Israel: Grandma's Orders
Bruce Gould
Grandma told me to say one more thing about Israel and then shut up. (for those of you who know Grandma – you don’t want to piss her off).
In the last few weeks the American press has been noticing that things are not quite right in Israel (it’s taken 50 years). Today this column appeared in the New York Times – it’s not the international diplomacy and the wars that are the story, it’s the way the Israeli government has been treating Palestinian civilians. Kristof only tells half the story – for the rest, got down to the American Friends Service Committee here in Chicago and ask them what they’ve seen with their own eyes.
In other news, the Israeli press is running more stories with the theme that the colonization and settlement building has gone too far, and the only solution left is either some type of Swiss-like binational state or even one state. (check out Ha’aretz).
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/08/opinion/08kristof.html?_r=1&ref=nicholasdkristof
Israel goes out of its way to display its ugliest side to the world by tearing down Palestinian homes or allowing rapacious settlers to steal Palestinian land.
Yet there’s also another Israel as well, one that I mightily admire. This is the democracy that tolerates a far greater range of opinions than America. It’s a citadel of civil society. And, crazily, it’s the place where some of the most courageous and effective voices on behalf of oppressed Palestinians belong to Israeli rabbis — like Arik Ascherman, the executive director of Rabbis for Human Rights.
Rabbi Ascherman — 50, tall, lean and bearded with mournful eyes (if central casting ever needed a Prophet Jeremiah type, he’d be it) — grew up in Erie, Pa. He fell in love with Israel on a brief visit between high school and college and moved here in 1994. At Rabbis for Human Rights, he presides over 20 staff members and hundreds of volunteers who sometimes serve as human shields to protect Palestinians — even if that means getting arrested or beaten.
I watched the ugly side of Israel collide with its more noble version, as Rabbi Ascherman and I visited a rural area in the northern West Bank where Jewish settlers have taken over land that Palestinian farmers say is theirs.
“If we try to enter our land, settlers will be waiting, and we will be beaten,” said Muhammad Moqbel, a 71-year-old Palestinian from the village of Qaryout who pointed to fields that he said had been stolen by settlers. Last year, he said, he was hospitalized with a broken rib after settlers attacked while he was picking his own olives…….