On Tuesday, 30 April, Bill Clinton and Nobel laureate Eli Wiesel spoke at the 20th anniversary of the opening of the Holocaust Museum. It was not their first appearance together at the museum, for they both delivered remarks there when the museum opened. Said Clinton:
This museum is not for the dead alone, nor even for the survivors who have been so beautifully represented. It is perhaps most of all for those of us who were not there at all, to learn the lessons, to deepen our memories and our humanity, and to transmit these lessons from generation to generation.
A few hours later, 1,950 miles northwest by west of Washington, D.C., Flathead residents interested in Middle Eastern issues gathered in the basement of the Colter Coffee House in Kalispell, Montana, to hear anti-Israel activist Alison Weir explain what she thinks Americans need to know about Israel and the Palestinians. Weir is the executive director of If Americans Knew, and president of the Council for the National Interest. Both groups are among the most notorious anti-Israel organizations in the U.S. The Anti-Defamation League’s dossier (PDF) on Weir begins:
Alison Weir has established herself as a prominent voice in the anti-Israel movement. She frames the Jewish State as a violent aggressor in the region and charges that the United States, through its aid, is the driving force behind this aggression. Weir claims that not only does Israel brutalize the Palestinians, but through its intimidation tactics, it corrupts the American political system and prevents criticism of its conduct from being voiced by the mainstream media. As a result, she contends, Americans are kept in the dark about how their taxes fund Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians.
In her discussions of Israel’s influence, Weir employs anti-Semitic imagery and portrays Israel and its agents as ruthless forces that control American policy through brutal intimidation and deception. Weir views herself and her organization, If Americans Knew, as part of a growing movement to promote U.S. interests by educating Americans about the vast conspiracy to keep the truth about Israeli practices hidden from them.
There’s more, and I encourage you to read it.
I learned about Weir’s visit by accident, from a friend and human right activist who is rightly appalled by the grim life of the Palestinians, especially those in the Gaza Strip, where water is scarce, jobs are few, misery and militants abound, and hope is next to non-existent. Americans who visit Gaza almost invariably return home shaken and angered by what they’ve witnessed. See, for example, Flathead Magazine editor Dave Reese’s account of his travels in Gaza, and Shirley Harryman’s account of her tour of the area. Neighbors East and West, which helps organize tours to the Middle East, has links to similar articles.
Neighbors East and West has roots in Indiana and Whitefish, MT, and on its website links to Friends of Sabeel North America, which bills itself as the “Voice of the Palestinian Christians.” Here’s how the ADL begins its backgrounder on Sabeel:
Sabeel, a Palestinian Christian organization based in Jerusalem with support groups in the UK and North America, is a driving force behind the campaign by mainline Protestant churches to divest from Israel. Its U.S.-based affiliated group, Friends of Sabeel in North America (FOSNA), has also supported an anti-Israel students’ divestment campaign.
Divestment in South Africa was a major part of the international campaign against apartheid — but Israel is not South Africa, and, Jimmy Carter’s histrionics to the contrary, Israel does not practice apartheid.
Sabeel, reports the ADL, opposes Israel on theological grounds, the Vatican’s 1965 Nostra Aetate notwithstanding. Sabeel publishes the Cornerstone, a slick newsletter aimed at English speaking Christians. Issue 62, Spring 2012, is a good starting point.
This is discouraging. It makes me wonder how many Christians still believe in the ancient Blood Libel, or some modern incarnation of it, and to what extent that contributes to the affection some Americans have for Sabeel, Alison Weir, and the contempt they display for Israel’s efforts to defend itself from terrorism. Is their apparent unwillingness to issue more than a perfunctory denunciation, if that, of Palestinian terrorism toward Israel rooted in religion?
That terrorism is real, and more than just a nuisance, according to the U.S. State Department’s 2012 human rights report for Israel and what the department calls the Occupied Territories:
Terrorist groups routinely fired rockets and mortars into the country during the year. There were 2,001 terrorist attacks against citizens, including 281 in Jerusalem and six elsewhere in the country; 11 cross-border attacks from Egypt; 576 attacks in the West Bank; and 1,127 attacks from the Gaza Strip. Those attacks included the firing of 2,327 rockets and mortar shells from the Gaza Strip into the country (compared with 419 rockets and 244 mortar shells in 2011), according to data compiled by the Israel Security Agency (ISA). In total nine persons were killed and 307 injured in these attacks. Terrorist attacks from across the Egyptian border killed an Israeli Arab construction worker, Said Pashpasha, who was building the border fence on June 18, and a soldier, Corporal Netanel Yahalomi, when he brought food and water to a group of African asylum seekers camped outside the security barrier on September 21.
Many of the missiles launched from Gaza are crude, inaccurate as bottle rockets, and seldom hit anything except unoccupied dirt — but they’re not harmless. They kill when they explode next to people. And even when they explode “harmlessly” in a field, they instill fear in Israelis, who awake each morning wondering whether this will be the day they are killed or maimed by a rocket from Gaza.
But terrorizing Israel is not the only objective of Palestinian suicide bombers and Gaza’s rocketeers. They want to provoke Israeli retaliatory attacks on Gaza, the more lethal the better, as part of a public relations campaign to portray Israel as a violator of human rights and Palestinians as victims of Jewish murderers. The Palestinians will supply blood and bodies for the cameras of visitors, especially Americans.
Israel’s response to those hostile acts, while lethal, was justified, necessary, and to my thinking, restrained. A nation can, must, and will respond when it’s being hit by thousands of rockets launched from its neighbor’s territory. Make no mistake: the responsibility for the retaliatory deaths in Gaza belongs not to Israel but solely to the incompetent, unreliable, irresponsible, and murderous, Hamas (a recognized terrorist organization with connections to and support from Iran; see also this) led government in Gaza; to the Palestinians themselves. They are not good neighbors.
Now, let me be clear: Israel has made some mistakes, and is making others. I don’t, for example, condone the settlements in the West Bank. I don’t like Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempts to push the U.S. into bombing Iran. And I didn’t appreciate Netanyahu’s meddlesome efforts to help his old business buddy, Mitt Romney, win the 2012 election for President of the United States.
But I’ve studied enough Middle Eastern history to know that the worst enemies of the Palestinians, and the worst by far, are the Arab states that exploit the misery of the Palestinians for political purposes, and the Palestinians themselves, who are too divided, too bitter, and too easily manipulated by the likes of Hamas to govern themselves competently. Israel seeks peace. But all too many Palestinians, especially those embracing Hamas, do not. They seek the elimination of Israel, and would kill every last Jew if they could.
Alison Weir and her cronies allege that the predicament of the Palestinians results almost entirely because Israel receives military aid from the U.S. — and that the aid is sent to Israel largely because of the secretive and highly effective lobbying of the Israeli controlled American Jewish Lobby. If you believe that conspiratorial garbage, you’ll believe almost anything.