Discussion of Palestinian Human Rights Taboo at Atlanta School Fair

By Karin Brothers

The day of the 1992 Atlanta International School's Fall Fair started out bright and balmy. Booths were set up, food concessions laid out and families trickled in. Before long, however, a small, angry knot of parents formed and went en masse to the school offices. A young administrator who went out to investigate the problem ran back shouting, "The PLO are here! Terrorists are here!"

His reaction was a tribute to media stereotyping. Two women in their sixties, both wives of medical doctors who had worked in the Middle East, had set up a card table displaying a handful of T-shirts and small piles of pamphlets, buttons and postcards showing the intifada. A handmade "Palestinian Human Rights Campaign" sign was on the table, and the same words were on a bright banner over two Palestinian women making falafel.

The fair's organizer, a sensitive German woman, was in tears. The besieged principal, describing himself as a "political animal," decreed that all the signs of the human rights organization would have to be taken down. The women could remain, without the signs, if they so chose.

The group of parents, still not satisfied and now augmented by a rabbi, stood 10 feet across from the card table and glared at the two women. Rita, who is English, confided that she had put up with far worse than that. She had received death threats for making similar appearances representing the Atlanta branch of the Palestine Human Rights Campaign.

Having personally witnessed the situation in the Middle East, however, she and her American-born colleague, Jean Rogers, felt committed to continuing their work on behalf of human rights for Palestinians. After about an hour of no apparent student interest in the political materials, the two doctors' wives departed. The falafel stand, now without its banner, remained open and was mobbed until the end of the day.

At the time, they and I, with a child in the school, accepted the principal's verdict without question. No one wanted to cause school officials embarrassment. What had begun as a fun day already had turned ugly enough. Later, however, came the second thoughts: Would anyone have had the nerve to demand that a Jewish human rights group remove its sign in a free country?

In the unlikely event that someone did, would a Jewish human rights group have responded with such docility? Or would it have gone to the media and confronted the school with a scandal, and perhaps a lawsuit, for riding roughshod over the Jewish group's First Amendment rights?

Every reader of this publication knows the answers. Our society has been highly sensitized to slights against Jews–far more so than to infringements, real or perceived, against the rights of any other minority.

What is more complex, however, is the reaction of the Jewish parents in this situation. Why were they angry? Did they really believe the Palestinians have no human rights complaints? Or did they feel the Palestinians had no right to publicize their situation in the United States, where criticism of Israeli actions or policies so offends some American Jews?

Why was the implicit accusation of Israeli wrongdoing so threatening? Must such abuse charges be treated as anti-Semitic even though they are confirmed annually in the U.S. State Department's human rights report? By this time, anyone who reads a newspaper or watches television newscasts knows that such accusations are true. Yet they are never discussed in public, and only warily with friends.

To compare: Is it anti-German to discuss the Holocaust? Or merely a discussion of tragic fact? As the Holocaust is discussed without fear of offending Germans, the Israeli abuse of Palestinians should be an open topic for public examination, particularly since it is occurring right now and can be stopped by American action, unlike abuses from the pages of history.

Is there a connection between the persecution suffered by the Jews at the hands of the Germans and that being inflicted on the Palestinians by the Israelis? Implicit in many Holocaust memorials is the attitude that the Jews killed in Europe "earned" for other Jews the right to settle in Israel. But did the Holocaust give the Israelis the right to mistreat the Palestinians, depriving them of the rights to their lives, their livelihoods, their land and their homes? In fact, many Jewish scholars feel that the misuse of the Holocaust to justify abuse of the Palestinians is spiritually damaging for the Jewish people.

A Cold-Blooded Shooting

The (Manchester) Guardian Weekly of May 9, 1993 carried a shocking eyewitness account of the cold-blooded shooting of Palestinian children in the streets of Gaza by Israeli soldiers positioned four to five stories above the streets. (See "Other Voices," page 98, in the July/August 1993 Washington Report.)

The children were engaged in no harmful activities. One was coming out of his house, another was getting into a car. There were no disturbances, no shouting, no rocks thrown. Just the sound of high velocity fire every 5 to 10 minutes as the soldiers picked the children off the street with their shots.

These killings were mentioned in The New York Times in the caption of a picture on April 29th. The photograph showed a youth throwing a rock minutes before his death. There was no mention of Israeli soldiers elsewhere sniping at totally innocent, unsuspecting children. The reality, however, is that such sniping is commonplace. But the facts of the Israeli occupation remain unacknowledged, unreported–censored–in this country by those afraid of offending the sensitivities of a large segment of the Jewish community.

Noam Chomsky, an outspoken Jewish American defender of Palestinian rights, wrote sardonically in Z magazine in May 1993 that the United States government believes "the Palestinians, being useless for U.S. strategic purposes, have no right of self-determination." Perhaps that explains why few countries found it in their interest during World War II to help the Jewish people.

Harvey M. Meyerhoff, chairman of the Holocaust Memorial Council, has said that visitors should leave the Holocaust Memorial Museum with "the determination to speak out and act against injustice and racism and the denial of basic human rights" not only of Jews, but of all persecuted people. But the suffering will have been in vain if injustice is only recognized when it is politically expedient to do so.

Karin Brothers is a free-lance writer based in Toronto.