The Jewish Transcript, Seattle
28 Iyar, 5762 | Friday, May 10, 2002 | Letters
Back from Israel
Having just returned from a month away, including five days in Jerusalem while attending The Third International Conference on the Holocaust and Education at Yad Vashem and eleven days total in Israel, I read read the April 5 and 26 issues.
I would like to respond to “It takes a village to raise a suicide bomber,” a poem printed on the April 26 opinion pages. It was written by Rabbi Mark Smilowitz, a teacher at Northwest Yeshiva High.
The writer dehumanizes “the other” (the displaced and beaten-down Palestinian people) and presents a staggeringly one-sided view of the conflict to student-age Transcript readers who deserve to learn there are two sides to what Jewish Israelis call “the situation.”
Smilowitz writes,”it takes schools and textbooks to feed the hungry minds of children with Nazi-style hate.” I don’t contest that there is ample evidence that Arab schools and textbooks have portrayed Jews, Israel and Zionists in the most demeaning and shocking historical analogies.
Smilowitz and other letter writers are unwilling to address the fact that the Israeli military occupation has been increasingly brutal and horrible on a 24/7 basis for the one and a half million Palestinians in Gaza alone and those in the West Bank as well.
Like it or not, the Palestinians are there to stay; the murder-suicide bombings represent a level of horrible desperation that it’s shocking that so many of us in the Jewish community are unwilling to see what inspires the roots of hopelessness. Why would teenagers end their lives at such young ages? Does anyone wonder? I do.
Like the Palestinians who reject learning that Jews suffered horribly in the Holocaust, many Jewish Israelis and their overseas supporters would simply rather not know about what day-to-day conditions are for Palestinians. This includes us; it includes me. All we can see is the terror and horror of the murder-suicide bombers and the slain and maimed Jews.
Jews would rather not know that four times as many Palestinians have died through Israeli Defence Force retaliations as have Jewish Israelis. A huge proportion of those Palestinians killed by our people have been children, women and teenagers. It will take more than a village and our silence for this tragedy to be overcome.
I look forward to the day when Arafat and Sharon alike are fossils of history. For Israelis and Palestinians to coexist and engage in desperately needed economic development. We will need a new and pragmatic generation of leaders on both sides.
I would be happy to come present a slide class to Rabbi Smilowitz’s classes to let his students learn about how adults stereotype, what Nazi supremacism was in relation to Germany, European Jewry, the Third Reich, and the Final Solution to the Jewish Problem.
I would be wiling to engage his students in dialogue on how conflict resolution and dialogue can be used to heal trauma and hate in the eventual aftermath of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
It takes a village and teachers to learn how to break down the walls that separate us. Like it or not, if Israel wants to achieve a lasting peace, it will have to accept that there are Israeli Palestinians and Palestinians who are not all bloodthirsty killers out to slaughter Jewish babies.
Like it or not, Palestinians will have to eventually accept that not all Jews are out to steal their land and kill their babies and children. Jews and Palestinians have far more in common than they realize.
Shalom,
Akiva Segan, Seattle