( First published at Mondoweiss.net)

If you want to know anything about what is really going on between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza or elsewhere, do not go to Lawrence Wright’s new play, “The Human Scale.” Like Wright’s New Yorker pieces, it is bookended by the plight of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier held by Hamas—as if somehow that explains the violence of Israel’s December 2008 assault on Gaza, Operation Cast Lead. Wright also uses Shalit’s detention to more less blame Hamas for the blockade. But, as the Goldstone report states, “maintaining the blockade of the Gaza strip until the release of Gilad Shalit…would constitute collective punishment of the civilian population of the Gaza strip.” I don’t see how collective punishment can be blamed on its victims. Wright also says or leaves the firm impression that the blockade was in response to the capture of Shalit. But, in fact, severe economic and political measures began in February 2006 with the Hamas victory in the legislative elections—almost four months before Shalit’s capture.

Wright, speaking from the stage, opens with some BS about Jewish Nobel prize winners vs. Muslim winners. I have been receiving that email for years from those who are anti-Muslim. What point he was trying to make was lost on me—something about the possible trade of 1400 Palestinians for one Israeli. Does the number of Nobel prize winners make it a good trade or a bad trade? The play is Israel-centric and paints Israelis as somehow caring more about life then Palestinians. It equates the occupied with the occupier when they are utterly unequal. It practically blames Operation Cast Lead on the claimed intransigence of the Palestinians. Wright reads from the Hamas charter, but does not give us all of the similar if not worse statements by the Israelis. In videos Wright shows us some of the destruction in Gaza. After we see some of that devastating footage, he talks about the response of a Palestinian woman who now says words to the effect that perhaps “we Palestinians have learned from this.” In other words, the assault worked to teach the Gazans a lesson. He briefly reads some of the conclusions of the Goldstone report giving roughly equal time to the condemnation of the Israel and Hamas, essentially equating the actions of the two parties. And as I recall he does not read the strongest conclusions of Goldstone regarding Israel’s assault.

I would love to see a play like this done from the Palestinian perspective. This play may work in NY with a brainwashed audience, but take it outside the US and it will be booed off the stage.

We were at Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to the Holocaust in Jerusalem. The “we” were my wife, Karen, and my two children, ages 19 and 21. We had decided to make the pilgrimage on our last day in Israel, and like so many visitors, we walked through the memorial in a kind of stupor of horror.  Display by display, we saw the documented history of the murder of six million Jewish people.  Ghetto by ghetto, we witnessed the vile efficiency of the Nazi project.  It was one of the most relentless indictments of human cruelty we had seen — and, in the end, as we stepped out into the light and onto a plateau overlooking in the distance the massacre site of the former Palestinian village of Deir Yassin — it also felt like an enormous betrayal.

We had not expected to be in Jerusalem, or at Yad Vashem. Our trip began in late December 2009 in Cairo. We had decided to go on the Gaza Freedom March (GFM) with 1400 others and try to get into besieged Gaza.  Our goal was to break the siege that Israel had imposed and demonstrate to the million and a half Palestinians imprisoned in that small strip of land that they were not alone. Our hope was to help bring worldwide attention to Gaza and the unlawful, punishing blockade of its people.  We did not make it into Gaza; nor did almost anyone else from the GFM. Sadly, the Egyptian government (presumably in cahoots with Israel and probably the United States) refused to let us through the Rafah border entrance in Sinai. So instead, after some three days of joining in the militant efforts of the GFM to change Egypt’s recalcitrance—we joined demonstrations everywhere—we decided to go to Jerusalem and the West Bank to witness the occupation in those parts.

 I had been to Israel twice as a child, once in the mid-50’s and once in the early 60’s. In those early days I had no political consciousness whatsoever. I had no thought that the land I was walking on—which I assumed was where my distant ancestors had walked —had just a few years earlier been populated by another people.  I did not know about Palestinians and was never told about them. For me, my trips to Israel were all milk and honey and I have wonderful memories of my childhood spent in Herzliya, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Eilat.

On this trip, 50 years later, I knew a lot more.  Or I thought I did. Nothing really prepared me for the apartheid state that was laid out in front of me and that should be apparent to anyone who opens their eyes. Checkpoints, a pass system, segregated roads, Jewish-only cities and the expropriation for Jews of large swaths of Palestinian land. My entire family was shocked and shaken. It was all so intentional, so cruel.

Hebron was an armed camp with watch towers overlooking the areas where a few Jewish settlers had ousted Palestinian families that had resided there for generations. The Palestinians that remained in those areas faced constant harassment from the settlers; even small Jewish children could throw rocks with impunity at Palestinians. Those Palestinians still living in districts where settlers had moved were, unlike the settlers, no longer allowed to drive cars to their homes. They often had to walk over a mile to get to their homes and take food and other necessities in by mule. Our host had a head full of scars from the times he had been attacked by settlers hurling rocks. The open markets were covered with protective wire mesh that was filled with bottles and garbage that had been thrown by the settlers who overlooked the markets.

