Applying Jim Crow laws to Israel: An Open Letter to
Secretary Rice
By Reuven Koret December 2, 2007
Madame Secretary,
Allow me to introduce myself. I am an American-born Israeli,
and since my early childhood I have been sympathetic to the
civil rights movement in the US, and human rights movement
around the world. My mother was a civil rights activist, a
marcher in the Washington demonstrations of the 1960's, just
as she marched for the rights of beleaguered Jews in the
USSR to gain their freedom. Among my proudest personal
accomplishments has been the co-founding, with black and
Jewish colleagues at Harvard University, of the pre-eminent
website for Africans and African-descent people, now called
*AOL Black Voices* <http://www.blackvoices.com>
< http://www.blackvoices.com%3e> .
I therefore have been interested to read of your attempts
to connect the civil rights movement and the Israeli-Arab
conflict. Most recently, you were quoted as telling, in a
closed-door meeting at Annapolis, a story from your
childhood in Birmingham, using it to show what you thought
was empathy for the Israeli and Palestinian peoples. You
said you did not want to draw historical parallels or be
too self-reflective, but you did so anyway, recalling the
time when a local church was bombed by white racists,
killing four girls, including your classmate.
'Like the Israelis, I know what it is like to go to sleep
at night, not knowing if you will be bombed, of being
afraid to be in your own neighborhood, of being afraid to
go to your church,' you said.
But then you went on to say, that, as a black child in the
South, you were told that you could not use certain water
fountains or eat in certain restaurants, you also understood
the feelings and emotions of the Palestinians. 'I know what
it is like to hear to that you cannot go on a road or
through a checkpoint because you are Palestinian,' she
said. 'I understand the feeling of humiliation and
powerlessness.'
'There is pain on both sides,' Rice concluded. 'This has
gone on too long.'
Well, we can agree on that, Madame Secretary. But the more
I thought about your attempt at a historical parallel, the
more it disturbed me. I am writing tell you that you are
wrong about much else, and what you trying to do to fix
this will lead to results opposite of what you intend.
Dr. Rice, you are wrong about how most Israelis feel. You
keep saying that the vast majority of Israelis support
leaving most if not all of Judea and Samaria and handing it
over to the Palestinians. But poll after poll shows that is
simply not true. Most Israelis are pragmatic and we
(sometimes) learn from experience. We saw what happened
when we withdrew from Lebanon and Gaza, and we are not
willing to repeat that mistake and allow Jerusalem, Tel
Aviv, Haifa, and our airport to become a target for
Palestinian rockets.
You are wrong, too, when you think that all we care about
is security. These days we worry less about being bombed,
because of the security measures our government took, over
Palestinian objections. Those same checkpoints you complain
about, and the security barrier that we built which so many
others complain about, keep bombers and drive-by shooters out.
But even if security weren't an issue, you need to
understand that when you speak about Judea and Samaria, you
speak about the Jewish People's heartland, not some foreign
country. The Bible you read is filled with those places
because that is where our faith was formed, that is where
our history was lived for many more centuries than the
United States has been in existence. And Jerusalem -- above
all, the Old City and the Temple Mount at its center -- has
been the spiritual core of our existence since the time of
David and Solomon.
For centuries, the Jews were denied even the right to pray
at our holiest sites near and on the Temple Mount. There
and at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron and in many
other places throughout Judea and Samaria, the Arabs
cruelly allowed us get close, but never to touch, never to
enter the place itself.
That didn't change even in 1948 when we earned our own
nation by defeating 6 attacking Arab armies and the local
Arab population. But that victory was only partial: we lost
the Old City of Jerusalem, Hebron and Gush Etzion, each
loss accompanied by massacres by the Arabs.
They burned down our synagogues: 17 out of 18 in the Old
City of Jerusalem alone after the Jordanians took control
in 1948. The other one they couldn't find because a decent
Arab hid it.
Secretary Rice, I am going to be blunt, in the fashion you
are known to be. Because you are doing business with the
worst racists and anti-Semites in the world, and their
bigotry is turning you into a racist and an anti-Semite, and
an advocate for racist and anti-semitic policies.
It's not like the world doesn't know who the Saudis are,
and what they stand for. Jews can't even visit, for God's
sake, and blacks are as close to slavery there as in most
countries, except of course most of the other Arab
non-democracies you invited to your little gathering. You
know that, I assume, but you choose to ignore it.
What stunned me was when I read today that you gave in to
the demands of the Saudis and agreed that the Israeli
delegation would not be allowed to enter the same door as
the representatives of the Arab states. The Israelis had to
enter through the service entrance. The Israeli delegation
agreed not to be photographed in the same pictures as the
Saudis and other Arabs lest Muslims be embarrassed by
appearing in the same photograph. God forbid that the two
religions should mix! And this Saudi nonsense about no
handshakes with Israelis. Doesn't this offend you in the
least? Can't you use your bully pulpit to deal with it?
