Articles
Letters to the Editor, Pages 5-6
Remember These Children
I am working on a short play about the conflict in Israel and Palestine and would like to use your site, <www.rememberthesechildren.org>, as a basis for it.
It is still very much in the early stages of development, but in brief it would feature two actors, one Israeli the other Palestinian, reading out the names of children in chronological order.
I am writing to seek your approval to use the content on your site for this purpose.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Riaz Bhatti, via e-mail
We are honored to have you use Remember These Children as the basis for your play, and gratified that you find the compilation of names of Israeli and Palestinian children killed since Sept. 30, 2000 as powerful as we and many others do. We hope the day will soon come when no more names will be added to this heartbreaking list.
“Termination” of Lives
I chanced upon the May/June 2009 issue of the Washington Report at the home of Father Labib Kobti in San Francisco. He gave me his copy to take home. I have since read it thoroughly and am quite impressed; I hope your courageous, unstereotyped, and detailed coverage of the Middle East is getting noticed. I commend you on taking a stand; the little that I can do to help is to subscribe and encourage my friends and family to do so as well. This I have done.
My family and I spent the last two weeks of 2009 in Israel-Palestine and celebrated Christmas in Bethlehem. On Dec. 26, we went through Nablus and were witness to the aftermath of Israeli “termination” operations where three Palestinians were executed in cold blood. We spoke with the families affected and took several photographs. Later we read that the U.S. government wished to question the Israelis on this operation; more recently, we found out that several Israeli groups are pressing their government to do a full investigation.
I wrote a report of my impressions of the termination operation which has now appeared on the Web site of a few human rights and other organizations (If Americans Knew and The People’s Voice are two such organizations). I also gave an interview to KPFA and created my own blog (<www.lithuindian.blogspot.com>) to share the report with my family, friends, and a larger social network. I have also offered my report and photographs to my congressman, the State Department, and to Sen. Barbara Boxer; so far, these efforts have not been successful at getting a response from our government.
I am attaching the report here for your consideration. Feel free to use it as you see fit; I would be honored if you chose it for publication. I wrote the report as an ordinary American citizen writing to other Americans.
Vijay Raghavan, via e-mail
Your e-mail and report arrived just as we were about to go to press, so we unfortunately were not able to publish your powerful report. We are glad to have the opportunity, however, to alert readers to your blog, which includes photographs of your experience, and to welcome you to the Washington Report family!
A Different Perspective
I recently and enthusiastically renewed for three years my subscription to the Washington Report, even though every issue publishes the same anti-Israel article 25 times and with Israel sounding worse with each issue.
After each thorough reading of the articles regarding Israel—the only articles I read—I always have the same set of questions for you, and I finally got unlazy enough to ask you them.
Do you realistically think—not just hope—that Israel will ever go back to its pre-’67 borders or that it under any government will allow Palestinians to return en masse to the land they lost to Israel in war? If Syria before ’67 was constantly harassing Israel, what would lead you to believe that Syria wouldn’t resume doing so if it were to get back Golan, especially in view of the fact that Israel has won every military operation against Syria?
Do you realistically think that with every Palestinian aged four and over, having been taught to hate Jews and Israelis, as teenagers and adults would want to make nice with the pigs, dogs, and devils they believe Jews and Israelis are?
Have you ever entertained the thought that the bottommost of bottom lines to the Israeli-Arab conflict is the lethal insistence on the Islamic part that no non-Islamic state will defile “its” land? If Israel would somehow cease to exist, do you realistically believe that, in view of how Arabs/Muslims treat each other with internecine bombings, beheadings, stonings, and mutilations that they wouldn’t immediately and gleefully do similarly to Jews?
Periodically, Washington Report compares the holocaust to the Israeli treatment of Palestinians; then how is it that while six million died in the holocaust, “There are more Palestinians than ever before”?
You have said numerous times that Washington Report serves as an antidote to the Western pro-Israeli press. But in the last 10 years or so, Israel seems to have been taking quite a few lumps from that same press. So why don’t you in sportsmanlike reaction publish, if not pro-Israeli articles, responses to charges you constantly make against Israel?