We went to Jenin, some two hours from Jerusalem, passing check point after checkpoint. We visited the refugee camp that had been so devastated by Israeli soldiers a few years before. We spent a few days in East Jerusalem, joined a demonstration against evictions going on in Sheikh Jurrah, and saw the open and notorious gobbling up of East Jerusalem and its environs by Israel.  We saw Palestinian houses demolished in neighborhoods that Israel had designated as Area C—areas that were to be purged of Palestinians and placed under complete Israeli control.  This was despite the clear illegality of expropriating lands taken by conquest. It was devastating and it was appalling.

We had one last day to spend in Jerusalem before our late night flight to New York City. For a few days I had said we should visit Yad Vashem. But I did not insist on seeing it. I was ambivalent about the visit for myself and my family.  This was not because I did not care about the Holocaust. I cared deeply. I was born in 1943 during the height of the murders. My family lost many, many relatives in Tykocin, Bialystok and Vilna. My father had been responsible for resettling hundreds of survivors, and growing up with people who had numbers tattooed on their arms was part of my childhood in Cleveland.  Trips to the killing camps in Europe were a rite of passage. My work as a human rights lawyer stems directly from heeding the admonition “never again,” whether that never is for Jews or any other people. In later years I made pilgrimages to Holocaust memorials in New York, Washington D.C. and Berlin.  I had been to a very different Yad Vashem in West Jerusalem in 1956. As I recall it was in a dark cave-like place where one could almost reach out and touch lamp shades made from human skin and soap from human fat. The Holocaust and its horrors remain part of my being.

 So why was I ambivalent? We had just spent three days trying to get into Gaza and five days exploring the treatment of Palestinians by Israel. Would visiting Yad Vashem somehow justify, if not for me, but for my children some of what we had just seen?  Would it make the case for a Jewish state in Israel? The need for protection from another Holocaust was a key founding narrative of Israel. My generation was raised on that narrative: Israel was necessary to save the Jewish people — then and in the future.  Wasn’t that the very reason for having the major Jewish memorial to the Holocaust in Israel, at the foot of Mt. Herzl, a mountain named after the founder of Zionism?

At the same time I trusted my family. They had just seen an apartheid state up close, had met refuges from ’48 and ’67, saw the taking of others’ lands and seen the oppression of Palestinians in Hebron and Jerusalem. So we took ourselves on a beautiful, sunny late morning in January to Yad Vashem.

For my children it was one of the first times they had immersed themselves in the history, documents and words of the Holocaust. They spent hours listening to the testimony, viewing the videos and asking questions. Occasionally, there were references to Zionism as it was part of the history of Jews in Eastern Europe, but it was not until the end of the formal exhibits that the “logic” of connecting the Holocaust to Israel was made explicit. Hatikvah (The Hope), Israel’s national anthem, was the musical theme at end of our journey through Holocaust history, making explicit the founding narrative.

 We then went into the Hall of Remembrance, a large rounded space with a deep pit carved out of its center with its walls lined with volume after volume of the names of the murdered. Off to one side is the computer room with a data base of the names that are known. My children immediately went to the computers and looked up our murdered relatives. Many had died at Auschwitz and; others were killed in the 1941 massacre in the Lopuchowa forest in Tykocin, Poland, where 3000 men women and children from that village dug their own graves and were murdered by the einsatzgruppen; others still died of typhus within days of liberation from the camps.   As we left the museum, with its triangular, elongated windowless, and cold concrete structure, we walked toward the picture window at the end and out onto a terrace overlooking the hills of Israel—again the narrative, from the Holocaust to Israel. 

As saddened and horrified as we were by what we had just experienced, we were all struck by the contradiction of having the museum in Israel, a country forged out of the theft of other people’s land and homes, a nation whose treatment of Palestinians had echoes of what we had just seen: walled-in ghettos, stolen houses and land, a segregated population.  It was an irony not lost on my family.  Yad Vashem should be history lesson for us all, but it’s a lesson that seems to be lost on many of the very people who were its victims.

Despite the power of Yad Vashem I felt robbed by my experience there. I felt manipulated. It is not that the history it told and pain it conveyed were false or that I felt distanced from the horror of the Holocaust. But the powerful narrative of the Holocaust that the museum was trying to make me accept, or at least justify, what was unacceptable:  the apartheid state that is today’s Israel. In this narrative, the Holocaust is used to ask us to wash away the sins of the occupier. By so doing the Holocaust is diminshed.

On our trip to Hebron our Palestinian guide had asked me whether I really thought six million Jews had been killed in the Holocaust. He was skeptical. I was angered by his doubts. I answered him directly and unequivocally: six million Jews had been murdered. The visit to Yad Vashem gave me some perspective on his doubts. He implicitly understood that it was the narrative of the Holocaust that was used to justify his victimization and the refusal of much of the world to do anything about it. His way of dealing with it was to reject the claimed justification for his oppression.

These words have been hard words to write. It does not come easily to me to raise questions about a memorial to the most horrific event in Jewish history.  But I do not accept that Jewish sorrow should be used to hide or justify the sorrow of others.  To truly remember and honor the lessons of the Holocaust would be to end the apartheid system that is the Israel of today. That would be a day of Hope.

