Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, August/September 2021, pp. 70-71
Other People’s Mail
To The Palm Beach Post, June 12, 2021
In a commentary published Sunday, Professor Norman Goda joins those who contend that anti-Israel sentiment is inherently anti-Semitic. Goda concedes that some “nuts and bolts” objections to Israel policy are tolerable; beyond that, however, he seems ready to impose what amounts to an iron yoke of censorship on criticism of Israel, leaving it up to people like him to decide what is allowable.
Obvious questions arise: When some very orthodox Jews rail against Zionism, must we deem them anti-Semites? When a great many people decry the ceaseless takeover of Palestinian lands and the expansion of settlements, does that make them anti-Semites?
When visitors to the West Bank are dismayed by what they see as brutal and harshly discriminatory policies akin to apartheid, are they anti-Semites because they voice that sentiment? When the world sees photos of extremist settlers waving photos that say, “Kill the Arabs,” is it anti-Semitism that induces many people to deplore this dark side of Israel?
On a more personal note: When the Jewish writer of this letter yearns to see an Israel in which every person, Arab or Jew, is treated as an equal, does that make him an anti-Semite because it challenges Zionist thinking? Apparently, Professor Goda thinks so.
The professor and I agree that the battle against anti-Semitism is an endless one which we must fight without respite; But as I see it, his approach is worse than counter-productive. Equating anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiment has become a major weapon wielded by those out to impose censorship of an inherently anti-democratic character.
The more Israel submits to right-wing extremism, the more ready it is to embrace an authoritarian doctrine that bans all but approved criticism.
Irwin Shishko, Delray Beach, FL
PRO-ISRAEL GROUPS DO NOT SPEAK FOR THE JEWISH COMMUNITY
To the Toronto Star, June 14, 2021
As a Jew who once lived in Israel, I am appalled by the letter from the “Canadian Jewish Community.”
Over and over again, studies have shown the majority of Canada’s Jewish community does not support the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
The ad in the Star that purports to represent the Jewish community has several serious errors, the most egregious being that Israel has presented three serious peace offers since 2000.
Those offers, which were primarily based on Israel retaining the settlements in occupied territory or claiming more territory, were never serious offers, with no resolution of the status of Jerusalem as a shared capital.
The loss of life is much higher in Gaza than in Israel.
The letter talks about lies and misinformation, but offers no concrete examples.
When will the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) and its allies bemoan the illegal occupation of Palestine and name it apartheid?
Brian Decker, Oakville, ON
NO, THE PALESTINIANS DO NOT KEEP REJECTING PEACE
To The Register-Guard, June 24, 2021
Craig Weinerman bemoans critics of Israel, claiming they “conveniently overlook history” (Guest View, June 19). He then trashes accurate history and writes the following fiction:
“The Palestinians have rejected at least five comprehensive offers of statehood since 1947. They are unwilling to accept any compromise that would result in partition of the land into Jewish and Palestinian states because it rejects the legitimacy of a Jewish state.”
This quoted statement is simply false. For example, at the July 2000 Camp David talks, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered nothing that was “comprehensive” to Yasser Arafat and the Palestinians. In fact, Barak, whose Israeli military controlled the West Bank, refused to present any kind of geographic map of his idea of an independent Palestinian “state.”
Previously, in May 2000, Barak had published a map with the potential Palestinian “state” broken into three non-contiguous regions divided and surrounded by Israeli military roads and checkpoints.
At Camp David, the Palestinians were certainly willing to accept the legitimacy of the State of Israel. If Weinerman’s emphasis is on a “Jewish” state, then, if he is honest, he will add the adjective “apartheid”—apartheid Jewish state.
Leo W. Quirk, Corvallis, OR
CALLING FOR AN IMPARTIAL U.S. APPROACH TOWARD ISRAEL
To The Columbian, June 21, 2021
Julian Levi, in his letter “Israel conflict has long history” (Our Readers’ Views, June 12), is a bit cavalier with Israel’s history. He conflates the partitioning of Palestine on Nov. 29, 1947, and the Arab-Israeli War starting on May 15, 1948. While these events were only six months apart, it was six months of the Jewish militias driving the Palestinians from their homes and from their lands.
While he is correct in saying that the U.S. did not support Israel in that war, the U.S. has done so at other times. For example, airlifting tanks to Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War and providing the Air Defense System (Iron Dome) that brought down 90 percent of the Hamas-fired missiles in the recent war. The Israelis were flying U.S.-provided aircraft to pulverize Gaza. The U.S. has also used its veto power to block most U.N. resolutions that are critical of Israel. And we wonder if our Middle East problems will ever cease.
It is time for the U.S. to get its thumb off the scale. Work with the U.N. to declare Palestine a sovereign nation and a U.S. ally, and provide them with the means to get their country up and running.
