Editor’s
Note:
Instead of my words introducing Viewpoint’s piece, here
is what Robert Fisk wrote for The Independent after
interviewing the author,
“Ms. Stern's sense of outrage is as brave as it is
lonely; although many American Jews are troubled by the
behavior of Israel's right-wing government and the
bloody adventures in which Israel has been involved in
Lebanon over the past 20 years, most will not take
kindly to Eva Stern's concern for the truth to be told"
(Saturday,14 June 1997).
Justice for the Palestinians, a Jewish cause
Shifra Eva Stern
I was recently asked a question I've been asked many
times before, mostly by fellow Jews: Why do I spend so
much time seeking justice for the Palestinians instead
of directing my efforts and passions toward fighting for
some noble "Jewish" cause. Surely, my questioner said,
and I fully agree, there are Jewish causes worth
fighting for.
By the same token, I agree that anyone can easily draw
up a virtually endless list of worthy humanitarian
causes that everyone, Jewish or not, should devote time
and energies to assisting, such as finding a cure for
AIDS, halting the repression of women throughout the
world, and ending the wretched poverty that afflicts so
much of the Third World.
Since it is impossible to be involved in every
humanitarian cause, I choose to channel my efforts into
fighting for a just solution of the Israel/Palestine
conflict because I think that is where I can be the most
useful. As a Jew, my opposition to Israeli policies
carries more weight, for better or worse, simply because
I am Jewish, just like the reportage of Gideon Levy or
Amira Hass in Israel's daily Ha'aretz again, for better
or worse, carries more weight than the dispatches and
analysis of non-Jewish reporters writing for Britain's
The Guardian.
So both as a Jew and as an American whose tax dollars
finance Israel's illegal and brutal occupation, I bear
greater moral responsibility in the Israel-Palestine
conflict. Furthermore, given my own personal and family
background, I cannot but be deeply concerned by and
opposed to Israeli policies.
Both of my parents are survivors of the Nazi
concentration camps. At least 70 members of of my
mother's extended family perished in Auschwitz,
including her father who was shot to death by a Nazi
officer for refusing to hand over his tallis and
tefillin (Jewish prayer garments). My mother's
recounting of her experience of standing in line at the
age of 17 stark naked with men and women (she came from
a devoutly religious home) waiting to be judged to life
or death by a Nazi doctor is indelibly seared in my
memory.
My father's account of his long march from the slave
labor camp in Yugoslavia to the Nazi German
concentration camps in Dachau and Flussenberg, without
having any bread or water for days on end, being beaten
by the German SS, Hungarian gendarmes, and Croatian
fascists to walk faster, leaves me with images I can
never forget or escape. Out of 3,600 people who
accompanied my father on that death march, only 200
survived.
At the risk of sounding melodramatic, I feel compelled
to reveal that my parents' suffering at the hands of the
Nazis has left me feeling as though I'm forever
breathing the air of the death camps. And, as a result
of their suffering, I have immersed myself in the
history of the Third Reich and the Nazi Judeocide for
the past 25 years. While I would certainly not consider
myself an expert on the subject, I do think I have a
sound enough background to draw some sobering
conclusions.
What has always haunted and intrigued me the most over
the years was not so much the motives of the murderers
and their hundreds of thousands of collaborators, but
rather, the behavior of the ordinary Germans who watched
as the Jews were being dragged from their homes and
brutally rounded up and expelled from the country they
loved.
Perhaps Dr. Norman Finkelstein sums up it up best in his
book A Nation on Trial, when he observes, "the near
consensus in the scholarly literature is that most
Germans looked on with malignant indifference." And it
is the eminent Holocaust historian Ian Kershaw who
wrote: "The road to Auschwitz was built by hate but
paved with indifference" (emphasis added).
It is also worth quoting from the speech Rabbi Joachim
Prinz gave at the civil rights March on Washington in
1963. "When I was a rabbi of the Jewish community in
Berlin under the Hitler regime I learned many things.
The most important thing that I learned in my life and
under tragic circumstances is that bigotry and hatred
are not the most urgent problems.
The most urgent, the most disgraceful and the most
shameful problem is silence. A great people which had
created a great civilization had become a nation of
silent onlookers. They remained silent in the face of
hate, in the face of brutality and in the face of mass
murder."
