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LETTERS Bias and the Jewish State What’s missing from the WRL goals, as listed in the “Statement on the Middle East,” is the recognition of Israel as a Jewish state. It will be democratic and secular, as it mostly is today, and Arabs can be full citizens, as tens of thousands are today. But if the Arabs do not recognize Israel’s essential Jewish nature, as the world recognizes the essential Moslem nature of all of the Arab and other states, there can never be peace. Or aren’t the Jews also entitled to a little slice of land, somewhere on the planet? —Stan Kohls Your protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, your anti-Israeli bias has never been more clearly displayed than in your May-June 2002 editorial, “WRL on Palestine and Israel.” You speak of Israel as “a heavily-armed state driven past sanity by its tragically misplaced notions of security.” What would qualify, in your view, as sane “notions” of security for a nation that has endured more than half a century’s and several aggressive wars’ worth of internationally supported, violent determination to destroy it? Can you be blind even to the bias in the choice of the trivializing word “notions”? Your declaration of moral equivalency (“We deplore equally … “) regarding innocent civilians as victims of suicide bombings vis-a-vis innocent civilians as victims of Israeli military occupation, deliberately distorts the case. The targets of the internationally financed suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks have always been innocent civilians, while innocent civilians have never been the target of Israeli military operations. Such a declaration of equivalency must be loaded with bias to balance a “moral” equation. You speak of the illegal occupation since 1967 in the same breath as the need to recognize Palestinian refugees’ rights. Those very territories were “illegally” occupied by Jordan from 1948 to1967 and used as staging areas for wars against Israel, while every Arab country that supported that occupation and those wars persisted in denying basic humane rights to Palestinian refugees. It was the refusal of those Arab states to accept a Palestinian state in the “territories” that has led directly to the present violence. It is certainly appropriate and consistent for WRL to oppose U.S. military aid abroad. But to single out Israel as the only named country to abuse such aid is egregiously discriminatory. What about those countries that have used U.S. military equipment to wage wars against Israel, arm the intifada, and support Arafat’s terrorists? Or must the documentary evidence of such support to be disregarded in order to maintain WRL’s posture of neutrality? And by the way, how do “settlements” become targets of WRL’s condemnations of Israeli policy? They are, by definition, places where people seek to live and work in peace—and have always been so throughout the history of civilization. Settlements become military outposts only when attacked by marauding forces determined to drive out civilizing “invaders.” A consistent WRL policy should not be concerned with arbitrarily imposed national borders but should support the existence of peaceful communities while condemning violent opposition to their very existence. It saddens me that those principles which drew me to WRL in the first place are so utterly betrayed in the NVA’s treatment of the conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors. —Neil D. Isaacs |
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