Who Has a Right to Security? What is True Security?

Rosemary Radford Ruether
May 24, 2006, Ramallah, Occupied Palestine

Both Israel and the United States have become states obsessed with security. Every form of oppression of those seen as potentially dangerous is justified by this need for security. In the U.S., especially since 9/11, extensive spying on the civilian population, wiretapping without warrants and collecting of data on such daily activities as books people buy and library circulation is being justified as necessary for security.
Israel has long justified the most extensive repression of Palestinians as necessary for its security. Most recently the building of a wall encircling the Palestinian areas of the West Bank, actually cutting deeply into Palestinian land and water aquifers, is claimed to be necessary to security, even though such a wall can certainly not prevent a suicide bomber from getting into Israel, but has the most dire consequences for restricting the access of Palestinians to their own land and water resources, employment, health care and education. Clearly the demand for absolute security for the powerful is in inverse relation to the lack of security for those on the underside of this power.
Palestinian life in the West Bank in particular has been characterized from the beginning of the Jewish state by increasing insecurity, in the sense of random violence and lack of any predictable rights to a secure daily life. This vulnerability is made manifest in hundreds of ways on a daily basis. For example, check points are a continual place where such lack of secure rights is evident. To gain a permit to pass the check point is endlessly difficult, and even when one has such a permit it can be arbitrarily denied by the soldiers at the check point. The ability to go to the hospital, to go to work, to attend school, to visit family is continually in jeopardy because of this arbitrariness.
But perhaps the most extreme example of such vulnerability and lack of security is the practice of the Israeli army of invasions into the Palestinian territories at any time, both through aerial bombing, targeted assassinations and military incursions. An example of this practice of incursions took place yesterday (May 24, 2006) in Ramallah where I was present for a week’s visit with friends working at the Friends International Center in Ramallah (FICR). A delegation of Swedish women was meeting with the directors of this center and myself at 2 PM in the afternoon. Suddenly loud explosions where heard outside, cries in the street, and loud gunfire just next to the Quaker meeting hall. Black smoke from explosions poured into the air. For more than an hour the center of downtown Ramallah was a war zone.
But perhaps the most extreme example of such vulnerability and lack of security is the practice of the Israeli army of invasions into the Palestinian territories at any time, both through aerial bombing, targeted assassinations and military incursions. An example of this practice of incursions took place yesterday (May 24, 2006) in Ramallah where I was present for a week’s visit with friends working at the Friends International Center in Ramallah (FICR). A delegation of Swedish women was meeting with the directors of this center and myself at 2 PM in the afternoon. Suddenly loud explosions where heard outside, cries in the street, and loud gunfire just next to the Quaker meeting hall. Black smoke from explosions poured into the air. For more than an hour the center of downtown Ramallah was a war zone.
What was transpiring was an incursion by undercover Israeli soldiers dressed as Palestinians who had come into Ramallah and entered a commercial building to arrest an Islamic Jihad leader. A crowd gathered outside the building and began to throw stones and to burn the vehicle that had transported the Israeli unit. Quickly fifteen Israeli military jeeps arrived and opened indiscriminate fire on the Palestinian crowd. Soon thirty-five Palestinians were injured (including eight children) and four dead.
Going out into the street after the Israelis withdrew was a shocking experience. Just two hours earlier the streets had been bustling with shoppers. Now it was littered with stones, every shop closed up and the stands selling fruits, nuts and falafel sandwiches disappeared or destroyed. An acrid smell of smoke lingered in the air. The livelihoods of hundreds of people had been set back, and families had to cope with the injuries and deaths of their young people. The whole town declared a day of mourning for the following day to bury the dead.
These kinds of incidents occur all the time throughout the Palestinian towns in what amounts to a continual siege. In the week of May 18-24, 2006 there were fifty military incursions into Palestinian communities in the West Bank and Gaza strip, killing nine and wounding scores. On May 20 there was an extra judicial assassination of a suspected militant in Gaza which killed three others and wounded four.
Who has a right to security? Who does not have a right to security? Surely security, in the sense of some basic protection and stability in daily life, is a basic need of all human beings, Palestinians as much as Israelis. Continually targeting Palestinians in the name of security, not only subjects Palestinians to a life of radical vulnerability, but does not actually contribute to the security of the Israelis. Such treatment generates a state of continual rage and resentment of Palestinians toward Israelis and is the seed bed for creating people willing to die to take revenge. Where does the cycle of violence stop?
True security lies in secure borders within oneself, to be firmly rooted in what is just and life giving. It flows from this inward security to the promotion of good relations with one‘s neighbors, recognizing that what is good for oneself is the same as what is good for one‘s neighbor and the welfare of both are inextricably interconnected. To love one‘s neighbor as oneself is the basis of true security.

Dr. Rosemary Radford Ruether teaches at the Claremont Graduate University in California and is the co-author of The Wrath of Jonah: the Crisis of Religious Nationalism in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.