Even mentioning the Palestinian People is antisemitic

Ilhan Omar, one of two Muslim women elected to Congress, has gone over the line in suggesting that politicians are influenced by money they get from the Israel Lobby. It is OK to say that our leaders are paid off by Big Oil, Big Pharma, and Wall Street. But it is antisemitic to imply that the Israel Lobby would do such things.

There should be a law making it illegal to reveal how much Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer get from the Israel Lobby. It is antisemitic to report that the two of them met recently with multibillionaires Haim Saban and Sheldon Adelson and promised an extensive list of "pro-Israel lawmakers" be appointed to important committees.

Boycotts, although they have a long history of being used against slave owners, Nazis, Jim Crow racists, and homophobes, are simply antisemitic when used against apartheid Israel and should be illegal. In fact, even mentioning the Palestinian People is an attempt to deny that Israel is a Jewish state. Talking about the occupation is antisemitic as well. Why not talk about human rights abuses in Darfur?

The effort to stop antisemitism has to start with the First Amendment. How dare our Founding Fathers promise freedom of speech and press without some qualifiers! Sure, citizens should be able to criticize politicians and foreign countries, but not a country that claims to be a religion, like Israel. No U.S. citizen should ever have the right to say that Israel has enormous power over our government.

Fred Nagel

An Example to be Followed

An Example to be Followed

Recently, I was excited to learn that members of Combatants for Peace (CfP) would be in the area, along with a clip from the award-winning movie, Disturbing the Peace.  Combatant for Peace, composed of former Israeli soldiers and former Palestinian fighters, had a message of peace that could resonate across lines usually not crossed. They have set an example to be followed – former enemies, laying down their weapons and their hostility, to work together as comrades  – for peace. 

My work in Veterans For Peace (VFP) had occasioned meeting with members of CfP numbers of times, both in East Jerusalem, and in the U.S. and I was always impressed with their commitment to end the occupation and achieve a just peace, but also, beyond that, the obvious friendship and even love that had developed between Palestinians and Israelis, both sharing the same mission, both caring deeply for the other. 

Here in our small town of Woodstock, known for peace and music, we’ll have yet another opportunity to hear about and witness real peace-making with two members of  Combatants for Peace, one Palestinian and one Israeli, on Friday, 7:00 PM,  March 8th, at the Community Center. They will also show a clip from the movie. I expect it to be a very interesting and inspiring evening.

VFP is honored to be a sponsor of the event. My old pal, Jay Wenk, would have been delighted. 

Tarak Kauff
Veterans For Peace

Not the Monster I thought You Were

Letter to the Editor February 20, 2019

In 2013, I completed a 10-year art project that offered a hypothetical world in which people would put themselves in the shoes of their so-called enemies and would learn to see from inside the “other’s” story - thereby opening space for a world without war. During the making of this project I received the Dutchess County Executive Arts Award to an Individual Artist, and was happy for the recognition this brought to an idea I strongly believe in.

My hypothetical, it turns out, was a reality somewhere on the planet. In Israel/Palestine there is a young, small, strong and committed organization composed of former enemies who put down their weapons, renounced the violence that permeated their lives, and now work very much together toward making peace in a land that has seen little of it. Combatants for Peace was founded by Israeli and Palestinian fighters who each made the huge mental and emotional journey out of their own life story, enabling them to listen to the “other.” Now they work together in nonviolent resistance to the complicated forces that preclude peace on their land. They stand against home demolitions, they protect Bedouin shepherds grazing their flocks, they bring solar power and playgrounds to villages living on the verge. They bring together Palestinian and Israeli families who grieve for all those they lost. This alone is moving beyond belief. They put up their hands against the growing crack in the dam, behind which is a future of war.

I love these people. Come hear them speak. March 8 Woodstock. March 9 Rhinebeck. http://afcfp.org/press-release-woodstock/ 

Madeleine Segall-Marx, sculptor Hyde Park, NY and New York CIty

Renouncing Violence

Renouncing Violence

By Tarak Kauff

It was November 2013, in a quiet restaurant in East Jerusalem, when a small delegation of Veterans For Peace (VFP) met with some  remarkable Israeli and Palestinian activists from Combatants for Peace. We sat at a big table across from each other, four U.S. military veterans and six Israeli and Palestinian former combatants, all who had renounced violence to work together for peace. We heard heart-wrenching stories on both sides of loss, forgiveness and a commitment away from violence. We shared a common goal of working nonviolently for peace and social justice regardless of what hostilities our governments promoted. We witnessed solidarity and brotherly love between these former adversaries that in itself set a vivid example of what we all hoped to see one day. 

Combatants for Peace was founded In 2006 when Israeli and Palestinian former combatants, people who had taken an active role in the conflict, laid down their weapons and joined forces to break the cycle of violence. The organization works to both transform and resolve the conflict by ending the occupation, resisting all forms of violence between the two sides, and building a peaceful future for both peoples.

One of the founding Palestinian members of Combatants for Peace, Bassam Aramin, was at the dinner.  In 2007, a year after Combatants for Peace was formed, he lost his 10-year old daughter, Abir to a rubber bullet fired by an Israeli policeman as she was carrying her books home from school. She was known as a model student. Bassam, once a Fatah militant, was devastated but renounced the desire for revenge to seek a nonviolent justice. 

Three years later he, his grief stricken wife and Abir’s memory were justified when an Israeli judge, after the initial denial by the Israeli Police, declared, "Abir and her friends were walking down a street where there were no rock-throwers, therefore there was no reason to shoot in their direction. It is clear that Abir's death, caused by a rubber bullet shot by border guards, was due to negligence..."

