Viewpoint Time for U.S. to examine friendship with Israel
By MARY BADER
Friends dont let friends drive
drunk. That message has recast a previously laissez faire approach to
friendship. It seems particularly apropos right now in light of Americas
historic friendship with Israel, a country whose leadership has been on a
dangerously intoxicated drive for many months.
Its a drive that is stretching democracy to breakdown, and
its long past time for a true friend to intervene.
To criticize Israels current policies opens Jews to charges
of being traitors and non-Jews to charges of anti-Semitism. All the more
admirable then is the courage of those Israeli soldiers who do speak out
against the policies of their own government by refusing to serve in the
occupied territories. With the Holocaust forever imprinted in their history,
Jews know better than most the terrible cost of collective silence in the face
of injustice.
For 17 months now the killing in Israel has escalated. Israeli
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who provoked the early violence, has positioned
his enemies as terrorists and brashly invaded Palestinian territory to
assassinate, bomb and bulldoze in reprisal for suicide bombings. More than
1,000 Palestinians and almost 350 Israelis have been killed in the current
uprising, with an ample number of women, children and innocent noncombatants on
both sides.
There would be a clearer definition of the causes and effects of
injustice if the Palestinian side were not hell-bent on sending violent
messages to protest their living conditions and the theft of their territory.
One can only wish the Palestinians were led by a Martin Luther King, dedicated
to nonviolent protests. Then it would be clearer that Ariel Sharon is a Sheriff
Bull Connor, one backed with nuclear weapons and American aircraft to boot.
In addition to being ruthless, Sharon is also an opportunist who
rushed to Washington after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and
the Pentagon to declare that now Americans would understand what terrorism was
and realize that Israel, too, was fighting terrorism. What he didnt
acknowledge, however, was that his policies were also provoking terrorism. The
Palestinians may be considered terrorists in the same way that the Native
American Dakota were considered terrorists in 1862. And the reasons that some
Palestinians resort to terror evoke the reasons some Dakota terrorized settlers
in western Minnesota: injustice and despair. Now we recall with sadness that
Americans repaid Dakota terror with the largest mass execution in American
history and the forced removal of most of the remaining Dakota from their
lands.
Today it is again settlers who are helping to deepen Palestinian
despair. Not only are the Jewish settlements in Arab territories illegal, but
the settlers powerful sense of entitlement and preeminence seems to be
infecting ordinary Israeli citizens as well. A new poll by the Jaffee Center
for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University found that 46 percent of
Israels Jewish citizens said they supported the transfer of
Palestinians out of the Arab territories of the West Bank and Gaza.
This is where friends should intervene. Is it Israels right
to exist or Israels right to expand that Americans have been asked to
support? If we are not supporting Israels expansion through colonization
of Arab lands, then why are we not urging Israel to end its 35-year illegal
occupation of Arab lands?
As we question our friend Israel, we should also ask ourselves a
few questions about the quality of our friendship. How, for example, do we
serve the cause of human rights and democracy with unequivocal support of an
Israel that treats its Arab citizens as second-class? An Israel whose occupying
army has recently been criticized for putting identification numbers on Arab
detainees limbs, as Nazis once did to Jews? An Israel that sometimes
seems to be more a real estate venture than a repository of democracy?
It is time to be a true friend to Israel by speaking the truth: In
order for Americans to live by democratic principles, we must insist on justice
for Arabs as well as for Jews. Our friendship and support for Israel was based
on giving the displaced Jews a homeland, not displacing Arabs from their
homeland. It was based on assuring Jews of their dignity, not robbing Arabs of
theirs. It is never easy to speak a painful truth to a friend, but true friends
dont let pain stand in their way.
Mary Bader is a writer living in Minnesota.
National Catholic Reporter, March 29,
2002
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