Akiva Ken Segan with a drawing he calls "Jerusalem Mosaic."
photo by Gwen Thompson
COLUMBIA MISSOURIAN, Missouri
June 6, 2024
GUEST COMMENTARY: A case for protesters to be both pro-Palestine and pro-Israel
As a Jewish-American boomer who grew up in the shadow of World War II, ongoing news of pro-Palestinian student demonstrators and of some pro-Israeli demonstrators in the U.S. gives me cause to reflect on what an old geezer can offer student-age demonstrators.
I have a strong love for Israel, where I guest-taught during seven trips, 1999 to 2011. I also sympathize for the plight of the stateless Palestinians and believe a secular one-state solution is the only ethical solution.
That is so far from Israeli political discourse that I doubt Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could fathom it. He detests a two-state solution.
The last column, published posthumously in “The Forward,” by late American Jewish journalist Leonard Fein, is memorable. He wrote that Israelis and Gazans alike don’t have PTSD — post traumatic stress disorder. They have OTSD —Ongoing Traumatic Stress Disorder.
An active op-ed writer during and after college, I didn’t address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict until after my first teaching trip at Yad Vashem’s International School for Holocaust Education in Jerusalem.
Later, after I criticized the late Israeli Ariel Sharon in a letter in Seattle’s now defunct Jewish Transcript, a Seattle area resident wrote that I support the death of Jewish babies. Not so!
Several years ago I had the opportunity to hear a talk by and chat with Ilan Pappé, an Israeli and a Exeter University history professor.
I asked him how apartheid ended, while the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues. He said the 1989 collapse of Soviet Communism changed the global dynamic, and he didn’t see anything comparable ahead to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
At an International Conference on the Holocaust and Education at Yad Vashem, 2002, I attended a workshop by the late Ben-Gurion University professor Dan Bar-On. The conference was during the height of the Israeli military response to the second intifada; many non-Israeli conference attendees canceled.
Bar-On led ground-breaking workshops with adult children of Jewish Holocaust survivors and Nazi war criminals. He led workshops with apartheid protagonists, and workshops with Protestants and Catholics of The Troubles, Northern Ireland. Apartheid ended in 1989, the Troubles in 1998.
As those two latter conflict enemies hated each other, why won’t Israelis and Palestinians sit down, break bread, and hammer out the peace?
On April 11, 2002, I visited a public market in Jerusalem. The next day a 17-year-young female murder-suicide bomber blew herself up at the same entry where I had entered the market. Six civilians died; 104 were injured.
At the Yad Vashem conference closing ceremonies, (now late) Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel spoke. He spoke of not understanding how children and teens are enlisted to willfully kill others and themselves die. I call these attacks murder-suicide; the media prefers suicide bombings.
Unlike the U.S, with our homegrown gun genocide, in Israel one is screened for weapons at public buildings, supermarkets, department stores, malls, post offices, etc.
During another teaching trip I took a bus to a Tel Aviv bus depot to get another bus. The next day there was a murder-suicide bombing at that entry I had been to.
Home after another trip, I learned a suicide bomber had slain a Jewish Scottish student at a university cafeteria. The student was a close friend of the son of a Scottish academic I had met at a conference.
The words of Palestinian academic Sari Nusseibeh and late Israeli author Amos Oz ring true. Raised nearby in Jerusalem yet in different worlds, they spoke at the Jerusalem YMCA. I recall this: “Neither side is going away! They are not going to learn to love each other, but they have to learn to live with each other!”
I believe that unless those who profess to be pro-Palestinian are pro-Israeli, then they are not pro-Palestinian. And if those professing to be pro-Israel are not pro-Palestinian, then they are not pro-Israel.
For years in my school, university and museum presentations I showed a photo published in a 2009 New York Times article about a Gazan girl who became quadriplegic from an Israeli missile strike targeting a Hamas fighter in a nearby car.
An Israeli boy lost half of his brain in a terror attack at the kibbutz where his family lived. Age 9 and best friends in a Jerusalem hospital.
Take kids out of a conflict zone and they can get along. We, as humans, can do better.
Artist Akiva Ken Segan is an artist and pro-life, tolerance, human rights and Holocaust educator. An MU-C MFA alumnus, he guest-taught in Columbia public schools, Hillel, Stephens College, and the University of Missouri during teaching trips to Columbia in 1996, 1997, 1998 and 2006. He lives in Seattle.