Adam
Shapiro is a harmless pacifist who believes he serves a purpose
in life by being a human shield.
I met
him on a recent visit to Ramallah where he and other members of
the International Solidarity Movement, including a number of Coloradans,
were protesting the presence of Israeli tanks outside Yasser Arafat's
headquarters. The protests were always peaceful but the Israelis
always responded with teargas and rubber bullets.
The “internationals,”
as they call themselves, oppose violence of any kind. They do
not condone Palestinian suicide bombings, just as they do not
condone Israeli military assaults on Palestinian communities.
They distribute food, volunteer as medics and stretcher bearers
and believe their presence, as foreigners, helps protect the Palestinians
from Israel's superior firepower.
When
I met Shapiro he wasn't getting much publicity. Most of that was
reserved for his fiery fiancee, Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian-American
born in Michigan, and Neta Golan, a 30-year-old Jew born of Canadian
parents in Israel. The two women, co-founders of ISM, were hogging
so many headlines that Shapiro wryly referred to himself as “the
unnamed guy with Huwaida.” All that changed when Israeli
troops punched into Arafat's compound on March 29. Shapiro, trapped
inside while trying to evacuate the wounded, spent a night there
and was invited to have breakfast with Arafat the next morning.
He then described his experience in numerous TV and newspaper
interviews. That enraged militant Jews in his hometown of New
York, who denounced Shapiro as the “Jewish Taliban”
and “Sheepshead Bay's John Walker Lindh.” His parents,
both public school teachers, had to move out of their Brooklyn
home because of death threats and his brother, a lawyer, is now
being called a “fake Jew.”
The New
York Post did not help with a column headlined: “Our Latest
Traitor Must Live With His Vile Choice.”
To its credit, the Anti-Defamation League leaped to the family's
defense. Calling the threats “sinister and serious,”
Abraham Foxman, national director of the Jewish group, said it
was “reprehensible to target anybody based on what they
believe or what they stand for, whether or not we believe in their
actions.”
But what
happened to the Shapiros illustrates a dark and dangerous undercurrent
in American society.
Pro-Israel
bias is so ingrained in our government, media and public consciousness
that anyone who sympathizes with the Palestinians or tries to
explain the Arab point of view is immediately labeled “anti-Israel”
or “anti-Semitic.” And Jews who do so are branded
“self-haters.” Since Sept. 11, such heretics also
risk being labeled “pro-terrorist” or “un-American,”
as if it is somehow unpatriotic to question why the Israeli tail
wags the American dog.
Ironically,
there is a far healthier debate on these issues in Israel than
here. In Jerusalem, I asked an Israeli colleague who writes pretty
much what I write if he received hate mail. “Only from American
Jews,” he replied. Thus Rabbi Michael Lerner, whose California-based
Tikkun magazine promotes the view that “Jews did not climb
out of the gas chambers of Europe to oppress another people,”
routinely gets death threats. And even Tom Friedman, a respected
columnist for the New York Times who is nothing if not pro-Israel,
sometimes gets bashed for questioning the wisdom of the occupation.
He faults “feckless American Jewish leaders, fundamentalist
Christians and neoconservatives who together have helped make
it impossible for anyone in the U.S. administration to talk seriously
about halting Israeli settlement-building without being accused
of being anti-Israel. Their collaboration has helped prolong a
colonial Israeli occupation that now threatens the entire Zionist
enterprise.”
Unconditional U.S. support for this enterprise also harms our
national interest. As Michael Lind points out in a thoughtful
article for the British magazine Prospect, “What is needed
is a debate between those who want to link U.S. support for Israel
to its behavior, in the light of America's own strategic goals
and moral ideals, and those who want there to be no linkage.”
Such a debate is long overdue. If, heaven forbid, Palestinian
suicide bombers move to our shores, we should at least know why.