Michael Dailey, Vancouver, WA
PAY ATTENTION TO FREE PRESS CHALLENGE IN ISRAEL
To The Seattle Times, June 11, 2021
As The Seattle Times’ Free Press initiative continues to expose the serious nature of closing newspapers across the United States, please lift up the crisis in Israel, as it continues to attack reporters who seek to expose war crimes and colonial violence.
While a cease fire has been declared against the carpet-bombing of Gaza, Israel continues to step up violence against the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem by blockading the neighborhood and arresting and abusing reporters, like Givra Budeiri of Al Jazeera, who seek to expose the truth about the behavior of the police and army.
Palestinians are being forced out of their homes, by the police, army and courts, so the homes can be given to new Jewish settlers—including many from the U.S. Existing neighborhoods, such as East Jerusalem’s Silwan, are being demolished for newly conceived parks and viewpoints.
Protesters are being arrested, Palestinians prevented from visiting their neighbors, while Jewish settlers are allowed to walk freely in the neighborhood, many armed with guns.
Please expose this ongoing colonial violence with clear reporting. Violence under any name harms people and governments, even ones that call themselves democratic.
Rev. Richard K. Gibson, Lynnwood, WA. The writer is a member of the Presbyterian Church USA’s Israel-Palestine Committee.
SCHOOL BOARD MEMBER TARGETED FOR ISRAEL COMMENTS
To InsideNoVa, June 16, 2021
Last month, a Fairfax County, VA school board member tweeted criticism of the policies of a foreign government, echoing language which has been used by Human Rights Watch, two of the foreign country’s most prominent human-rights organizations and at least 10 former officials of that foreign government.
Unfortunately, however, the school board member has since become the target of a slew of baseless accusations and calls for her resignation or removal.
It is hard to overlook the fact that there has been such a backlash for oft-stated human rights-based comments—particularly because the school board member at issue, Abrar Omeish, is Arab American, and the foreign entity in question is the Israeli government.
Targeting Arab Americans with accusations of bigotry or anti-Semitism simply because of political criticisms of the Israeli government is a form of Arab baiting—a decades-old tactic used to exclude Arab American voices from civic spaces and to silence advocacy for Palestinian human rights.
Much of the criticism of Ms. Omeish’s comments focus on the words she chose—such as “colonization” and “apartheid”—to describe the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians. But both the first and second Bush administrations and the Reagan administration used the term “occupation,” which differs from colonization in only the length of time of the activity.
The word “apartheid” as been used for decades to describe Israeli policies by politicians, from South Africa’s Desmond Tutu, to Israel’s Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Olmert, to President Jimmy Carter. (And note that Ms. Omeish’s critics most often use loaded buzzwords without actually addressing the accuracy of her statement.)
Indeed, the bad-faith outrage toward Ms. Omeish is not because what she said is factually incorrect, but because of who she is.
The day before Ms. Omeish’s tweet, U.S. Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA) also rightly criticized Israeli policies, using the word “occupation” in a letter condemning the same illegal land grab in Sheikh Jarrah that Ms. Omeish decried. Since then, the Fairfax GOP has tweeted about Omeish three dozen times. They have not yet mentioned Rep. Connolly at all.
Perhaps the worst result of these attacks on Abrar Omeish is not her victimization, but what it represents and the shifted focus away from the grueling reality of Palestinians, and Palestinian children in particular.
Since 2006, the Israeli government displaced an average of 370 Palestinian children each year as a result of ongoing home demolitions. The Israeli military also detains between 500 and 700 Palestinian children each year.
As a Fairfax County parent, I applaud any school board member who will join the chorus against such injustice wherever it is found. Palestinian children are just as deserving of a future as our children, and any policy based on justice must not ignore their plight.
Ryan Suto, Burke, VA. The writer is policy counsel for the Arab American Institute.
SCHOOLS SHOULD TEACH ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS
To The Daily Gazette, June 6, 2021
Regarding the dispute in Schenectady schools over what terminology to use to describe Israel’s dealings with Palestinians reported in the May 30 Gazette (“Mideast Conflict Hits Home”), and specifically whether “ethnic cleansing” applies, let’s remember that Israel’s founding in 1948 as a specifically “Jewish state” entailed the expulsion of some 750,000 Palestinian Arab residents.
Also that a fair number of those expelled, who took refuge in the Jordan-controlled West Bank and the Egypt-controlled Gaza Strip, were conquered yet again in 1967, when Israel overran those areas and forcibly expelled some 400,000 of them.
David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father, posited that Israel could abide a maximum Arab population, a limit that has been maintained to this day, when remaining Arabs are widely described as a “demographic threat.”
The event that sparked the most recent violence—the expulsion of half a dozen Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem to make way for a band of Jewish zealots from New York—was just another tiny step in a long trail of such expulsions.
A United Nations commission has defined ethnic cleansing as “rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area.”
If Israel’s actions over the years do not meet that definition, they come awfully close.
The fact that Jews themselves in recent times were the victims of ethnic cleansing, and even of genocide, does not bar them from perpetrating such crimes against others but only adds a layer of irony.
Carl Strock, Saratoga Springs, NY
