Israel and Palestine
Dear Editor:
Re: A last Christmas in Palestine?
As someone with a fair knowledge of the West Bank – I started reading about Israel and its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, wrote from the West Bank and Israel for various US publications from 1979 through 1988, have followed Israeli politics including its occupation ever since, and have visited the West Bank twice since 2000 - I find Hagan’s column extremely disturbing. I would suggest you contact the Palestinian Christian organization Sabeel (sabeel@sabeel.org), phone, 972-2-532-7136, and ask them to comment on it. Your readers deserve no less. (Please note that I am Jewish and while I respect Sabeel am not a member.)
In my experience, Palestinian Christians and Muslims have been singular for their tolerance of each other and united in their endurance and hatred of Israel’s occupation, whose latest draconian measure is the apartheid wall, ruled illegal by the International Court. Among other places whose economy has been strangled by the wall is Bethlehem, now surrounded by the wall on all sides. Hagan scores Bethlehem’s mayor for what he alleges as “cynicism� in drumming up tourism to beef up the city’s economy (and why not drum up tourism, one wonders), but you might consult the mayor’s “Message from Bethlehem� in The Catholic Reporter where he says among other things: “I should say the Israeli occupation of our land is the sole obstacle to peace and the major cause of instability in our region. Peace should be based on justice, equality and respect of others’ rights if it is to prevail, and not on oppression, might and separation.�
As for West Bank lawlessness, extremist settlers (one of whose organizations Hagan cites as a source) have regularly conducted pogroms against Palestinians since before I began reporting there 26 years ago; Israel’s human rights organization B’tselem has chronicled these crimes. It would be absurd to say that Palestinian crime against Palestinians doesn’t exist, but this hardly makes the West Bank any different from the US, Europe or, I daresay, Canada. I have never heard about anti-Muslim acts by Palestinian Christians. This isn’t to say it couldn’t happen, but I wouldn’t believe the source Hagan cites – Daniel Pipes, who cites the Israeli ex-military officer/settler organization, GAMLA, which endorses the ethnic cleansing of every Palestinian as “the only possible solution� to the Arab-Israeli conflict (see Kristine McNeil, THE NATION, 11/11/02.)
As for Pipes, he’s a notorious hate-monger against all things Arab and Muslim. Here are a few selected Pipes quotes: “Western European societies are unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining different standards of hygiene…All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most.� (National Review, 11/19/90) “…black converts tend to hold vehemently anti-American, anti-Christian, and anti-Semitic attitudes.� (Commentary, 6/1/2000) “The Palestinians are a miserable people…and they deserve to be.� (Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July 2001) Pipes also runs Campus Watch, a sort of “Red squad� that monitors and composes dossiers of university teachers and students who dare to criticize Israel. Your columnist, in short, makes himself known by his bedfellows.
ELLEN CANTAROW
Medford, MA
