Articles
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, April 2009, pages 39-40
Other People's Mail
Compiled by Kate Hilmy and Delinda Hanley
Academic Freedom For All
To President Lee Bollinger, Columbia University, Feb. 20, 2009
ON A NUMBER of occasions since becoming president of Columbia University you have expressed your views in public on questions of academic freedom in the Middle East. Yet you have remained silent on the actions by Israel that deny that freedom to Palestinians.
These actions include Israel’s continuing blockade of Gaza, the imposing of barriers, checkpoints, and closures around and within the West Bank that make academic life unworkable, the denial of exit visas to Palestinian scholars offered fellowships abroad or invited to international conferences, including scholars invited to Columbia, and the recent three-week war against Gaza that included not only the bombing of Palestinian schools and colleges, with great loss of life, but the widespread destruction of the material and social fabric on which academic life depends.
We, as Columbia and Barnard faculty, ask you now to make public your opposition to these actions and your support for the academic freedom of Palestinians.
Signed by more than 127 faculty members at Columbia and Barnard Universities.
Palestinian Ghetto
To the International Herald Tribune, Jan. 15, 2009
Comments and letters published by the IHT advocate the rebuilding of Gaza as a means to weaken the Palestinian radicals.
But the make over of a ghetto still leaves a ghetto. Gaza is a place where most inhabitants did not chose to live. Their hardship is a physical and a spiritual one.
Only when Israelis allow Palestinians to live in their midst and enjoy the same level of freedom and prosperity, will peace come to the Middle East. Of course, Israel would then no longer be a Jewish state, and this may be the core of the problem. Israel’s founding rationale is Zionist (in the most neutral sense). Can it move on and become a truly secular state?
Ronald Vopel, Brussels
Shifting to the Right in Israel
To The Washington Post, Feb. 19, 2009
Griff Witte’s Feb. 14 news story “Israeli Election Reflects Resurgence of the Right” accurately described the rise of the far right in the Israeli election as a “shift away from politicians who emphasize negotiations with Palestinians.”
But the assessment was still fundamentally misleading. The same Israeli officials who favor negotiations have always rejected policies that might make those negotiations successful. Throughout 2008, Israel was led by the “centrist” Kadima party, to which Tzipi Livni—known for emphasizing negotiations with Palestinians—belongs. But that year brought even greater settlement construction. Historically, it was Labor-led governments that presided over the heaviest settlement expansion even as their prime ministers visited Washington to “emphasize negotiations.”
The rise of the extreme right—especially the explicitly racist right wing of Avigdor Lieberman—is a dangerous development for Israel.
But it might end the illusion that emphasizing negotiations equals stopping settlements. And that just might make possible a new U.S. approach. If President Obama is confronted with an Israeli leader who doesn’t even feign an interest in negotiations, it will be much easier for him to consider ending the $3 billion annual U.S. aid that facilitates the continuing expansion of Israel’s occupation.
Phyllis Bennis, Institute for Policy Studies, Washington, DC
Criticism Isn’t Anti-Semitism
To The Independent, Feb. 20, 2009
Howard Jacobson’s hysterical piece that seeks to equate all criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, made me very angry. He objects to the use of the words “massacre” and “slaughter” in reference to the killing of 400 Palestinian children by Israeli tanks, missiles, bombs and bullets, with his opinion that “it is in the nature of modern war.” As a former professional soldier with four years on active service, I can categorically inform him, it is not. The British Army, the U.S. Army, or any other army, do not, to my knowledge, deliberately kill children on the pretext of “self-defense.”
I, and many, many other British Jews, have given repeated, and documented, warnings to the London Jewish Chronicle and elsewhere, of the dangers of the Board of Deputies of British Jews allying itself so closely and unwisely with Israel’s brutal treatment as an occupying force in the Palestinian territories. That overt alliance, together with the millions of pounds sent every year to Israel by Jewish charities, virtually ensures the inevitability of anti-Israeli feelings being extended to those in Britain who so clearly, and sometimes, it must be said, arrogantly support the Israeli government agenda.
There was nothing in Howard Jacobson’s article that indicated one shred of remorse that 400 Palestinian children should be killed as a reprisal for the rockets of Hamas. Nothing. That, tragically, is the attitude that contributes to the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Britain and thereby also endangers those of us, within British Jewry, to whom political Zionism is anathema. Zionism is not, and never was, a synonym for Judaism.
Michael Halpern, Westbourne, Dorset
Ignoring the Other Side
To the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Feb. 4, 2009
In a Jan. 20 letter voicing support for Israel, Edward L. Russakoff talks about the “routine” nature of “unprovoked mass murders” and “the cruel savagery endemic...in the Arab world.” This is a racist generalization that accuses the Arab world, and thereby every single Arab human being, of cruelty and savagery.
By contrast, activists for lasting peace in the Middle East do not define Israel’s deplorable policies as endemic in the Jewish world, or even as endemic to all the citizens of Israel. This would be anti-Semitism, a topic on which Mr. Russakoff seems highly concerned.
What is cruel, savage and decidedly routine, however, are military offensives by the Israeli government like the recent one in Gaza that killed over 1,300 Palestinians, at least 419 of whom were children and 108 were women.
