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Welcome to USAGOLD's "Gilded
Opinion" pages.
We invite you to browse our index
of outstanding gold-based commentary.
(Back to Holger Jensen Index)
While we find Mr. Jensen's columns particularly informative with respect to foreign affairs, his opinions do not necessarily represent those of Centennial Precious Metals, USAGOLD, its management and clientele.
INSIDE FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Pro-Israeli bias stifles
needed debate
by Holger Jensen, International Editor
Adam Shapiro is a harmless pacifist who believes he serves a purpose in life by being a human shield.
I met him on a recent visit to Ramallah [related article - photos] where he and other members of the International Solidarity Movement, including a number of Coloradans, were protesting the presence of Israeli tanks outside Yasser Arafat's headquarters.
The protests were always peaceful, but the Israelis always responded with tear gas and rubber bullets.
The "internationals," as they call themselves, oppose violence of any kind. They do not condone Palestinian suicide bombings, just as they do not condone Israeli military assaults on Palestinian communities. They distribute food, volunteer as medics and stretcher bearers and believe their presence, as foreigners, helps protect the Palestinians from Israel's superior firepower.
When I met Shapiro, he wasn't getting much publicity. Most of that was reserved for his fiery fiancee, Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian-American born in Michigan, and Neta Golan, a 30-year-old Jew born of Canadian parents in Israel. The two women, co-founders of ISM, were hogging so many headlines that Shapiro wryly referred to himself as "the unnamed guy with Huwaida."
All that changed when Israeli troops punched into Arafat's compound on March 29. Shapiro, trapped inside while trying to evacuate the wounded, spent a night there and was invited to have breakfast with Arafat the next morning. He then described his experience in numerous TV and newspaper interviews.
That enraged militant Jews in his hometown of New York, who denounced Shapiro as the "Jewish Taliban" and "Sheepshead Bay's John Walker Lindh." His parents, both public school teachers, had to move out of their Brooklyn home because of death threats, and his brother, a lawyer, is now being called a "fake Jew."
The New York Post did not help with a column headlined: "Our Latest Traitor Must Live With His Vile Choice."
To its credit, the Jewish group Anti-Defamation League leaped to the family's defense. Calling the threats "sinister and serious," Abraham Foxman, national director, said it was "reprehensible to target anybody based on what they believe or what they stand for, whether or not we believe in their actions."
But what happened to the Shapiros illustrates a dark and dangerous undercurrent in American society.
Pro-Israel bias is so ingrained in our government, media and public consciousness that anyone who sympathizes with the Palestinians or tries to explain the Arab point of view is immediately labeled "anti-Israel." Some have been called "anti-Semitic." And Jews who dare to question are branded "self-haters."
Since Sept. 11, such heretics also risk being labeled "pro-terrorist" or "un-American," as if it is somehow unpatriotic to question why the Israeli tail wags the American dog.
Ironically, there is a far healthier debate on these issues in Israel than here. In Jerusalem, I asked an Israeli colleague, who writes pretty much what I write, whether he received hate mail. "Only from American Jews," he replied.
Thus Rabbi Michael Lerner, whose California-based Tikkun magazine promotes the view that "Jews did not climb out of the gas chambers of Europe to oppress another people," routinely gets death threats. And even Tom Friedman, a respected columnist for The New York Times who is nothing if not pro-Israel, sometimes gets bashed for questioning the wisdom of the occupation.
He faults "feckless American Jewish leaders, fundamentalist Christians and neoconservatives who together have helped make it impossible for anyone in the U.S. administration to talk seriously about halting Israeli settlement-building without being accused of being anti-Israel. Their collaboration has helped prolong a colonial Israeli occupation that now threatens the entire Zionist enterprise."
And unconditional U.S. support for such activities harms our national interest.
As Michael Lind points out in a thoughtful article for the British magazine Prospect, "What is needed is a debate between those who want to link U.S. support for Israel to its behavior, in the light of America's own strategic goals and moral ideals, and those who want there to be no linkage."
Such a debate is long overdue. If, heaven forbid, Palestinian suicide bombers move to our shores, we should at least know why.
April 6, 2002
Send your questions to international editor Holger Jensen, who will answer one each day. E-mail: hjens@aol.com
Copyright © 2002 The E.W. Scripps Co. All Rights Reserved.
Reprinted by USAGOLD with permission of Mr. Jensen. No further reproduction without permission.
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