Shame on you, Secretary Rice. How could you allow this to go
down? How could you tolerate this kind of bigotry? If
that's not a modern resurrection of Jim Crow laws, then
what is? How dare you! And then to lecture Israel about the
morality of its checkpoints?
Let me put it in the bluntest terms I can think of, but no
less true for being blunt: in the eyes of the Arabs, Israel
is the nigger of the Middle East: not because of our
borders but because of being the Jewish State and, to make
matters worse, beating the Muslims in every war.
For surviving in a sea of Muslim, we have been constantly
insulted, humiliated, discriminated against. We are --
because we are Jews, representing the Jewish State --
treated as less than human or, as the they continually
remind us, 'a race of pigs and monkeys.'
As such, Madame Secretary, we have no faith in the
possibility of a peace treaty in a year or even in ten
years, maybe not in a hundred. Why? Because the Arabs, the
Muslims in general, and the Palestinians in particular, are
educating their people, their youth, to hate us, to
dehumanize us, to demonize us, to deny our basic rights.
The Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the militant wings of Mahmoud
Abbas' Fatah, defined all as terror groups by your State
Department -- these are the local version of the Ku Klux
Klan you remember from your childhood, with one crucial
difference: they don't just want to keep us down. They want
to make us dead.
Theirs is not a non-violent civil rights struggle, but a
nationalist struggle to exterminate the people of Israel
from the Land of Israel, primarily by violent means and,
when necessary, political means using well-meaning people
like you.
I need not tell you that our fears are not without
justification, with Muslims the world over, and some
non-Muslims as well trying to foment the idea of a world
without Israel, without a Jewish state.
And, sadly, you have to some extent thrown your lot in with
them, by morally equating them and us, by saying that we are
equally guilty of terror and incitement as the
Palestinians, who invented terrorism and incite against us
in their mosques, media and government statements.
The joint understanding you worked so hard to achieve in
Annapolis starts wrong, when it refers to the Palestine
Liberation Organization as one of the two parties. It's
called that because it intends, has always intended, to
liberate Palestine, all of Palestine, including all of what
is Israel, expelling or exterminating all of the Jews who
live here.
The PLO has never, despite all the conferences and word
play, retracted that desire. They continue to pursue their
Plan of Stages to replace Israel with Palestine. They want
a Jew-Free state of Palestinian and an Israel they will not
recognize as Jewish, which they hope gradually turn into an
Arab majority, by virtue of a higher birthrate and whatever
'right of return' they can negotiate. You did not insist
that the Palestinian recognize Israel as the Jewish
Homeland, even though President Bush does. You are
encouraging them to believe they can have Palestine, and
also destroy Israel from within.
And the joint understanding is wrong in its very end, when
it sets up the United States as judge of who is and who is
not implementing the 'road map.'
Secretary Rice, neither you nor your bosses, have the right
to judge us, nor do our leaders have the right to let you to
do so. You are acting in ways that show us that you are not
an honest broker, nor someone who knows very much about our
region, and certainly not our country. Only the people of
Israel can decide what is in the interests of the people of
Israel.
You are aligning yourself with the world's most racist and
anti-semitic autocracies. And if your actions in Annapolis,
and in your subsequent maneuver at the UN, are any guide,
you are learning from them and following their orders like
they were your slavers. You are applying Jim Crow laws to
Israel. That should as shameful and humiliating for you as
it is for us.
I am sure that, at some level, you know that what I am
saying is true, that the Saudis and their ilk are odious,
arrogant racists, who look down at you at least as much as
they look down at us.
One day you will recognize that the Arab despots, and the US
interests they grease, are your masters, exploiting you as a
willing slave to do their dirty work, a dhimmi to hew their
wood and carry their water. And the job they expect is for
you to make Israel, the Mideast nigger, the dirty Jew of
the world, pay -- pay so dearly and castrate itself to such
an extent that it will not be able to defend itself when
the killing attack begins.
We Israelis -- most of us -- know that. We shall overcome
the Arabs, and the Persians, and we shall overcome you and
your masters, if you insist on forcing us into a situation
of existential vulnerability.
We have no desire to rule over another people, but neither
do we intend to allow that people or their cousins to
destroy the Jewish homeland and exterminate Jewish history,
which is their clearly and continuously expressed intention.
We want to be free of them, in a way that does not allow
them threaten us, or undermine us, or kill us.
May that day come soon.
Respectfully,
Reuven Koret
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
No virus found in this incoming message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.5.516 / Virus Database: 269.17.13/1210 - Release Date: 1/5/2008
11:46 AM
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment