Our readers speak out 'Loved I not justice more'
1988 1988-05Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 15 →
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The following letter was sent originally to The New York Times, which did not see fit to print it. Paul Siegel refers in the letter to an advertisement that appeared in the March 13, 1988, issue of the Times. See the article on pages 12-13 of this issue of Socialist Action for more on this topic.
Dear editor, Mr. Abraham Foxman of the [B'nai B'rith] Anti-Defamation League in his letter of March 20—responding to an advertisement calling for a democratic, secular Palestine in which Jews and Arabs could live together harmoniously on the basis of equality-does not seek to refute a single one of the charges that were made against Israel.
Instead, he adjures those supporters of Israel "who are so quick to criticize" it to forget about their criticisms and rally around it.
American ews and those sympathizing with a people whose long history of being persecuted culminated in the horror of the Holocaust would be better advised to ask themselves some fundamental questions about how it came about that a government of this people has perpetrated such atrocious brutalities.
Is it not due to the establishment of a state in which those of a single ethnic and religious identity have official dominance and from which 1.25 million of the original inhabitants were driven out?
Must not the remaining Moslem and Christian Arabs living in a country called Israel, whose flag bears the Star of David, be second-class citizens? I ask my fellow American Jews: Would you like to live in a country called the United Christian States of America whose flag bore the cross as a sign of the dominance of a single religion?
Israel's law of return provides that any Jew settling in Israel instantly becomes an Israeli citizen—no other persons, let alone the dispossessed original inhabitants, having this right. Does this not outdo the racist immigration quotas of the United States in the 1920s which discriminated against would-be immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, including Jews?
Palestine, unlike Israel, is the name of an area without reference to the racial and religious identity of its occupants. Why can there not be a pluralistic Palestine in which Palestinian Jews and Palestinian Arabs live together without the dominance of one over the other? Only in such a land of justice and equality will the survivors of the Holocaust.