We were at Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to the Holocaust in Jerusalem. The “we” were my wife, Karen, and my two children, ages 19 and 21. We had decided to make the pilgrimage on our last day in Israel, and like so many visitors, we walked through the memorial in a kind of stupor of horror.  Display by display, we saw the documented history of the murder of six million Jewish people.  Ghetto by ghetto, we witnessed the vile efficiency of the Nazi project.  It was one of the most relentless indictments of human cruelty we had seen — and, in the end, as we stepped out into the light and onto a plateau overlooking in the distance the massacre site of the former Palestinian village of Deir Yassin — it also felt like an enormous betrayal.

We had not expected to be in Jerusalem, or at Yad Vashem. Our trip began in late December 2009 in Cairo. We had decided to go on the Gaza Freedom March (GFM) with 1400 others and try to get into besieged Gaza.  Our goal was to break the siege that Israel had imposed and demonstrate to the million and a half Palestinians imprisoned in that small strip of land that they were not alone. Our hope was to help bring worldwide attention to Gaza and the unlawful, punishing blockade of its people.  We did not make it into Gaza; nor did almost anyone else from the GFM. Sadly, the Egyptian government (presumably in cahoots with Israel and probably the United States) refused to let us through the Rafah border entrance in Sinai. So instead, after some three days of joining in the militant efforts of the GFM to change Egypt’s recalcitrance—we joined demonstrations everywhere—we decided to go to Jerusalem and the West Bank to witness the occupation in those parts.

 I had been to Israel twice as a child, once in the mid-50’s and once in the early 60’s. In those early days I had no political consciousness whatsoever. I had no thought that the land I was walking on—which I assumed was where my distant ancestors had walked —had just a few years earlier been populated by another people.  I did not know about Palestinians and was never told about them. For me, my trips to Israel were all milk and honey and I have wonderful memories of my childhood spent in Herzliya, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Eilat.

On this trip, 50 years later, I knew a lot more.  Or I thought I did. Nothing really prepared me for the apartheid state that was laid out in front of me and that should be apparent to anyone who opens their eyes. Checkpoints, a pass system, segregated roads, Jewish-only cities and the expropriation for Jews of large swaths of Palestinian land. My entire family was shocked and shaken. It was all so intentional, so cruel.

Hebron was an armed camp with watch towers overlooking the areas where a few Jewish settlers had ousted Palestinian families that had resided there for generations. The Palestinians that remained in those areas faced constant harassment from the settlers; even small Jewish children could throw rocks with impunity at Palestinians. Those Palestinians still living in districts where settlers had moved were, unlike the settlers, no longer allowed to drive cars to their homes. They often had to walk over a mile to get to their homes and take food and other necessities in by mule. Our host had a head full of scars from the times he had been attacked by settlers hurling rocks. The open markets were covered with protective wire mesh that was filled with bottles and garbage that had been thrown by the settlers who overlooked the markets.

We went to Jenin, some two hours from Jerusalem, passing check point after checkpoint. We visited the refugee camp that had been so devastated by Israeli soldiers a few years before. We spent a few days in East Jerusalem, joined a demonstration against evictions going on in Sheikh Jurrah, and saw the open and notorious gobbling up of East Jerusalem and its environs by Israel.  We saw Palestinian houses demolished in neighborhoods that Israel had designated as Area C—areas that were to be purged of Palestinians and placed under complete Israeli control.  This was despite the clear illegality of expropriating lands taken by conquest. It was devastating and it was appalling.

We had one last day to spend in Jerusalem before our late night flight to New York City. For a few days I had said we should visit Yad Vashem. But I did not insist on seeing it. I was ambivalent about the visit for myself and my family.  This was not because I did not care about the Holocaust. I cared deeply. I was born in 1943 during the height of the murders. My family lost many, many relatives in Tykocin, Bialystok and Vilna. My father had been responsible for resettling hundreds of survivors, and growing up with people who had numbers tattooed on their arms was part of my childhood in Cleveland.  Trips to the killing camps in Europe were a rite of passage. My work as a human rights lawyer stems directly from heeding the admonition “never again,” whether that never is for Jews or any other people. In later years I made pilgrimages to Holocaust memorials in New York, Washington D.C. and Berlin.  I had been to a very different Yad Vashem in West Jerusalem in 1956. As I recall it was in a dark cave-like place where one could almost reach out and touch lamp shades made from human skin and soap from human fat. The Holocaust and its horrors remain part of my being.

 So why was I ambivalent? We had just spent three days trying to get into Gaza and five days exploring the treatment of Palestinians by Israel. Would visiting Yad Vashem somehow justify, if not for me, but for my children some of what we had just seen?  Would it make the case for a Jewish state in Israel? The need for protection from another Holocaust was a key founding narrative of Israel. My generation was raised on that narrative: Israel was necessary to save the Jewish people — then and in the future.  Wasn’t that the very reason for having the major Jewish memorial to the Holocaust in Israel, at the foot of Mt. Herzl, a mountain named after the founder of Zionism?

At the same time I trusted my family. They had just seen an apartheid state up close, had met refuges from ’48 and ’67, saw the taking of others’ lands and seen the oppression of Palestinians in Hebron and Jerusalem. So we took ourselves on a beautiful, sunny late morning in January to Yad Vashem.

