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February
2001
Letters
March
2001
Blaming the Victims? I was shocked at all the letters
in the last issue of Satya (February 2001) denouncing Hanan
Ashrawi and Satya’s decision to print her essay, “Anatomy
of Racism”(November/December 2000). The common theme of the
letters—that the Palestinians are largely responsible for the
violence directed against theme—is disturbing in its total lack
of compassion for the victims. A recent Village Voice article described
the pain and suffering endured by some of the 11,000 wounded, including
1,500 who are crippled for life. Yet we are told to blame the stone-throwing
civilians, rather than those behind the lethal M16s, helicopters and
tanks.
I think Ashrawi roils so many people because she speaks the truth
so eloquently. “All we want,” she says, “is for the
Israeli army to leave us alone, for the occupation to leave.”
She speaks of dignity and rights, and calls on Israeli leaders to
“chart the course of a future unfettered by inequities of the
past.”
I want to hear what Ashrawi and other Palestinians have to say, and
I applaud Satya for daring to publish her views. I challenge all compassionate
people to stop blaming the victims and begin addressing their grievances.
Joan Zacharias Chatham, NY
I applaud Satya’s publishing an article
by Hanan Ashrawi, and I’m disturbed at three letters
in the February issue which object to it.
One of the writers identifies herself as from ‘Jews For Animal
Rights.’ But it seems she can’t extend her compassion to
neighboring members of her own species who have been dispossessed
of their homes, humiliated and deprived for decades of a chance for
self-determination and a dignified life. Racist generalizations about
‘the Arabs’ and apocryphal stories about Palestinian children
with rifles can’t hide the fact that the Israeli state, armed
with helicopter gunships, advanced aircraft, cluster bombs, and all
the terrible panoply of modern armaments—including nuclear weapons—has
consistently used its military might to oppress another race and pursue
an aggressive policy of expansion. Israeli attacks on civilian populations,
not just Palestinians but Lebanese people, continue, unfortunately,
to be commonplace. Against this, the desperate youths who throw stones
are demonized by Israeli propagandists.
Another writer suggests that Satya is ‘anti-Jewish, anti-Israel’
(falsely equating the two) for publishing a moderate Palestinian voice.
No, it isn’t anti-Jewish to criticize the racist policies of
the Israeli state, which is constructing an apartheid-style Bantustan
system in the occupied territories, and has imposed one of the longest
military occupations in history, against the condemnation of the entire
world—excepting the U.S which is using Israel as a military surrogate
in its endeavors to control the region. That path will continue to
do more long-term harm to Israeli society, and to the Jews, than would
a policy of true peace and non-violence.
Laurie Kirby Woodstock, NY
February
2001
Hanan Ashrawi: The Third Rail
It’s very convenient for Hanan Ashrawi to
pretend that people in the Middle East woke up one morning and found
the poor Palestinians oppressed by the evil Israelis (see Ashrawi’s “Anatomy of Racism” in Satya November/December
2000). That’s because it conveniently
forgets the nearly 100 years of Arab obstinacy, rejectionism and terrorism
that contributed so much to this situation. From the rejected UN partition
plan in 1947 to the rejected Camp David agreement in 2000, from invasion
in 1948 to the Tanzim today, from the riots in 1936 to the Olympics
in 1972 to bus bombings in 1996, Palestinians bear a great deal of the
responsibility for the political situation they find themselves in.
I say this as someone who supports the Israeli government’s efforts
to come to an honest and just peace, and to end the occupation, which
is so damaging to both sides. But I wish that I could feel that the
Palestinian leadership, and the Palestinian people, felt the same way
about coming to an honest and just peace. I just don’t see the
evidence of that right now.
But the more interesting point to me is why Satya would decide
to publish such an article at all? After all, Hanan Ashrawi is someone
who can be counted on to go on CNN after every terrorist attack and
say something to the effect of, “Well, we regret the loss of life,
but the Israelis had it coming.” I thought Satya was interested
in issues of non-violence, compassion and peaceful solutions to political
problems, not in giving a forum to someone who has become a professional
apologist for the worst excesses of her people’s liberation struggle.
And if you felt the need to publish such a piece, you could at least
have contextualized it, perhaps by running a companion piece by one
of the many Israelis who are more committed to a just and lasting peace
than is Dr. Ashrawi.
Moti Rieber
Via the Internet
The Palestinian issue is the hardest one to deal with, so strong are
the lobbyists and people’s opinions. The fact of the matter is
that general American opinion seems to have shifted in the last decade
to one that tolerates the Palestinians in ways that old-time liberals
have refused to over the years—those who are eager supporters of
social justice issues everywhere except in Palestine. It is important,
because the issue is so controversial, to get people thinking in new
ways about the Palestinian issue, by allowing them to read what moderate
thinkers like Hanan Ashrawi say and think about the rights of Palestinians.
