Richard Arens

Might Oscar Wilde have called this profile: "The Importance of Being Richard?" We'll never know, but what is sure is that there are many admirers of Richard Arens in the U.S. and elsewhere who believe it is very important that he is not Moshe.

These are two men who must be added to the long list of those brothers, beginning with Cain and Abel, who have had startingly different outlooks on the world.

Moshe Arens, of course, is the Israeli Defense Minister who throughout his political career has been a super hawk—one of the flinty few who even voted against the Egypt—Israel treaty on the grounds that Begin was being too soft on the Arabs.

Richard, on the other hand, is the University of Bridgeport professor who has long specialized in international human rights—and who has been arguing for years that Moshe and his ilk are guilty of violating the human rights of Arabs in the West Bank, Lebanon, and other parts of the Middle East.

Drifting Apart

The two brothers have seen little of one another, 'mostly at family funerals," Professor Arens says—since Richard went off to school in England at the age of 14, leaving the younger Moshe back home in Lithuania. Later, when Richard was attending college in the U.S., Moshe arrived there to go to high school. After both served stints in the American army during World War II, Richard decided to sink his roots in the U.S., while Moshe went to Palestine.

"At the time Moshe sailed off," Dr. Arens says, "I was also sympathetic to the notion that the survivors of the Nazi camps, who sought a home of their own, should have one. But I was not yet fully aware of the fact that the homeland they were selecting for themselves was one already inhabited by another people, and that what they sought was not a venture in which they would join the people already there in raising the general prosperity of the land, but rather gaining dominance of it."

Despite his growing doubts about Israel, Dr. Arens did not concern himself much with happenings in the Middle East for the next 25 years, devoting himself to teaching and practicing law, while getting deeply involved in the civil rights movement—litigating against segregation, and becoming the first lawyer to raise a case of juvenile rights before the U.S. Supreme Court. But as he began drifting more into the field of international human rights, he once again became seriously disturbed at what he saw the Israeli government doing.

"In the 1970s I visited Paraguay to check on reports that Indians were being systematically exterminated," says Dr. Arens. "The Paraguayans were, indeed, sending armed parties into the forest to round up Indians, mowing down some and forcing others into what amounted to slave labor. I was horrified to see that the military men were using Israeli Uzzi submachine guns. Later I discovered that in Guatamala, which was also victimizing Indians, the favorite weapon against them was the Israeli Galil rifle. But when I brought these matters up with Israeli officials, they acted as though they couldn't care less."

His interest in the Indians made him think increasingly about the Palestinians in the West Bank, whom he saw as a peasantry which was being both oppressed and dispossessed. "I told myself I could not turn my back upon another persecuted group just because they were being persecuted by people of my own ethnic background," he says.

Going Public

But it was the Israeli invasion of Lebanon which finally "galvanized" him, as he puts it, into speaking out in public for the first time. He kicked off by giving an interview to a newspaper, and since then has accepted a flood of invitations to speak at a variety of forums all over the country. He also writes Op-Ed articles, has become a consultant to the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and has taken actions through the U.N. and other bodies to try to protect the rights of Palestinians who were being detained by Israel in camps in south Lebanon.

"I felt I could not maintain silence without losing my self-respect," he says. "Many Jews, unfortunately, are imitating the so-called 'good Germans' under Hitler, who did not like what was taking place, but felt that to denounce the actions of their own government was wholly improper. They figured that the bad actions of Hitler would cease—but instead, they snowballed. Their attitude was later called 'the crime of silence."'

Dr. Arens has received a substantial amount of "hate mail," he acknowledges, and has also had threats and warnings. "Once someone sent me a ticking package, which turned out to have only a clock in it." His enemies have also sent letters to the university administration suggesting he is unqualified for his job.

Dr. Arens received his B.A. from Michigan, and a J.D., LL.M. from Yale. He has been a Fulbright Professor of Law, taught at several universities prior to coming to Bridgeport, and has authored, edited and contributed to a number of books on legal subjects. He is a director and past president of Survival International, U.S.A.; a member of Amnesty International, and on the advisory board of Search For Equality and Justice in Palestine.