For my children it was one of the first times they had immersed themselves in the history, documents and words of the Holocaust. They spent hours listening to the testimony, viewing the videos and asking questions. Occasionally, there were references to Zionism as it was part of the history of Jews in Eastern Europe, but it was not until the end of the formal exhibits that the “logic” of connecting the Holocaust to Israel was made explicit. Hatikvah (The Hope), Israel’s national anthem, was the musical theme at end of our journey through Holocaust history, making explicit the founding narrative.

 We then went into the Hall of Remembrance, a large rounded space with a deep pit carved out of its center with its walls lined with volume after volume of the names of the murdered. Off to one side is the computer room with a data base of the names that are known. My children immediately went to the computers and looked up our murdered relatives. Many had died at Auschwitz and; others were killed in the 1941 massacre in the Lopuchowa forest in Tykocin, Poland, where 3000 men women and children from that village dug their own graves and were murdered by the einsatzgruppen; others still died of typhus within days of liberation from the camps.   As we left the museum, with its triangular, elongated windowless, and cold concrete structure, we walked toward the picture window at the end and out onto a terrace overlooking the hills of Israel—again the narrative, from the Holocaust to Israel. 

As saddened and horrified as we were by what we had just experienced, we were all struck by the contradiction of having the museum in Israel, a country forged out of the theft of other people’s land and homes, a nation whose treatment of Palestinians had echoes of what we had just seen: walled-in ghettos, stolen houses and land, a segregated population.  It was an irony not lost on my family.  Yad Vashem should be history lesson for us all, but it’s a lesson that seems to be lost on many of the very people who were its victims.

Despite the power of Yad Vashem I felt robbed by my experience there. I felt manipulated. It is not that the history it told and pain it conveyed were false or that I felt distanced from the horror of the Holocaust. But the powerful narrative of the Holocaust that the museum was trying to make me accept, or at least justify, what was unacceptable:  the apartheid state that is today’s Israel. In this narrative, the Holocaust is used to ask us to wash away the sins of the occupier. By so doing the Holocaust is diminshed.

On our trip to Hebron our Palestinian guide had asked me whether I really thought six million Jews had been killed in the Holocaust. He was skeptical. I was angered by his doubts. I answered him directly and unequivocally: six million Jews had been murdered. The visit to Yad Vashem gave me some perspective on his doubts. He implicitly understood that it was the narrative of the Holocaust that was used to justify his victimization and the refusal of much of the world to do anything about it. His way of dealing with it was to reject the claimed justification for his oppression.

These words have been hard words to write. It does not come easily to me to raise questions about a memorial to the most horrific event in Jewish history.  But I do not accept that Jewish sorrow should be used to hide or justify the sorrow of others.  To truly remember and honor the lessons of the Holocaust would be to end the apartheid system that is the Israel of today. That would be a day of Hope.

Today we came away stunned, shocked and almost numb from our trip toEast Jerusalem with Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions. And when I say we, I mean my family—my wife and two children, 19 and 21. We have spent the last 10 days trying to get into Gaza from Egypt; demonstrating against the Gaza siege and joining demonstrations in Israel at the Erez crossing and protesting the evictions in the Sheikh-Jarrah area of

Today we traveled with Jeff through East Jerusalem and to what some, at least in the media in the U.S,. refer to as the settlement of Ma’ale Adummin. It is not a settlement, but a

Jeff then drove us to a viewing site at the edge of East Jerusalem where we overlooked what is called by Israel area E1. It was a valley with roads criss-crossing it, a few houses and trees and on the distant other side, there it was, Ma’ale Adummin. While I had heard of area E1, I never understood what was meant. I think I understand it now. It is, at least the valley area I was looking at, the road system and land that will link Ma’ale Adummin to

As we drove toward Ma’ale Adummin Jeff took us to what are known as Areas A, B and C.  Area A is where there is full Palestinian control; B is where there is joint Palestinian and Israeli control; and C is where there is full Israeli control. It is in the C area of East Jerusalem where many of the house demolitions are occurring—another story for later. We also went to the Shuafat refugee camp in

What first strikes one is the color. The city is green and lush. There is grass everywhere and palm trees lining cleanly paved concrete roads. This is all in an area where water is almost non-existent and many Palestinians have no water. In the center of each of the roundabouts on the way up is an olive tree, but not just an ordinary olive tree, but a wide squat one that is perhaps 400 or even 500 years old, likely an olive tree likely taken from a Palestinian farm. At the entrance to the city is one of the more incongruous and Orwellian monuments to erect in this stolen city:  a huge white metal sculpture of two doves with wings unfolded sheltering a globe and inscribed on its base with the word—and it seems like a nasty joke—“Peace.” Peace, apparently defined, as the dismembering of the Palestinian people. As we continued our ride up we pass a suburban shopping mall with some big box stores, stores that are part of international chains that hopefully will become targets of the BDS movement.

