Refuting Randall Kuhn

When Israel Expelled Palestinians: What if it was San Diego and Tijuana Instead?
by Randall Kuhn

In the wake of Israel's invasion of Gaza, Israel's Defense Minister Ehud Barak made this analogy: "Think about what would happen if for seven years rockets had been fired at San Diego [1], California from Tijuana [2], Mexico."

Within hours scores of American pundits and politicians had mimicked Barak's comparisons almost verbatim. In fact, in this very paper on January 9 House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and House Minority Whip Eric Cantor ended an opinion piece by saying "America would never sit still if terrorists were lobbing missiles across our border into Texas or Montana." But let's see if our political and pundit class can parrot this analogy.

Think about what would happen if San Diego expelled most of its Hispanic, African American, Asian American, and Native American population, about 48 percent of the total, and forcibly relocated them to Tijuana? Not just immigrants, but even those who have lived in this country for many generations. Not just the unemployed or the criminals or the America haters, but the school teachers, the small business owners, the soldiers, even the baseball players.

What if we established government and faith-based agencies to help move white people into their former homes? And what if we razed hundreds of their homes in rural areas and, with the aid of charitable donations from people in the United States [3] and abroad, planted forests on their former towns, creating nature preserves for whites to enjoy? Sounds pretty awful, huh? I may be called anti-Semitic for speaking this truth. Well, I'm Jewish and the scenario above is what many prominent Israeli scholars say happened when Israel expelled Palestinians from southern Israel and forced them into Gaza. But this analogy is just getting started.

Kreplach:
The authors takes a comparison and then injects his own prejudical assumptions into the mix. First rockets were flying in from Tijuana and suddenly Mexicans are being expelled a la apartheid across the border.
What should be mentioned was that Pancho Villa ordered those Mexicans to leave their homes so he could vanqyish those pesky San Diegans. The author may be Jewish but has a limited grasp on what actually happened in 1948. Most Arabs who relocated to the West Bank or the Palestinian highlands did so on the advice of the leaders of 5 Arab Armies (Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt) A few were expelled and some fled in fear. In losing the war the Arab armies created vast tracts of empty land and created Israel.
Fearing complicity in the attempted genocide of Palestinian Jews, the R=Arabs remained there. The author out of naivete ignorance or malicousness fails to mention this in his “analogy”.
What if the United Nations kept San Diego's discarded minorities in crowded, festering camps in Tijuana for 19 years? Then, the United States invaded Mexico, occupied Tijuana and began to build large housing developments in Tijuana where only whites could live.

What if the Mexicans refused to integrate these Mexicans into the rest of the Mexican population? What if they were taught by rebels groups to hate San Diegans for the lack of integration instead of the Mexicans?? What if the Mexicans under UN aegis treated these refugees poorly? What if Mexiv=cans refused to talk with the San Diegans on these issues? And then The San Diegans beat off a Mexican attack and occupied Tijuana? Population pressure then caused many San Diegans to migrate to Tijuana.

And what if the United States built a network of highways connecting American citizens of Tijuana to the United States? And checkpoints, not just between Mexico and the United States but also around every neighborhood of Tijuana? What if we required every Tijuana resident, refugee or native, to show an ID card to the U.S. military on demand? What if thousands of Tijuana residents lost their homes, their jobs, their businesses, their children, their sense of self worth to this occupation? Would you be surprised to hear of a protest movement in Tijuana that sometimes became violent and hateful? Okay, now for the unbelievable part.

And then Mexico funded extremist terrorists to kill San Diegans in San Diego, Tijuana and everywhere else. How could you keep this conflict in check? With walls, checkpoints and separation!

Think about what would happen if, after expelling all of the minorities from San Diego to Tijuana and subjecting them to 40 years of brutal military occupation, we just left Tijuana, removing all the white settlers and the soldiers? Only instead of giving them their freedom, we built a 20-foot tall electrified wall around Tijuana? Not just on the sides bordering San Diego, but on all the Mexico crossings as well. What if we set up 50-foot high watchtowers with machine gun batteries, and told them that if they stood within 100 yards of this wall we would shoot them dead on sight? And four out of every five days we kept every single one of those border crossings closed, not even allowing food, clothing, or medicine to arrive. And we patrolled their air space with our state-of-the-art fighter jets but didn't allow them so much as a crop duster. And we patrolled their waters with destroyers and submarines, but didn't even allow them to fish.

What if Mexico also built a wall and surrounded this area? Considering the violent episodes that regulary pulsed the population fed by hate refusing to talk wouldn’t you want to keep them in check until they regained their sanity. Here sanity means accept San Diegos right to exist.

Would you be at all surprised to hear that these resistance groups in Tijuana, even after having been "freed" from their occupation but starved half to death, kept on firing rockets at the United States? Probably not. But you may be surprised to learn that the majority of people in Tijuana never picked up a rocket, or a gun, or a weapon of any kind.
No you wouldn’t be surprised that the Tijuanitas were launching missiles with a death philosophy based on an extreme version of their religion and funding from extremists in Mexico.

The majority, instead, supported against all hope negotiations toward a peaceful solution that would provide security, freedom and equal rights to both people in two independent states living side by side as neighbors. This is the sound analogy to Israel's military onslaught in Gaza today. Maybe some day soon, common sense will prevail and no corpus of misleading analogies abut Tijuana or the crazy guy across the hall who wants to murder your daughter will be able to obscure the truth. And at that moment, in a country whose people shouted We Shall Overcome, Ich bin ein Berliner, End Apartheid, Free Tibet and Save Darfur, we will all join together and shout "Free Gaza. Free Palestine." And because we are Americans, the world will take notice and they will be free, and perhaps peace will prevail for all the residents of the Holy Land.

The majority of Tijuaintas were polled frequently always expressed support for the most extreme elements out of a combination of fear and hatred of those extremists and taught hatred over generations. Free Gaza is shouted but Gaza really was free all along but CHOSE war.

© 2009 The Washington Times

Randall Kuhn is an assistant professor and Director of the Global Health Affairs Program at the University of Denver Josef Korbel School of International Studies. He just rd from a trip to Israel and the West Bank.