I don’t believe she has been on the barricades, but she does represent
a people who have been consistently oppressed ever since the Jews unilaterally
declared their independence 52 years ago. So it is her right to stand
up and demand justice—and she usually does it so articulately.
On the other hand, would critics be happy with an article by Palestinian
doctors who have been at the forefront of caring for those wounded
and
killed in recent clashes with the Israeli army? They would be just
as adamant.
The other month I was attending a production of David Hare’s “Via
Dolorosa” [a one-man play about the Israeli-Palestinian dynamic],
and the presenters staged a “peace cafe” after the production
to get people to talk about it. One Jewish man got up to give the traditional
“Never Again” speech, then the Palestinian in the cafe got
up to say, “That’s right, and never again will we Palestinians
not be heard from when our rights are being taken away.” The rights
of all oppressed people need to be addressed, and I think the American
public is approaching that measure of understanding (recent polls suggest
that critics are, in fact, now out of touch with general American feelings
on the subject).
Satya magazine is for airing views peacefully, and in that context
alternative views need to be read and discussed.
Terry Walz
Washington, DC
I was amazed, even shocked, that Satya printed an article
by Hanan Ashrawi.
It is patently absurd to state that the two Israeli soldiers “were
clearly infiltrated and planted.” She refers to these two young
men as “undercover agents and members of “the notorious Israeli
death squads.” That makes as much sense as the FBI sending a black
African to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan, or an Orthodox Rabbi to infiltrate
Aryan Nations. The two young men were literally torn apart by the gang
of Ramallah’s virile manhood.
By way of explaining how such a thing could happen Ms. Ashrawi would
have us believe that there was some rationale to the mob’s frenzy
of bloodlust, and thus some justification. The murder of these two
boys,
who took a wrong turn in their vehicle is, in my view, the defining
act of the Arab/Israel conflict and the psychology of Palestinian Arabia.
Fortunately, an Italian cameraman caught the event on film.
What I want to know is why did Satya publish an article by Hanan
Ashrawi? Is Satya anti-Jewish, anti-Israel? Are you not aware
that she is incapable of speaking the truth? Do you not see the patent
absurdity of what she writes?
Albert Kaplan
New York, NY
As the president of Jews for Animal Rights, I was shocked to see a slanderous
attack on Israel in your reprint of an article by Hanan Ashrawi. Her
analysis of Israel as a racist country exhausts the categories of Western
sociological thinking on dehumanization and racism. What is an article
like this doing in Satya?
It is the Arab countries who practice ethnic cleansing on minorities,
whether pagan cultures or Christians or Jews in Africa, Egypt, and other
Muslim counties. Arab slave traders still ply a slave trade which comes
up out of the Sudan and sells black minority groups as slaves to Saudi
Arabia and other Arab countries.
The strategy of the Arabs is to isolate Israel and turn its state into
a ghetto in the Middle East, and then to convince the West that Israel
has no moral legitimacy, that it represents Bantustan and apartheid,
and that the Holocaust never happened.
Hanan Ashrawi’s version of the two Israeli reservists who were
lynched and mutilated during a Palestinian Arab funeral is ridiculous.
Can anyone believe that two “undercover agents” would appear
in the company of an Israeli soldier who was in uniform and who would
immediately attract attention to themselves? Who can believe this nonsense?
However, even if they were undercover agents, every civilized country
in the world arrests spies and tries them in a court. They don’t
lynch and mutilate them.
As for the children martyrs, whatever their motives are for martyring
themselves, it has turned into a profitable business for their families.
Iraq pays $10,000 to the family of each martyred child, and $3,000
for
each injured child. (Arafat pays too, but apparently not as well.)
Ms. Ashrawi complains that “we are accused of sending our children
out to die.” No, they’re accused of selling their children
out to die, in a competition between the Palestine Authority and Sadaam
Hussein for the loyalty of these children.
Propaganda like the kind that Satya saw fit to pass on is choking
the Mideast Peace process. Palestinian children go to summer camps where
they learn how to shoot rifles at targets in the shapes of Israelis.
Three generations of Palestinian children in the West Bank have been
given a diet of outrageous propaganda passed on in their textbooks.
Arab newspapers are filled with anti-Semitic cartoons and caricatures
of Jews lifted out of early Nazi newspapers, and this propaganda has
been spread throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds.
It is sad, sad for me as a Jew and as an animal rights activist, to
see Satya play a role in this kind of propaganda.
Roberta Kalechofsky
Jews For Animal Rights
Marblehead, MA
Satya welcomes your letters. However, due to space, we are obliged
to edit letters for length as well as style. Please keep your letters
short and to the point.