What is routine is Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and its blockade over Gaza. What is routine is 60 years of systematic dispossession, starvation and house arrest against a region’s indigenous population. What is routine is the impassable network of checkpoints at which Palestinians are stopped for hours every day. Routine are the color-coded IDs that every single Palestinian must carry to denote their race.
Routine are the demolition of homes and greenhouses. Routine are the violations of international law that ban countries from establishing settlements in territories they are occupying. Yet the most routine of all is America’s chronic tendency to ignore the other side of this crucial story.
Alborz Ghandehari, Oakland, PA
Blocking Ads Showed BBC Bias
To The Independent, Jan. 29, 2009
Dominic Lawson throws up all the usual arguments about who’s biased and who does what to whom but ignores one simple fact. Ordinary people, men, women and children, with no power or choice of their own, are desperately in need of aid. The appeal is designed to achieve this, and previous occasions, Congo and Burma for instance, have shown the power of the BBC in this respect. In defense of the BBC refusal, Mr. Lawson argues that the charities have become “politicized.” This says more about the inherent fear and guilt of those (on both sides) who perpetrate such violence in the first place. The state of Israel is “political.” Hamas is “political.” Organized life is “political.”
It must be almost impossible to witness the effects of war and not develop an opinion. To worry about “balance” and “bias” is to place perception before people. A maimed child is just that, a maimed child, and one who needs our help. Mr. Lawson, with children of his own, should support any measure that might help that child. The BBC should ignore the posturings of critics and countries. People are suffering and dying now. They need our help.
Christopher Dawes, London, UK
Kudos for “60 Minutes”
To CBS, Jan. 30, 2009
Bravo to Bob Simon and “60 Minutes” for an honest look at the prospects for peace in the Middle East! They told a side of the story that U.S. audiences are almost never allowed to hear. Don’t let the right-wingers silence you! Peace in the Middle East is too important to the entire planet to let only the Israeli side of the story be heard. The Palestinians also have their story, and it is just as compelling as the Israelis.’’ As our mothers taught all of us, two wrongs never make a right. The Holocaust was wrong and so was al-Nakba, the catastrophe. The Palestinians desperately need Israel and the U.S. to acknowledge their right to exist and live in peace.
Rklapholz, via e-mail
Another Hopeless War
To the San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 27, 2009
Amidst all the hoopla surrounding Obama’s presidency, justified as it may be, where is the one voice of dissent we desperately need? I am speaking about the war in Afghanistan.
Have we been crying out against the war in Iraq for so long that we have no anti-war voice left? Take troops out of Iraq to put in yet another hopeless war? What is our otherwise so-wise new president thinking?
And when will we ever learn that you can’t fight terrorism with the blunt force of a conventional army? War is bad enough. Hopeless war is the ultimate horror.
Mr. President, you have so much promise. Won’t you promise us no more war?
Emory Winship, Sonoma, CA
Toward the End in Iraq
To The New York Times, Feb. 5, 2009
Re: “Pointing to New Era, U.S. Steps Back as Iraqis Vote”: I am relieved that this ill-conceived war in Iraq is finally drawing to a close. I am also happy to see a president in office who favors diplomacy over military might.
It is always more difficult to end a war than to begin one. I have been protesting against America’s involvement in wars for the last 60 years; with the luxury of hindsight, I can see how we could have avoided all of them.
President Obama is a student of history; perhaps he can begin to show the world the way to avoid future wars.
Susan Stern, Newton, MA
Cheney’s Warning
To the San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 10, 2009
When former Vice President Dick Cheney predicts that someday terrorists will attempt a catastrophic nuclear or biological attack, the problem is that he is right. Someday, someone will attempt this. And then people will say: Cheney was right. Which is exactly the kind of vindication people like Cheney are looking for. But should we regard Cheney’s message about the need for brutality any differently than we would the fanatic on the street corner whose sign reads, “The end is near”? After all, someday that person may be right, too.
For Cheney, and those like him who say you are either for us or against us, the world is seen in black and white. People, and by extension nations, are either good or bad. The bad must be fought against, and the good must prevail. The irony is that this viewpoint is exactly the viewpoint we are supposedly fighting against in other parts of the world. We are at war with extremists. Yet the extremists live among us here as well. If Cheney had been around during the Inquisition, he would have been its proudest defender.
I have no illusions that our new president will perform miracles. I have no doubt that a war against extremism is no more winnable than the war against drugs. But one day, I hope we will look back at this time and say: That was the time when the power of all forms of extremism began to wane. God help us if it doesn’t.
Nick W. Ozier, Oakland, CA
Waiting for Change in Position
To The Boston Globe, Feb. 12, 2009
I’m shocked and disappointed that the Obama Justice Department has decided, in the case of Mohamed et al. v. Jeppesen, to continue the Bush administration’s use of state secrets privilege to block judicial review of torture committed by our government. When I voted in November, I thought I was voting for change, but evidently, in the matter of extraordinary rendition, torture, and other war crimes committed in our name, Barack Obama intends to continue the cover-up. A shameful chapter of our history continues.
Paul Rickter, Brookline, MA
