structural violence set up by the Israelis, the "social, economic, political and cultural arrangements, such as those represented by colonialism and military occupation."

"Structural violence can cause deaths as surely and predictably as if guns were fired into the body of each baby that dies," he said. "Palestinians would argue that the structural violence of Israeli invasion and occupation is what has stimulated Palestinian resistance — a second level of violence, even when it takes the form of suicide bombing."

When considering the actions of Palestinians, he said, it's important to remember Noam Chomsky's principle of universality, which says any demand I make on you, I should have to make on myself.

"It means that obligations I define for you should also apply to me. If it's wrong for you to kill innocent civilians, it's also wrong for me. If it's against the law for you to torture, it's also illegal for me. If it's immoral for you to possess nuclear weapons, it's also immoral for me."

Any solution to this problem, he said, must provide justice tempered by mercy and compassion, but based on admission of guilt. This is similar to the African concept of Ubuntu, exemplified in South Africa at the end of the apartheid.

Milligan students can help bring this solution, he said, by supporting Palestine and lobbying their congressmen on behalf of the Palestinians. To learn more about the issue, Rivage-Seul recommends Elias Chacour's "Blood Brothers" and Chomsky's "Hegemony or Survival."

Rivage-Seul lectured again Tuesday evening, presenting "The Unknown Jesus of Mark's Gospel."

His basic point was that the oppressed of the world identify with the life of Jesus more than the privileged. Jesus was many of the things considered negative in today's society. He was the son of an unwed teenage mother, an immigrant in Egypt, of the working class, a friend of the prostitutes and drunkards, considered to be an irreligious person, under government investigation since birth, a victim of torture, a victim of capital punishment and an opponent of empire.

Rivage-Seul was introduced to his radical way of thinking during his graduate work in Rome, seeing how critical they were of the U.S. and how different their religion was. He is also highly inspired by liberation theology, which focuses on Christ not only as the Savior, but as Liberator of the oppressed.

He is married to Peggy Rivage-Seul, director of the Women's Studies program at Berea College. The couple has three children.

Rivage-Seul and his wife taught in the Latin American Studies Program for four semesters before this year. Milligan students Danielle Bush, Andy Ross, Adam Farmer and graduate Irena Loloci studied under the couple

For a more thorough description of Rivage-Seul's convocation lecture, visit http://www.globaljusticecenter.org/articles/betterworld_palestine.htm.

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