We finally stop at the end of a street that could come out of any middle class suburb in America: neat houses and apartments with small yards. Ma’ale Adummin is called a dormitory community or as we would say, a bedroom community. Its residents work in Tel Aviv. They live here rather than in Jerusalem because of price (half that of

Almost a year ago, on the celebration of Martin Luther King’s birth and just as the Israeli military assault on Gaza was coming to a close, I wrote a piece titled, Israel in Gaza: A Time Comes When Silence is Betrayal.[1]   In that piece I spoke of the role of American Jews and of Americans in remaining silent in the face of horrendous human rights violations perpetrated on Palestinians.  I acknowledged that:  “ For too long, and I do not exempt myself, most of us have stood silently by or made only a marginal protests about the massive violations of Palestinian rights carried out by Israel.” I pointed out that for “as long as this silence continues so will the U.S. billions in aid and arms that facilitates the killings of Palestinians.”

Since that time, I and many others, Jews and non-Jews alike, have come some distance toward breaking the silence. We knew while the assault was continuing that we were witnessing massive crimes. We watched as most of the world stood by. Gaza, I think for many of us, demanded that we no longer stand on the sidelines. 

I must admit to my shock at reading the Goldstone Report, the report of the UN Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict.[2]  Fact by fact it documented violations of the laws of war and human rights law that were chilling. The report put the assault in the context of the responsibilities under law of an occupying power which Israel is in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. It addressed the annexation of East Jerusalem, the building of the wall, 85% of which is illegally located in occupied territory, the pass laws and the settlements. It addressed the blockade of Gaza which began years before the December 2008 assault and the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.  As to the war, the Report concluded that the “military operations were directed by Israel at the people of Gaza as a whole” to “punish them” and “in a deliberate policy of disproportionate force aimed at the civilian population.”  Each example was more disturbing than the one before and the cumulative effect was horrifying: deliberate targeting of civilians, the intentional destruction of the infrastructure of Gaza including fuel supplies, the sewer system, the only flour mill and the Palestinian legislative building.

The killing statistics tell us almost all we need to know: over a thousand Palestinians were killed (estimates run from 1,166 to 1,444), most of them civilians; 13 Israelis lost their lives of which three were civilians. Imagine Gaza as an overcrowded prison, for that is what it is, with no ability for people to hide, escape or defend themselves. Then imagine an assault with impunity from the air, the sea and the land. Gaza was no accident. It was not a mistake. Israeli leaders justified the destruction of civilian objects: “destroy 100 homes for every rocket fired.”  The Israeli government claimed that “there is really no distinction to be made between military and civilian objectives as far as government and public administration in Gaza are concerned.” [3] 

After the Goldstone report there cannot be, if there ever was, any doubt about the need for investigation and prosecution of the criminality of the military assault on Gaza. Judge Goldstone is one of the most preeminent jurists in the world—he would be in my top 3—and I am not sure who the other two are. His credentials are impeccable. A South African courageously opposed to apartheid, a justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa and the chief prosecutor of the special UN tribunals for Rwanda and the Former Yugoslavia—and a Jew as well. Yet, attack him and his report is exactly what Israel and the United States have done.  The U.S. State Department called it “deeply flawed,” but did not elaborate. Israel, which had refused to cooperate in the investigation, said it was appalled and disappointed by the Report claiming it effectively ignored Israel’s right of self-defense, makes unsubstantiated claims about its intent and challenges Israel’s democratic values and rule of law. Even if Israel was acting in self-defense, although many would dispute this, that right does not grant permission to commit war crimes. And yes, the Report challenges Israel’s commitment to the rule of law: it does not seem to have a commitment when it comes to Palestinians.  Despite these protestations, as Shakespeare wrote:  “truth will come to light; murder cannot be hid long….but at the length truth will out.” Well it has, but truth still needs a push—a push into action.

That is why I am going to Gaza with the Code Pink Freedom March:[4] because truth needs a push.  It’s straightforward. I want to break the blockade. I want to see for myself the damage caused the weapons bought with my tax dollars. I want it understood that Israel does not kill in my name. I want to follow words with actions.

12/14/2009

[1] http://www.michaelratner.com/blog/?p=40

[2] http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/specialsession/9/FactFindingMission.htm

[3] Goldstone at para. 379.

[4] http://www.gazafreedommarch.org/article.php?list=type&type=416

At a reception I attended the other day a progressive acquaintance came up to me and said the left “must stop bashing Obama. Keep doing it and he will lose the election. We should be thankful for what we have.” I am not sure he thought that I was one who bashed Obama or he just wanted to get that message out in the community. As it happens I do not “bash Obama” whatever that means; but I am sharply critical of a number of his policies and practices and those of his administration. (This is not to say I would have preferred McCain to win; I would not have and on some issues, mostly very safe ones, Obama has made some difference, e.g. Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, ending the HIV exclusion.) I responded to my acquaintance: “It won’t be the criticism of progressives that will lose him the election—we hardly have that kind of power. It is his own actions especially around economic issues that could make his reelection difficult; actions that have alienated and angered significant segments of the unemployed American population. I don’t do my work by thinking about whether it will help or hurt Obama in the next election. I don’t tailor principles to politics.”

