The bitter and violent conflict between Jews and Palestinians will never be resolved until both sides stop teaching hatred to younger generations, a panel of Jewish and Palestinian students said Thursday.
The panel, consisting of two Jewish students, political science senior Kris Clancy and biology doctoral student Niv Sabeth, and two Palestinian students, finance senior Fatma Abdallah and accounting senior Suzanne Abu-Shaaban, answered questions from UH Air Force ROTC cadets after watching Encounter Point, a documentary about the war between the two groups.
Clancy said the first step in settling the dispute would be to increase awareness of the situation by showing the documentary to more people.
"It shows that there’s suffering on both sides," he said. "The movie, I think, should be shown a lot more often than this. I had never heard of it before this."
Clancy said on his first visit to Israel he was forced to leave after only four days because two of his friends were killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber.
Sabeth, who grew up in Israel, agreed with Clancy that the documentary would do more than the media to had shed light on the situation.
"It’s not something that we see a lot in the media," Sabeth said. "The media is usually not showing the other side."
Abu-Shaaban said not many people are aware of the problems Palestinians face, many of which are caused by poverty.
"We’re treated very unfairly over there," she said. "Our hospitals are being shut down because we don’t have water. We don’t have clean water. People are getting sicker and that creates a lot more anger. We don’t have any sort of economy."
Abdallah said her family has acknowledged and accepted the conflict.
"Their viewpoint toward it is, you know, Israel’s going to be there," she said. "They just have to deal with it… there’s still a lot of, I think, anger and a lot of injured and that causes all the problems."
Clancy said the violence in Israel has escalated, though his family does not notice it. His family only travels to Jerusalem on religious holy days, he said.
"Jerusalem, you really don’t go into the Arab quarter unless you’re an Arab and you really don’t go into the Jewish quarter if you’re not a Jew," he said. "It’s that segregated and it’s self-segregated."
While the group agreed the dispute would stop once the hatred does, they said the conflict has no chance of ending soon.
"Not anytime soon is there going to be peace. I think the problem is not exacerbated as much as between Jews and Palestinians as it is by the other Arab countries and by the United States," he said. "Our country’s support is so strong to Israel. Oftentimes, our congressmen and our senators are blind to what goes on over there. They’re taken over there and they see the wall. They see documentation, but they see it from just a military viewpoint."
