Washington Report, December 1988, Page 33

Other People's Mail

"Gentlemen don't read other people's mail," an Idealistic American official exclaimed between World Wars I and II as he abolished US cryptographic counterintelligence programs. Times change, however, and some letters by or to other people are as Informative for our readers as anything we might write ourselves.

Congressman Speaks Out

Dear Secretary George Shultz: August 3, 1988

I am writing to express my deep concern and sense of outrage over the ongoing abuses being perpetrated by Israeli soldiers against Palestinian civilians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Since coming to Congress, I have been a strong supporter of the state of Israel. I join with you in condemning the PLO's continued use of terrorism. Clearly, peace will not come to the Middle East unless the PLO and its Arab allies renounce terrorism and accept Israel's right to exist within secure borders. However, the Palestinian people have a basic right to self-determination. Our policy should acknowledge and support this right.

While I remain firm in my support for Israel, I do not condone their present policy to deal with the Palestinian uprising. The indiscriminate use of beatings, live ammunition, and tear gas against the civilian population should be loudly condemned. I am also profoundly disturbed over Israel's continued policy of deporting Palestinian activists. I am gratified that the State Department has continued to speak out against Israel's deportation policy.

Enclosed please find a copy of an article that appeared today in the Washington Post. The incident outlined in this article (reporting a fatal heart attack suffered by a 67-year-old Palestinian-American, Rebhi Barakat Kaid of Columbus, OH, who was visiting the West Bank when three Israeli soldiers ordered him to climb a steep flight of stairs to paint over anti-Israeli graffiti on a school wall) is an outrage. Unfortunately, this tragedy was not an isolated incident.

I respectfully urge that the State Department conduct a thorough investigation of the incident outlined in the attached article as well as other incidents of abuses committed by the Israeli army in the occupied territories. As a nation dedicated to the protection of human rights for all peoples, the United States cannot remain silent on this issue.

I want to thank you in advance for your time and consideration of this important matter. I look forward to your response.

Respectfully, J.A. Traficant, Jr., Member of Congress, OH.

Palestinians Deserve Our Help

Editor, Washington Post: November 13, 1988

Some myths die with a bang; others die with a whimper. But I was astonished to see one laid to rest so gently in the back pages of the Post that it barely caught the eye: the Israel Creation Myth ("Likud's Would-Be Allies Want to Deport Arabs," Nov. 4). As a college student in the 1970s, I used to plead with my classmates to understand the Palestinians as a people driven from their homes by an invading European army. Not so, I was told: The Palestinians who left the lands conquered by the Zionists in 1948 did so voluntarily, or at the urging of the Arab states; those who wanted to stay were welcome. My classmates were convinced that Israel's founding was a humane and noble event, and certainly no excuse for the explosions of Palestinian violence that followed. I could only mutter in an answer that at least my family's village had been depopulated by force; my father and grandfather had been there and had told me.

Now, Rehavam Zeevi, newly elected Israeli Knesset member and former West Bank military chief, publicly recalls his assistant commander's orders during the 1948 war regarding the Arab populations: "Expel them." The commander, Yitzhak Rabin, now Israel's defense minister, told the same story in his 1979 memoir and ascribed the expulsion policy to Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, "but the (expulsion) sections were deleted by an official censorship committee. Israeli historians have confirmed similar accounts." "We came to conquer land and settle it," Mr. Zeevi argues. "if transfer (i.e. expulsion) is not ethical, then everything we have done here for 100 years is wrong."

I had the good fortune to be born an American. I want to ask my fellow citizens: If armed invaders from a foreign land forced you from your homes at gunpoint, sending you destitute to spend the rest of your lives in squalid refugee camps, would you fight back? And if they branded you criminals and terrorists for fighting, would you fight on? The answers the Palestinians have given to these questions are the origins of the PLO, the Palestinian uprising and what the Post's editorials call the Palestinians' "rejectionist" positions.

So, one more of the myths that have fueled our country's massive support of Israel has quietly passed away. I am glad it is gone, because it removes another barrier to American understanding of the Palestinians as they really are: a small, perhaps unimportant people, driven from their homes like animals, vilified and victimized by most of the world for 40 years, who yet refuse to die. Instead of the scorn and hatred we have heaped upon them, they deserve our compassion—and perhaps even our help.