In arguing that we should mute our criticisms of Obama we are being asked to accept administration actions that are unacceptable; practices that will involve the deaths of thousands and the violation of our own constitution and binding treaties. I have always believed we must advocate and act on principle and that is the way to make change.  So when we see that Obama will continue the preventive detention scheme that underlies Guantanamo, that he will have detainees tried before military commissions, that he will continue the incommunicado detentions at Bagram and hide detainees from the Red Cross, we cannot and should not stand by in silence. We are seeing the continuation of Bush’s law and the deterioration of fundamental protections of freedom. When we see Obama hide illegal acts behind claims of “state secrets;” when he refuses to have the torture conspirators investigated and prosecuted; and when he even welcomes some of the conspirators into his administration, we must speak up. Granting impunity to officials who torture is to insure that we will again be a nation of torture and that the message heard by every petty dictator around the world is: “The United States can torture in the name of national security and so can we.”  When we see officials of this administration attack the Goldstone report which documents war crimes in Gaza, we understand the deep hypocrisy of this government.

Nor can there be any screaming that is too loud in opposition to the wars that Obama is continuing without end. The July 2011 beginning withdrawal date from Afghanistan was shown to be a fiction within an hour of Obama’s speech. Obama like those before him accepts that “We are the United States and war is what we do.” Obama and the Presidents before him are bleeding our country and world. Of course, I do not expect miracles from one man on top of a huge national security establishment that is hard to buck. Rome was not built in a day and neither will it be dismantled in a day. But I don’t see a lot of dismantling going on. What I see is more and more building of a national security state—perhaps with a softer hand—and that is alarming.

As I said when I began this piece I do not think progressive and liberal criticisms on most of these issues or other disappointments such as Obama’s failure to end “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” will have much affect the next Presidential election. Even the war probably won’t have much to do with who is our next President. Obama took a safe course, at least for himself and the next election: he gave the generals roughly what they asked for and the Republican Secretary of Defense, like the cat that ate the canary, is smugly satisfied.  

It seems likely to me that the economy will be Obama’s Waterloo. He has shoveled billions and billions into the big banks, and the wars and almost nothing into creating jobs and saving people’s homes.  Regarding the jobs meeting he convened to help with ideas about how to reduce unemployment, he said there are “limits to what government can do and should do,“ and that he was open to “responsible” and “demonstrably good” ideas to create jobs. I don’t think that is what the over 15 million unemployed in the country wanted to hear. They need jobs and they especially did not want to hear Obama say there was not going to be enough money to do it. The danger here is not just that Obama will lose the next election; but it’s one we have already begun to see: a right wing populism that often occurs in times of great economic dislocation, income disparities and joblessness.

We are at a time of great economic insecurity; a time when fundamental rights are under threat from our own government and a time when we are the world’s warriors. Silence or passive acquiescence is complicity. Enough already!  We can applaud Obama’s actions when they are right; we cannot and should not excuse or explain away his actions when they are wrong. If we don’t speak out, who will?

Michael Smith and I have been reading John Gerassi’s new book, Talking with Sartre, Conversations and Debates.[1] The book is a shortened form of three years of on and off conversations Gerassi had with Sartre in the early 1970’s.  The book is utterly remarkable. It is as if you are  seated at the table with Sartre and asking him and debating with him questions on Marxism, existentialism, his life with Simone de Beauvoir, his depression, his plays, novels, political activism, and views about anti-colonial and revolutionary violence both before and after a revolution. In this short piece we write only about this latter subject—taken from the book– in which he takes positions which are almost never found in writings on the political left in the United States today. Even if one disagrees with Sartre, which Michael Smith and I do on some issues, it is a timely discussion in today’s world.

What Makes a Revolutionary?

Gerassi and Sartre discuss what makes a revolutionary. Sartre had great respect for Che and seems to have agreed with Che that “a true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.” However, Sartre also said that a revolutionary was possessed of both “hatred and love.”  Hating injustice and hating the enemy. Sartre believed it was necessary to hate the enemy in order for a revolution to succeed. As Sartre said,

 “That’s very important hatred. Without it one stops too soon.  It happened in the French Revolution; I think it happens in every revolution, when those who do not hate the enemy suddenly say, Enough already, and stop short of accomplishing the complete restructuring of society, and the result is that the revolution is betrayed.” (56)

Executions in Cuba After the Revolution

Sartre then applies some of his thinking to the Cuban Revolution. Gerassi asks Sartre about Fidel putting on trial the Batista torturers where the evidence of their guilt was overwhelming. Gerassi says that even Time magazine claimed the trials were a catharsis and saved the country from a bloodbath of vengeance. Presumably, this was because the people would have taken justice in their own hands and enacted vengeance without trials. But then 365 torturers were executed and that showed that Fidel was “not just a bourgeois reformer but a genuine revolutionary” and Time and the United States condemned him.  Gerassi then asks what Sartre thinks of the executions when all knew including Fidel that the real culprits were the owners of United Fruit, IT&T and other corporations for who Batista exploited the people of Cuba.

Sartre answers “that under an ideal situation, the torturers could have been rehabilitated.” But he agreed with Fidel that at

“that moment a bloodbath had to be avoided, and these torturers were scum, after all, so if executing them for their proven crimes, even if the president of IT&T is ultimately responsible, will avoid that bloodbath, then ethically their execution was justified….”