How, you may wonder, does any of this relate to the
Israel/Palestine conflict and my passionate support for
a just settlement for both Israelis and Palestinians?
Israel claims to be a Jewish state (legally, it calls
itself "the sovereign state of the Jewish people") and
has, since its creation, made it abundantly clear that
it "speaks" and "acts" on behalf of world Jewry.
As a researcher, I follow the conflict very closely. My
main source of information is not the New York Times or
other American or foreign newspapers, but rather what
Israeli journalists themselves report daily from the
occupied territories. In addition, I read the human
rights reports of B'Tselem, (an award-winning Israeli
human rights organization), Physicians for Human Rights
(Israel), Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
They have all concluded that Israel has repeatedly
committed major violations of humanitarian and human
rights law.
For example, on April 3, 2002, when the Israeli Defense
Forces (IDF) launched a major military operation in the
Jenin refugee camp, Human Rights Watch concluded that
"during their incursion . . . Israeli forces committed
serious violations of international humanitarian law,
some amounting prima facie to war crimes." There was
major destruction of homes in Jenin, which "was
aggravated by the inadequate warning given to civilian
residents. Although warnings were issued. . . by the IDF,
many civilians only learned of the risk as bulldozers
began to crush their houses.
Jamal Fayid, a thirty-seven year old paralyzed man, was
killed when the IDF bulldozed his home on top of him,
refusing to allow his relatives the time to remove him
from the home. . . . Muhammud Abu Saba'a had to plead
with an IDF bulldozer operator to stop demolishing his
home while his family remained inside; when he returned
to his half-demolished home, he was shot dead by an
Israeli soldier." (Human Rights Watch, Jenin: IDF
Military Operations, May 2002).
In a fervent denunciation of these crimes, the former
British shadow foreign secretary Gerald Kaufman, who is
Jewish, said: "Sharon has ordered his troops to use
methods of barbarism against the Palestinians ... It is
time to remind Sharon that the Star of David belongs to
all Jews and not to his repulsive government. His
actions are staining the Star of David with blood. The
Jewish people, whose gifts to civilized discourse
include Einstein. . . are now symbolized throughout the
world by the blustering bully Ariel Sharon, a war
criminal implicated in the murder of Palestinians in the
Sabra-Shatila camp and now involved in killing
Palestinians once again." (The Guardian, 17 April 2002).
Thus, my response to the query "Why don't you stick to a
'Jewish' cause" is that seeking justice for the
Palestinians is, in fact, the Jewish cause, because that
is where Jews can be most valuable. When major crimes
are being committed in my name, if I want to be able to
look at myself in the mirror in the morning, I don't
want to see the reflection of a Jew who displays
"malignant indifference" while Sharon uses methods of
"barbarism" against the Palestinians. Rather,
I want to see the reflection of an ordinary decent Jew
who reacts to Israeli crimes by saying loudly and
clearly, "Stop! You do not speak or act in my name."
Painful though it may be to face, the reality is that
without the continued moral, spiritual and financial
support of world Jewry, Israel would have been forced to
quit the occupied territories a long time ago. Although
U.S. diplomatic, economic and military support for
Israel enables the brutal occupation to continue, if the
majority of world Jewry would denounce Israeli crimes,
Israeli troops and policymakers would not have been able
to continue pursuing their shameful practices.
What does give me hope now is that, though still a
minority, a significant number of Jews are beginning to
express discomfort with Israeli policies and are no
longer blindly supporting them.
While it goes without saying that I fully agree that
Palestinian suicide bombings are, as Human Rights Watch
wrote in its October 2002 report Erased in a Moment:
Suicide Bombing Attacks Against Israeli Civilians,
"crimes against humanity" and "war crimes," that does
not diminish the far greater and daily crimes Israel has
been committing against the Palestinian people since the
foundation of the state in 1948, which saw the
destruction of over 400 Palestinian villages and the
flight of over 700,000 refugees, and even more so since
the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza began in 1967.
It is thus our collective responsibility as Jews not to
behave as "morally indifferent" Germans did in the 1930s
and 40's or to remain "silent onlookers." It is times to
say, once and for all, to Sharon and his government,
"Stop, we will no longer allow you to 'stain the Star of
David with blood'."
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Shifra Eva Stern is a researcher and editor of an
unpublished dossier on "Israel's Operation 'Grapes of
Wrath' and the Qana Massacre"
(April 1996).
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