Washington Report has been very convincing: Palestinians live terribly under Israeli rule. But have you ever entertained the notion that Palestinians would rather live, kill, and die under Israeli rule than live well alongside a non-Muslim state?
Thank You,
Jerry Axelrod, via fax
We certainly appreciate your devotion to the Washington Report! Perhaps you weren’t a subscriber in 1998, however, when we cited a May 11, 1997 New York Times article describing an interview Israeli Gen. Moshe Dayan gave—but which was not made public until after his death—in which he discussed the Golan Heights: “I know how at least 80 percent of the clashes there started,” he said. “In my opinion, more than 80 percent, but let’s talk about 80 percent. It went this way: We would send a tractor to plow some area where it wasn't possible to do anything, in the demilitarized zone, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn't shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance farther, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot. And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that’s how it was.”
With regard to your assertion that young Palestinians are “taught to hate Jews and Israelis,” our experience is quite the opposite: many of the Palestinian parents we have met on visits to the occupied territories express concern that they represent the last generation that had a connection to individual Israelis. They fear their children, who encounter only settlers and soldiers, will not have the opportunity to make similar connections.
Finally, as far as what we really believe, this magazine believes in international law—and that Americans should not be sending billions of their tax dollars to foreign nations that flout that law.
A Bittersweet Read
It was bittersweet to read Phil Pasquini’s article “After 140 Years, Studio Varouj Closes in Jerusalem’s Old City” (Jan./Feb. 2010 Washington Report, p. 71). It was wonderful to see Varouj’s expressive face (he and his family are very much a part of Palestinian history), but sad to see that his shop is closing. When I was a reporter for a local Palestinian newspaper in the early 1980s I would supplement my meager income by photographing weddings for Varouj. I always enjoyed working for him. When I went for a visit to Palestine in 2000, I stopped by Varouj’s shop. As we drank tea he showed me photos of his daughter and one of his son’s recent weddings. When I asked if their spouses were from the Jerusalem area he told me with surprise that, no, they were from Armenia and that he had gladly assisted with the arranging of the marriages. “You mean you brought a husband and a wife for your children all the way from Armenia?” I asked in amazement. “Of course,” he answered, “That way we know if they come from good families. If they came from someplace like America we don’t know what we’re getting.”
Varouj is a good man and I wish him well.
Jamal Najjab, Washington, DC
Darfur
I just read Delinda Hanley’s review of Mahmood Mamdani’s Saviors and Survivors (November 2009 Washington Report, p. 68). As you would expect, I disagree with everything that she highlighted from the book. I would encourage your readers to read my recent review that was published in the SAIS Review of International Affairs, “When Killers Become Victims: Darfur in Context.” Mamdani apologizes for the actions of Khartoum in Darfur, despite their glaring similarities to human rights violations and atrocities he has highlighted in his past work on Iraq, Palestine, etc.
It is also important to note that Mamdani never once interviewed an employee of Save Darfur, or any of its 180 partner organizations (including prominent Arab- and Muslim-American organizations, like the Arab American Institute and the Islamic Society of North America). Likewise, he never inquired about Save Darfur’s close relationships with human rights groups in Sudan, the Arab world and Africa. I assure you that organizations such as the Arab Network for Human Rights Information, the Arab Coalition for Darfur, and the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies would disagree with his conclusions. As Save Darfur’s international outreach manager, I work closely with these organizations everyday.
I look forward to hearing from you, as I would welcome the chance to set the record straight in your publication.
Sean Brooks, International Advocacy and Outreach Manager, Save Darfur Coalition, 1025 Connecticut Ave., NW, Suite 310, Washington, DC 20036
We thank you for your letter, and are publishing it to make our readers aware of your perspective and allow them to reach their own conclusions. We wonder if you read p. 67 of our November issue, which included excerpts from an Aug. 14, 2009 editorial in the Jewish weekly The Forward, which acknowledges “a changing reality in Darfur, where the mass killings have largely stopped.”