 However, Sartre points out that had the trials taken place a year later and there was no risk of a bloodbath, “then no, their executions would not have been justified.” (98-99)

Counter Terror Against Terror

Sartre was consistent on the question of the morality of counter terror against terror. (This is not to say he recommended it as a tactic.)  He supported the FLN in fighting the French for the liberation of Algeria even if that meant killings on the streets of Paris. In the context he even believed the Baader-Meinhof group was “totally justified.”  As Sartre says,

 “Remember that context. The shah [of Iran] comes to Berlin and the students protest peacefully. They are severely beaten by the shah’s security goods and the German police who shoot and kill one student. Benno Ohnesorg.  The pro-US press then yells that the real responsible one was Rudi Dutschke [leader of the student protesters] and he is shot in the head. From a moral and a revolutionary point of view, the groups rampage of murders of German industrialists are absolutely justified. But…you see my problem–all ethics depend on circumstances.” (99)

And here is Sartre addressing the question of resistance by the Palestinians. Gerassi asks Sartre about the French GP (La Gauche Prolétarienne) which supports armed struggle by the Palestinians and considers the suicide bombers “freedom fighters.” Sartre answers “I have always supported counterterror against established terror.  And I have always defined established terror as occupation, land seizure, arbitrary arrest, and so on, as does the Israeli left….” (191)

Conclusion: Michael Smith’s Analysis                                         

   Sartre was a revolutionary.  He was an existentialist, not a Marxist.  He derived his morality from his own unique philosophy involving action and commitment.  He brings his existential sensibility to the question of terror,   For Sartre it was a question of the terrorism of the oppressor versus the terrorism of the oppressed, on whose side he was resolutely on.

     This question was taken up both in theory and in practice by the revolutionary Russian Narodniks of the l880s and by the Bolsheviks in that great laboratory of social struggle which was to culminate in the victorious Russian revolution of l9l7.  It is both historical and extremely contemporary.

      The Narodniks, were skillful and accomplished self-sacrificing terrorists. They managed to kill over three thousand Tsarist officials.  It was Trotsky, who, like Sartre, stood in absolute moral solidarity with them, articulated a different, Marxist, strategy and critiqued the practice of individual terror.  He opposed it for three reasons.

   First, it didn’t work. The Tsarists government simply replaced one dead functionary with another live one.  Second the terrorism took the onus of violence off the government, where it belonged, and placed it on the oppressed, and further stepped up its repression.  But the third reason for the Marxists like Trotsky was central.  All the bombs, assassinations, the violence’s a whole served to sideline the masses, it made them spectators.

    Even if they looked on approvingly at the death of a hated official, which often they did, they did not have any part in their own struggle.  The current of revolutionary socialism condemned terrorism as a tactic because they believed the emancipation of the workers and peasants and their allies from class rule had to be achieved by the oppressed themselves if it were to be conclusive and lasting.  In the words of the International, the song that came out of the first great workers rebellion, the Paris Commune of l87l, “We want no condescending saviors.”   For Marxists, the self-activity of the masses was the absolute key.  To those who advocated terrorism they simply said, “Comrades, chose another path.”

   Sartre’s talk with Gerassi on this subject is a passionate reprise of a crucially important and timely discussion given the U.S. engagement with the Muslim world.

[1] Law and Disorder Radio which can be heard at lawandisorder.org did a lengthy and remarkable interview with John Gerassi regarding this book. Numbers in parenthesis refer to page numbers in Talking With Sartre.

You may recall the case. The CIA was accused of a 2003 kidnapping of an Egyptian cleric, Abu Omar, from the streets of Milan, Italy. He was rendered to Egypt where he was tortured. A courageous Italian prosecutor, Armando Spataro, had been pursuing the case since that time over the objections of the Italian government. Luckily in Italy the prosecutors are independent of the political branches and Spataro, despite many attempted roadblocks, went ahead. Now the court has come down with convictions and jail sentences. Robert Seldon Lady, former CIA station chief in Milan got 8 years and 22 other Americans got 5 years. Utterly remarkable!  The only problem is none of the defendants showed up for trial and the Italy was unwilling to ask for their extradition.

Despite this, the convictions are really earth shattering news although the New York Times asserts they will have “little practical effect.”  Just ask the 23 convicted operatives if they agree with that sentiment. They are considered fugitives in 25 countries of the European Schengen area and subject to arrest. Upon arrest they will be sent to Italy to serve out their jail sentences. Already one of those convicted is suing the United States claiming she should have had received diplomatic immunity.(See list of 24 below.) And I wonder what those agents think about Stephen R. Kappes, who at the time of the kidnapping was the assistant director of the CIA’s clandestine branch and is said to have planned the rendition? He was not a defendant, having not been in Italy, but is currently Obama’s second ranking CIA official. So he is off the hook, at least for the moment, and can still enjoy Rome and Paris. So no wonder a U.S. spokesmen said the administration was “disappointed” in the verdicts.

Just think about the message these convictions send for the future even if these agents do not spend a day in jail. If you were a CIA agent, would you kidnap again? Would you waterboard?  This is why prosecutions work. They act as a deterrence. No matter what happens now, no matter what the Obama administration does to get rid of these convictions e.g. getting Italy to give clemency, a clear message has been sent.  Committing human rights atrocities even if done in the name of national security and for the most powerful state in the world does not give you immunity. I don’t think all such law breaking will cease, not by a long shot. However, the Italian courts have taken a powerful first step toward giving substance to the expression that no one is above the law.