The author, standing, second from left, Bassam Aramin third from left.  Photo: Mike Hastie

On Friday, March 8th at the Mountain View Studio from 7 to 9:00 pm, two Combatants, one Israeli and one Palestinian, will share their personal stories of transformation from violence to nonviolence. The program will include a short clip of the award-winning documentary: Disturbing the Peace. 

Palestinian, Osama Elewat, one of the speakers says, “I know that we can only heal this situation if we work together. We can only end this conflict, and heal the sorrow and pain of both our nations, if we work together cooperatively and peacefully. Peace cannot come through war. Freedom will only come when we break out of the chains that bind us: the chains of hatred, of violence and of revenge. Love truly is the strongest force on this earth. A revolution of love is the only thing that can save us.”

Michal Hochberg, the other speaker, says after she met Palestinians and heard “their stories and the daily suffering they were experiencing, I could no longer keep my eyes closed.” their stories and the daily suffering they 

The perverse use of anti-Semitism charges against supporters of Palestinian rights

The perverse use of anti-Semitism charges against supporters of Palestinian rights
Middle East Lillian Rosengarten on November 19, 2018 

https://mondoweiss.net/2018/11/perverse-supporters-palestinian/?fbclid=IwAR1hexmoHBlXdLt0Yx4JyxRltudWSco6roBB_swwJQg3MkYiAFj0OzmTwJg

As many of you know, I am a refugee from Nazi Germany and a Jew. I was also on a small catamaran with 4 elderly Jews in September 2010 with a goal to break the siege of Gaza. We were Jews who wanted to convey our hopes, our dreams for Palestinian freedom and dignity. They looked forward to our arrival and yes, we yearned to feel a connection and love.

I had felt this love and tragedy when I did finally get to Gaza in 2012. No one can imagine the horror of the 2008-9 Operation Cast Lead and 2012 Operation Pillar of Defense. More came soon after. Bombing and horrible destruction continues now. Unimaginable horror plus the use of phosphates and deadly chemicals dropped down on defenseless ones and too many children and pregnant women.

So many in this country (as well as Germany) have tragically identified with the psychotic rantings of a country that is now aligned with evil forces to create a most horrifying group of war mongers. It is the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia, all known as countries of mass destruction.

Our small boat never made it. Instead we were brutally captured in international waters and ultimately imprisoned by our Israeli captives, treated like terrorists. I felt at times as if I were escaping the Nazis, it was so surreal I escaped to another time. This time instead, I was still a Jewish refugee from Germany and it did not matter to our intruders. I felt these people, the Israelis were living an odd kind of psychosis, as I was interrogated for several hours. Nothing mattered to them except an allegiance to a broken down system that imprisoned its Palestinian brothers, sisters and children. Nothing mattered for them except to understand Palestinians as vicious terrorists to be destroyed in order for the Jewish State to control all of Israel. Their psychosis manifests as a chronic belief system, a ludicrous invention the state uses and distorts. These are lies and manipulations that echoes another insanity, the 1930’s of Germany.

Some of my family got out of Germany before they were murdered. Some of them died. My parents’ relatives were scattered and what is left is a tiny family consisting of refugees in South America whom I do not know. We are alone, my son, daughter and two grandchildren. My first born son died of a drug overdose. My parents could never forget their privileged life in Germany and died tragically through suicide and grief.

And so it was, after many visits to Israel, watching the growth of settlers taking the place of Palestine, colonial settlers who grew on the land, stolen land– settlers, racists and taught to hate. These settlers helped create a “Jewish Nation” that ostensibly welcomed all Jews of the world as a homeland while continuing as a country without a soul, without a heart, a country that supports apartheid, racism and weapons both physical and emotional to use on anyone who resists. It is a country that uses anti-Semitism as a perverse decree on those who dare to support Palestine Justice.

We who support Palestinian rights must condemn Zionism and vile, endless apartheid denied to the rest of the world. It is bizarre, ludicrous– that to condemn the response to the brutality inflicted by the Zionists is called anti-Semitic. Of course there is a large degree of anti-Semitism that has grown towards Jews because of the hatred being created.

In this atmosphere of hate and mistrust, it remains critically important to remember the use of the non violent BDS campaign, created to protect the Natural Rights of Palestinians. BDS, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, is grossly delegitimized by the very country that has for over 70 years tragically succeeded in large part to systematically destroy Palestinian life. The use of the Holocaust to defend this action is both dishonest and destructive.

Who shall raise their voices for Palestinians, for freedom from intolerable suffering, for their land? We have a government that supports a rogue country creating its own nightmare. Evil loves the darkness and hates the light of truth. Is the support for human rights anti-Semitic? It is a scandal, a humiliation that must be ended. It is fear and hysteria that has eluded rational discourse and has created unnerving hatred.

We who see Zionism as a destroyer of souls, a place where poetry and true love have been stamped out by an arrogant pretense at democracy, a place of hell with bombs and spies that exist for the lies to continue, this painful place of injustice and death — we will never stop our support and hope for a free Palestine. Hate and revenge must be strangers for all of us who struggle for Palestinian freedom. There can not be a Jewish State born out of apartheid and destruction. Israel and Palestine must live together in freedom.

About Lillian Rosengarten
Lillian Rosengarten is author of the book “Survival and Conscience: From The Shadow Of Nazi Germany To The Jewish Boat To Gaza."(October 2015, Just World Books) It has been published in German. (Zambon 7/14). She can be contacted through her website, lillianrosengarten.com
Other posts by Lillian Rosengarten.