Here is a draft of a response to Rabbi Chasan's resignation from the Peace and Justice Center and his letter published in the current P&J News. I'd like any suggestions before I send it in.
My questions:
-- Should I go into the generally chilling effect of official Jewish stands such as his?
-- Should I go into my experiences being accused of being a self-hating Jew by people like him?
-- Should I identify myself as a Jew?
-- Or is it enough as it stands?
Thanks for any help.
Marc
I append an unformatted version below for those of you who can't or won't open attachments.
Rabbi Chasan,
Let's agree, as we probably do, that there are no "demons" among us -- evil, supernatural beings, intent on inflicting disaster on an upstart world. Thus to call someone a "demonizer" is to a priori assign their assertions to the realm of destructive, outworn myth, and to implicitly dismiss those assertions without further discussion.
Yet the word "demonization" does have common meaning, generally understood. It indicates the activity -- most prevalent in wartime -- of describing an "other" in invidious, often sub-human terms, with accompanying caricaturish imagery.
Your letter in the September Peace & Justice News centers accuses the P&J statement of demonizing Israel. I therefore re-read that statement very carefully to see if I could find any example of such demonization. Not finding any, I changed my question to "What are the statements, the language, that Rabbi Chasan might see as demonization?"
Is it the assertions that Israel is conducting a "siege" in West Bank and Gaza, a "violent", "militaristic assault" on the Palestinian people, using "brutal", "hardship"-producing tactics? Are these words "demonizing", or do they accurately (and minimally) describe the program of "collateral damage", house demolitions, agricultural destruction, checkpoint humiliation and paralysis, water appropriation, destruction of civil, cultural, educational and health infrastructure -- all directed against innocent civilians? (I leave aside torture and assassinations without trial of people merely suspected of military resistance.)
If, in fact, all of these things are being perpetrated by the Israeli government, the IDF or by settlers protected by them, is it "demonizing" to describe them, to passionately object, and to ask others to join the objections?
Is it demonizing to call for Israel to abandon settlements patently illegal under international law, and understood as such by virtually the entire "civilized" world community -- as evidenced by decades of both General Assembly and Security Council votes in which the US and Israel (and perhaps Micronesia) stand alone against the nations of the world?
What is it in the P&J statement -- or in "the kind of criticism...voiced often in our neck of the woods -- that is "factually inaccurate"? Is "our neck of the woods" particularly blind, poorly educated, misguided, even antisemitic, emitting a "whiff of hatred of a people"?
You say that you "experience injustice" when the Board of Directors of the Peace & Justice Center takes an official, "demonizing" stand. But where is the demonizing? And does your "experiencing injustice" mean that there actually is injustice in their stand?
Most disturbing in your letter is the assertion that the Peace & Justice statement contains "the kind of rhetoric that leads to violence." Where, Rabbi, is the violence? In the collected wisdom of the worldwide peace movement reflected in the P&J statement? Or in the worldwide oppression of peoples (all with some rationale) of which the Israeli occupation is presently the chief and most world-affecting example.
If any statement is "demonizing" here, it is yours.
Marc Estrin
Jewish member of Vermonters for a Just Peace in Palestine/Israel
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LETTER TO CHASAN.doc
Description: MS-Word document