The lesson the Obama administration should learn is that unless and until it holds U.S. officials accountable, other counties will.

The Schengen countries where U.S. officials will be arrested:

Austria Belgium Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Greece Hungary Iceland Italy Latvia Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden   Switzerland

On Tuesday, November 3, Congress is poised to vote on H.Res.867, which calls on the “President and the Secretary of State to oppose unequivocally any endorsement or further consideration of the `Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict’ in multilateral fora.’ ”

The Resolution instructs the Obama Administration to prevent further consideration of the Goldstone Report (as it is informally known) in any international body.  For Congress to do so, without a hearing where Judge Goldstone can testify and based upon a Resolution rife with factual errors, makes a mockery of assertions by the United States that fundamental protections of human rights laws law apply equally to all. It leaves the United States, and especially Congress, without a thread of moral authority.

This Resolution is a rush to judgment. It is a rush to judgment made on the basis of serious factual errors and mischaracterizations of the Goldstone Report. The Goldstone Report documents in a dispassionate and even-handed manner “violations of international human rights and humanitarian law and possible war crimes and crimes against humanity” committed by all parties prior to, during, and after Israel’s assault on the occupied Gaza Strip in December 2008-January 2009.

The text of the Resolution is directly at odds with the actual mandate of the Fact-Finding Mission and its report. The Resolution asserts that the mandate of the Fact Finding Mission was aimed only at Israeli violations of the laws of war. This is a blatant lie.  In a letter to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Judge Goldstone states that the mandate  he “demanded and received clearly included rocket and mortar attacks on Israel and as the report makes clear was so interpreted and implemented.”

The Resolution claims that the Goldstone Report “repeatedly downplayed or cast doubt upon” allegations of Hamas committing war crimes.  In fact, however, it examined Palestinian militants rocket and mortar fire into Israel and concluded that “these attacks constitute indiscriminate attacks upon the civilian population of southern Israel and that where there is no intended military target and the rockets and mortars are launched into a civilian population, they constitute a deliberate attack against a civilian population. These acts would constitute war crimes and may amount to crimes against humanity.”

It is likewise with the spurious claim in the Resolution that the report “denied Israel the right to self-defense.” The Goldstone report examined the conduct of the party’s conduct of the war and not the right of Israel to use military force.  As Judge Goldstone said, “Israel’s right to use military force was not questioned.”

The United States provides $3 billion for weapons and military equipment every year to Israel. The Goldstone Report concluded  that “ grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention were committed by Israeli forces in Gaza: willful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, and extensive destruction of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly. ”   In these circumstances the United States has a special responsibility to insure that serious investigations are undertaken of the use of the weapons it supplies. Congress should not be blocking such an investigation.

Michael Ratner, an attorney, is President of the Center for Constitutional Rights.(Identification Only)

For many years I have had a side interest in the recovery and the return of the cultural patrimony of peoples, tribes and nations. I have only litigated one case to recover ancient Aymara textiles for a Bolivian town, Coroma.  That story is wonderful, beautiful and moving. You can read more about here: The Recovery of the Aymara Textiles (http://culturalheritage.state.gov/aymara.html).

I am writing about this now because I recently saw that the demand for the Elgin marbles  (much of the Parthenon Frieze) is being pressed by Greece. They are currently in the British Museum. Greece now has a new museum at the foot of the Parthenon and has assembled white plaster copies of what should be the originals. To the extent there was ever an excuse that Greece would not care for the returned frieze(an excuse I never accepted), that excuse is over. There is now a fine, new museum in Greece for the Elgin marbles.

Over ten years ago the NYT reviewed a book about the marbles and book as well as the reviewer gave a lot credibility to England’s case for keeping the Parthenon Frieze. I responded strongly to that review in a letter the NYT published in its weekly book review.  That letter sets forth some of the issues and why there is really only one side to this question: the Elgin marbles must be returned. The letter from 1998 is below:

January 25, 1998

All the Marbles

To the Editor:

As an attorney who has fought for the repatriation of Indian sacred objects, I was appalled by Nigel Nicolson’s review of Theodore Vrettos’s book ”The Elgin Affair” (Jan. 4). The review reads like a litany of every unconvincing excuse collectors have employed for generations to justify possession of works of art and sacred objects that are the patrimony of other cultures.

Nicolson argues that the sculptures were not removed by ”dishonest means or stealth,” but admits that bribes were paid to Turkish officials. And by what right, except that of illegal occupier, did Turkish officials permit Elgin to export the Parthenon marbles? Nor is Nicolson’s claim that the marbles were better protected in the British Museum than ”high up on the Parthenon” relevant to their return to Greece today — there can be no question that Greece will safeguard them.

Underlying Nicolson’s arguments seems to lurk his belief that the sculptures are best appreciated by the English and best displayed by them as well. Nicolson likes having such works of art in British and American museums and in his own garden, where he has five Greek marble altars.

The point is that no matter Elgin’s motives, good or bad, the sculptures are probably the single most important work of Greek art and symbolic of one nation’s plunder of another. The sculptures, along with Nicolson’s altars, ought to be immediately repatriated.

Michael Ratner