Firing
Debbie Ducro, Free Speech?
This article was sent to Debbie Ducro, an American-Jewish journalist with the
Kansas City Jewish Chronicle.
She published it, and was fired the next day!
I am a Jew. I was a participant in the Rally for the
Right of Return to Palestine.
It was the right thing to do.
I've heard about the European holocaust against the
Jews since I was a small child.
I've visited the memorials in Washington DC and
Jerusalem dedicated to Jewish lives lost and I've cried at the recognition to
what level of atrocity mankind is capable of sinking.
Where are the Jews of conscience?
No righteous malice can be held against the survivors
of Hitler's holocaust.
These fragments of humanity were in no position to make
choices beyond that of personal survival.
We must not forget that being a survivor or a
co-religionist of the victims of the European Holocaust does not grant
dispensation from abiding by the rules of humanity.
"Never again" as a motto, rings hollow when it means "never again
to us alone.
" My generation was raised being led to believe
that the biblical land was a vast desert inhabited by a handful of impoverished
Palestinians living with their camels and eking out a living in the sand.
The arrival of the Jews was touted as a tremendous
benefit to these desert dwellers. Golda Mier even assured us that there "is
no Palestinian problem."
We know now this picture wasn't as it was painted.
Palestine was a land filled with people who called it
home.
There were thriving towns and villages, schools and
hospitals.
There were Jews, Christians and Muslims.
In fact, prior to the occupation, Jews represented a
mere 7 percent of the population and owned 3 percent of the land.
Taking the blinders off for a moment, I see a second
atrocity perpetuated by the very people who should be exquisitely sensitive to
the suffering of others.
These people knew what it felt like to be ordered out
of your home at gunpoint and forced to march into the night to unknown
destinations or face execution on the spot.
The people who displaced the Palestinians knew first
hand what it means to watch your home in flames, to surrender everything dear to
your heart at a moment's notice.
Bulldozers leveled hundreds of villages, along with the
remains of the village inhabitants, the old and the young. This was nothing new
to the world.
Poland is a vast graveyard of the Jews of Europe.
Israel is the final resting-place of the massacred
Palestinian people.
A short distance from the memorial to the Jewish
children lost to the holocaust in Europe there is a leveled parking lot.
Under this parking lot is what's left of a once
flourishing village and the bodies of men, women and children whose only crime
was taking up needed space and not leaving graciously.
This particular burial marker reads: "Public
Parking".
I've talked with Palestinians.
I have yet to meet a Palestinian who hasn't lost a
member of their family to the Israeli Shoah, nor a Palestinian who cannot name a
relative or friend languishing under inhumane conditions in an Israeli prison.
Time and time again, Israel is cited for human rights
violations to no avail.
On a recent trip to Israel, I visited the refugee camps
inhabited by a people that have waited 52 years in these 'temporary' camps to go
home.
Every Palestinian grandparent can tell you the name of
their village, their street, and where the olive trees were planted.
Their grandchildren may never have been home, but they
can tell you where their great-grandfather lies buried and where the village
well stood.
The press has fostered the portrait of the Palestinian
terrorist.
But, the victims who rose up against human indignity in
the Warsaw Ghetto are called heroes.
Those who lost their lives are called martyrs.
The Palestinian who tosses a rock in desperation is a
terrorist.
Two years ago, I drove through Palestine and watched
intricate sprinkler systems watering lush green lawns of Zionist settlers in
their new condominium complexes, surrounded by armed guards and barbed wire in
the midst of a Palestinian community, where there was not adequate water to
drink and the surrounding fields were sandy and dry.
University professor Moshe Zimmerman reported in the
Jerusalem Post (April 30, 1995), "The [Jewish] children of Hebron are just
like Hitler's youth."
We Jews are suing for restitution, lost wages,
compensation for homeland, slave labor and back wages in Europe.
Am I a traitor of a Jew for supporting the right of
return of the Palestinian refugees to their birthplace and compensation for what
was taken that cannot be returned?
The Jewish dead cannot be brought back to life and
neither can the Palestinian massacred be resurrected.
David Ben Gurion said, "Let us not ignore the
truth among ourselves...politically, we are the aggressors and they defend
themselves...The country is theirs because they inhabit it. Whereas we want to
come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them
their country..."
Palestine is a land that has been occupied and emptied
of its people.
It's cultural and physical landmarks have been
obliterated and replaced by tidy Hebrew signs.
The history of a people was the first thing eradicated
by the occupiers.
The history of the indigenous people has been all but
eradicated as though they never existed.
And all this has been hailed by the world as a miraculous act of God.
We must recognize that Israel's existence is not even a
question of legality so much as it is an illegal fait accompli realized through
the use of force while supported by the Western powers.
The UN missions directed at Israel in attempting to
correct its violations of have thus far been futile.
In Hertzl's "The Jewish State," the father of
Zionism said, "...We must investigate and take possession of the new Jewish
country by means of every modern expedient.
" I guess I agree with Ehud Barak (3 June 1998)
when he said, "If I were a Palestinian, I'd also join a terror group."
I'd go a step further perhaps.
Rather than throwing little stones in desperation, I'd
hurtle a boulder.
Hopefully, somewhere deep inside, every Jew of conscience knows that this was no
war; that this was not God's restitution of the holy land to it's rightful
owners.
We know that a human atrocity was and continues to be
perpetuated against an innocent people who couldn't come up with the arms and
money to defend themselves against the western powers bent upon their demise as
a people.
We cannot continue to say,
"But what were we to do?" Zionism is not synonymous with Judaism.
I wholly support the rally of the right of return of
the Palestinian people.