There was a cartoon in the Berkeley Daily Planet. It shows a picture of a man holding a Palestinian flag that says ‘State of Palestine’ and it shows an American flag and a man with a Jewish Star of David stabbing him in the back, as if Israel denied statehood to the Palestinian people. Prince Bandar, the Saudi Arabian member of the peace delegation, said if Arafat had accepted what was offered, we could be celebrating the third year of Palestinian statehood. Palestine could have been one of the wealthiest states in the Middle East, with all kinds of money pouring in from Europe, with great medical care and good education.
I’m pro-Palestinian. The only difference between me and other pro-Palestinians is they are anti-Israel. I could debate them because my goal is simply to bring more nuances in the discussion of the Israeli/Arab Palestinian conflict to the college campus. Enough of the shouting, enough of the polemics, enough of the extremism, enough of the ignorant comparisons to Nazism or to apartheid. Enough of the thoroughly non-intellectual sloganeering. Let’s have a real intellectual discussion, let’s have a real conversation. Let’s have a real case.
But you can’t buy that case unless there’s elimination of the extremist rhetoric – this sense that Israel is demonized, delegitimized in the world. In fact, the extreme criticism makes it hard to get the nuances of criticism of both sides. And what happens is each side gets polemical views and that doesn’t make progress toward peace.
So I ask those in the progressive movement, who support feminism and civil liberties – the kind of political theories I’ve supported all my life – to come join an effort to support Israel and support Palestine. To support a democratic Palestinian state to be sure. Take the position you want on unilateralism, or on the fence; they are issues about which reasonable people can disagree. Israelis disagree.
The fence case is now in the Israeli Supreme Court as well as the International Court of Justice. The Israeli Supreme Court will resolve it fairly. The International Court of Justice won’t. Why? Because the International Court of Justice is just like the Mississippi Supreme Court in the 1930’s. There was a Mississippi Supreme Court that could do justice only for cases of a white against a white. It was an all-white court. It could in a paternalistic way solve a case of a black against another black, but it couldn’t do justice in a case involving a black and white. It would always find in favor of a white in such a case.
The same goes for the United Nations General Assembly and the International Court of Justice, which is a United Nations court. It can do justice in some disputes, but when Israel is involved it is incapable of doing justice. Among cases now pending before the International Court, there are no cases pending involving genocide or slavery, or oppression of women. There are no cases of oppression of people because of their religion. There are no cases involving events in Algeria or the Sudan or Rwanda. But Israel builds a moveable fence – a fence that three times already has been moved by order of the Israeli Supreme Court and by the Israeli government in response to changes on the ground – and that seems to be the greatest violation of international law.
There is a clear effort on the part of those who want to demonize and delegitimize Israel to win a struggle for the hearts and souls and minds of the next generation of American leaders. The generation educated at Berkeley, at Stanford, at the University of San Francisco, today’s students at UC Santa Cruz. Students from all over the state of California and all over the United States. The goal is to make these people so knee-jerk anti-Israel that they will resemble typical French or most Western European leaders of today.
