WRL Homepage • WRL Programs • WRL Literature • WRL Actions • WRL Employment • About WRL
|
Homepages: |
|
Phillip Berrigan There are a number of factual errors in Judith Mahoney Pasternak’s obituary for Phillip Berrigan (Jan.-Feb.). Pasternak says that Daniel Berrigan was one of the four participants in the October 1967 blood pouring at the Baltimore, MD, draft board. Dan was not. Only two members of the Baltimore group, Phil Berrigan and Tom Lewis, also participated in the May 1968 burning of draft files at Catonsville. Thus, Pasternak is also mistaken when she says that Dan Berrigan was among those who received concurrent sentences for the Baltimore and Catonsville actions. Pasternak also says that the defendants were acquitted in the Harrisburg conspiracy trial, in which Phil Berrigan and the other defendants were accused of plotting to kidnap Henry Kissinger and blow up underground heating tunnels in Washington, DC. This is incorrect. The trial ended in a hung jury that voted 10-2 for acquittal. In such a case, the government can elect to re-try the defendants without violating the double-jeopardy clause of the Fifth Amendment. In that case, the government chose not to re-try the defendants. It is worth noting that the lead defense attorney for the Harrisburg defendants was former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who had been responsible for the indictment in January 1968 of pediatrician Ben Spock and four others on charges of conspiracy to encourage draft resistance. At the last moment, Clark chose a highly unorthodox legal defense for Berrigan and his co-defendants: putting on no witnesses and no case whatsoever and just arguing to the jury that the government had the burden of proof and had failed to meet it. Clark also told the jury that when he was Attorney General such a weak case would never even have gone to a grand jury. Pasternak is to be commended for acknowledging that “[t]he Plowshares concept had critics within the peace movement …” The same is true of Phil Berrigan’s earlier tactic of destruction of draft files. When I was on the staff of the national WRL office in 1969, at the height of the Vietnam War, I was virtually alone among WRL staff in supporting the tactic. (I participated in the destruction of draft files at 14 draft boards up and down the east coast in 1969 and 1970.) WRL’s chairman and part-time staff member Igal Roodenko vigorously opposed draft file destruction, as did [staffers] Jim Peck and David McReynolds. [Staffer] Ralph DiGia was less outspoken but deeply skeptical. Peck spoke for many when he wrote, in the September 1, 1969, issue of WIN magazine (published jointly by WRL and the New York Workshop in Nonviolence), “Raiding, looting and destruction are still not actions that command respect. …” —Jerry Elmer More on Israel/Palestine Wendy Schwartz’s response to my letter (NVA, September-October) is a cogent statement of an irrational position. I would not be misunderstood as a complaisant supporter of Israel’s policies and practices. I have disagreed with many for decades—and so have many Israelis. But when Palestinian loss of property and the “isolation” of Palestinian towns are equated with terrorist bombing and killing of innocent Israeli citizens, the “moral equivalency” argument is revealed in all its fatuous and repugnant sophistry. And she has distorted my point of relative wrongs: I said that Israel has never targeted Palestinian civilians for murder. Schwartz’s objection to a Jewish state of Israel is that it falls short of the ideal of “universal human and civil rights [with] laws [not] based on the narrow, sometimes discriminatory, values of only a segment of their population.” But in the real world, where people engage in joyous celebrations of the atrocities they encourage, I find such reference to narrow values, at best, full of chutzpah, at worst, a mark of disingenuous cynicism. Palestinian sympathizers among the NVA readership should not reject the two-state solution, but they should keep in mind that the survival of Israel is the best hope for a free democratic society in the Middle East, and that there would long since have been a Palestinian state on the West Bank if the Arab countries had not refused to accept one because that would have implied acceptance of Israel’s right to exist. That said, we must also recognize that in the real world Israel would cease to exist if it lost its identity as a Jewish state. Five of the world’s most persistent and active terrorist organizations are dedicated to the extinction of Israel. Until its neighbors cease to support the terrorists, indeed as long as the terrorists continue to operate against them, Israelis must defend themselves. As for Matthew Williams’ suggestion that nonviolent civil defense would preserve life in Israel, how pretty it is to think so (to borrow Hemingway’s ironic tag-line). How may the two-state solution be brought about? It is easy to agree with Schwartz that both Arafat and Sharon should go, but here again is where real-world factors should give us pause. If Israelis agree that Sharon should go, he will—in a democratic process—and likely be replaced by a less aggressively militaristic administration. If Palestinians agree that Arafat should go, he will—perhaps by assassination. And who could realistically predict that his successors would not be even more intimately engaged with the terrorist organizations than he has demonstrably been? America cannot bring peace to a world in which it is the greatest provider of arms. On every continent, America has armed factions only to face our own weapons in battle, or armed regimes that have metamorphosed into our bitter enemies, or armed both sides of conflicts in the mistaken cause of geopolitical balance to protect short-term “interests.” It is hard to know which is worse. But one thing is certain, beyond the understanding that war is never an answer: If there is a third way toward a lasting peace, we cannot foster that cherished goal by irrationally abandoning support for Israel against its—and our—violent terroristic enemies. To believe otherwise, I think, is to forget that gas chambers were not merely showers. —Neil D. Isaacs |
WRL Homepage • WRL Programs • WRL Literature • WRL Actions • WRL Employment • About WRL