Jamil Nasir, Silver Spring, MD.

Hospitalized Victim Needs Help

Editor, Charleston Gazette: September 6, 1988

One month ago a young man, Mohammad Abu Aker, from the Dheisheh refugee camp, was shot outside his home by Israeli soldiers. He was shot in the stomach and the bullet destroyed most of his intestines.

Mohammad was expected to die after only a few days. Miraculously, this determined young man clung to life and even began to rally and gain weight.

The doctors at Makassad Hospital made contact with the Naim Foundation, the Palestine Human Rights Campaign, and other humanitarian organizations, and secured a doctor and a hospital in Boston who agreed to perform an intestinal transplant on Mohammad immediately. This operation is very difficult and very costly.

Despite the fact that the surgeon, Dr. Sahyoun, has generously offered his services "pro bono," thousands of dollars will be needed to cover Mohammad's treatment and prolonged stay in the hospital.

The Naim Foundation has taken on a commitment to raise the funds necessary to save Mohammad's life.

Please send your tax-deductible donation to the Naim, Foundation, 2812 Connecticut Ave., NW, Suite 3, Wash., DC 20008. Thank you for caring.

Dirar Ahmad, Charleston, WV.

US Should Re-Examine Aid To Israel

To the Carroft County (NH) Independent: September 7, 1988

I commend Ellen Fleischmann and John Benvenuto of Sandwich for relating their experiences and showing their slides depicting life in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where they taught at the Friends School in Ramallah. I share with them their outrage at the brutality inflicted upon the native Palestinians by their Israeli occupiers, and their sense of shame that this occupation is being funded by huge donations of foreign aid given by the American government under intense pressure from the Israeli lobby.

If an aroused American public does not soon effectuate a change, the American system of government will soon deteriorate into government by

There is no justification for ' this disproportionate amount of American foreign aid to a country which insists upon aggrandizement. It is time we reexamined the extraordinary aid given to the State of Israel out of taxpayers' money; how it is spent and the reasons why our representatives vote to give it.

Phillip J. Ganem, Wolfeboro, NH.

USS Liberty Memorial Library

To The Editor, the Milwaukee Journal.-August 22, 1988

The Milwaukee Journal's July 7 editorial regarding the naming of a new library in Grafton, Wisconsin "The 05 Liberty Memorial Library" entitled "How honorable Grafton effort turned ugly," demands a forthright answer. Your editorialist asserts that Grafton's village officials are "insensitive." I hope this doesn't imply the Milwaukee Journal practices journalism with an eye to hurt feelings rather than the bold pursuit of truth.

That aside, the USS Liberty story/"cause" does, indeed, have a "darker side," one that self-proclaimed journalistic first amendment defenders would be well advised to address, including your editorialist! From June 7, 1967 to the present, the two-hour Israeli sea and air attack on a Navy ship has been "pegged," "lost," misrepresented, ignored—CENSORED—by all but a few media people. With commendable exceptions, first amendment journalistic "gate keepers" tacitly, if not overtly, rejected their constitutional assignment.

One citation, The 1968 World Almanac events chronology, ignores the USS Liberty attack. Of course, the 1969 Alamanac recounts in summary detail North Korea's early '68 seizure of the USS Pueblo intelligence ship but, there is nothing about the almost identical situation of the Liberty. It seems obvious, then, the WorldAlmanac editors were sensitive to "insensitivity," so much so that they willingly re-wrote history.

The issue is not library benefactor Benjamin Grob's alleged right-wing affinities, but the "ugly" project to enforce public silence—to suborn the first amendment. I submit that had the USS Liberty story been honestly reported, had the US Navy been allowed to conduct and make public an honest investigation, and had proper public respect been accorded the killed and injured sailors, the story would have taken a proper place in naval annals and an appropriate place in the public mind. But far, far too often narrow, self-interest factions decide what the public should know, if anything.

They're wrong. It's not what Americans know that will hurt them. It's what they don't know that harms. With the media's acquiescence, what has been created is a stubborn, smoldering bog fire. It will take more than the Milwaukee Journal's fire brigade to put it out.

George Green, Oakland, CA.

Diplomatic Immunity in New York

To President Ronald Reagan: October 14, 1988

The newspapers carried a small article on the Israeli government trying to pressure the United States to give diplomatic immunity to some of the Israeli employees in its 250-person military purchasing office in New York. Since then your administration has done so, although some of their activities have been questionable and they are subject to US prosecution.

I protest granting diplomatic immunity to any of these people just as I protest all of the other acts granting special privileges to Israel. Our so called "special relationship" is being used and misused and is destroying our American system.

As Americans, we are supposed to support democracy, human rights, and individual freedoms. As an American reads about the horrible, unjust treatment of the Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories, how can he possibly justify the decisions and activities of the Israelis?

Our support is a disgrace and I have felt guilt and shame as I have read of our past dealings and our role in enabling past Israeli policies to be carried out.

Past pre-election promises and maneuvering have set precedents and policies that now tie the hands of our officials. Americans are made to look like naive fools to people who would like to look to us for leadership. Beatings, killings, imprisonments, humiliations, economic restrictions, strict curfews of entire villages, destruction of homes, and other methods used by the Israelis are not what Americans want to support or be linked with.

Our own system of government is being endangered by those who act to use our election system to benefit Israeli interests. American interests are disregarded in their blind devotion to the Zionist dream that denies the reality of millions of Palestinians. American politicians who unthinkingly cater to the pro-Israel lobby in their search for financial rewards tend to forget the true function of their offices and the consequences of their acts.

Please take a stand and deny immunity to this group.

Florence Richards, Whittier, CA.

Zionism and the Holocaust

To Frank Breckbill, Houston, TX: September 1, 1988

Thank you for letting me read the Houston Zionist rabbi's two-page, single-spaced reaction—one can hardly say "reply"—to your inquiry for "a Jewish study on the Zionist connection to the holocaust." He could readily have referred you to your local public library for Ben Hecht's Perfidy or Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem. Both trials revealed Zionist success, during World War II, in persuading the Nazis to release a significant number of healthy, bright Jews to migrate to Palestine for "nation building." This was in return for Zionist collaboration in keeping millions of others ignorant of, or non-resistant to, the plans for their own impending extermination.

Such revelations, like references to the non-Jewish millions slaughtered in the Nazi death camps, undercut the simplistic "Jews vs. non-Jews" interpretation of the holocaust (and of human relations generally) which is used to justify the establishment and expansion of Israel as an exclusively Jewish haven from "inevitable" anti-Semitism.

Hecht and Arendt have suffered accusations of "treachery" (not of inaccuracy!) by their Zionist fellow-Jews for publishing the fruits of their scrupulous research. That the rabbi should malign you as "planting seeds of anti-Semitism" is (while I would not minimize your heartache) comparatively bearable.

Your rabbi's dragging in of your support of security for Israel within pre-June, 1967, borders as evidence of your enmity is interesting. More so is his seeming confusion over his own national identity. On page 1, regarding some "mottoes that are spouted by individual Jews," he comments that "Jews have freaks just like Americans have freaks." And on page 2 he says of "the Jewish people and Israel" that "we do not want to commit suicide—just as Americans do not want to commit suicide." Does he carry over this distinction between "Jewish" and "American" into his own situation? If so, into which category does he place his own primary loyalty? Whatever his answers, don't let anybody distract you from your concentration on contributing toward a future in which Jews and everyone else are guaranteed equal security everywhere.

Rev. L. Humphrey Walz, Janesville, WI.

Blame Congress

Editor, Los Angeles Times.-August 20, 1988

Personally I blame members of Congress for allowing themselves to become clones for this lobby. When a lobby for a foreign government (Israel) has more influence with members of Congress than the working men and women of this country, something is very wrong.

The bottom line is the money they receive from AIPAC to build their campaign funds. One can only hope that one day the majority in Congress will put integrity and backbone ahead of the almighty dollar when voting for an AIPAC-sponsored bill.

Janet Schmieder, Los Angeles, CA.