( 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

On the celebration of King’s birth I often read or listen to the anti-war speech that he gave at Riverside Church on April 4, 1967—A Time to Break the Silence. It was a powerful statement of his opposition to the Vietnam War. He spoke of how he was told to not oppose the war because his opposition would anger President Johnson and harm the civil rights movement. He was warned that “Peace and Civil rights don’t mix.”  King admitted he held back because of this possible consequence for too long and failed to speak out earlier.

I bring this up today when I think about Israel’s recent invasion of Gaza. While we are celebrating King’s birth and the inauguration of Barack Obama, Israel invaded Gaza killing over 1200 people, men women and children, and injured thousands. It targeted UN buildings, homes, mosques, police stations, universities and media outlets.  Thirteen Israeli soldiers were killed—a ratio of one hundred Palestinians for each Israeli. The international law violations have been well documented: disproportionate military force, attacks on civilian targets, collective punishment. The killings of the three daughters of a Palestinian doctor gave a face to those killed in way that numbers could not. Members of my broader family knew the doctor, had visited him in Gaza and heard from during the Israeli onslaught.  He was terrified for his family, but had no way out. 

When I heard the news of the murders of the doctor’s children I was at the Sundance film festival and had just viewed an amazing and moving film about radical lawyer Bill Kunstler called Disturbing the Universe.  The film shows Bill in Chicago during the 1969 Chicago 8 trial. During the time of the trial Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was murdered by the Chicago police. Bill was appalled by the murder, but he did not just blame the Chicago police. He blamed himself and all white Americans. For it was white Americans that for too long had remained silent and accepted the pervasive racism and the murder of Blacks in our society.

This brings me to Gaza and role of American Jews and, in fact, of almost all Americans. 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 recall a conversation I had some years ago with the political artist Leon Golub, famous for his outsized oil paintings of torture carried out by American mercenaries in Central America. Leon told me that he had been invited to attend a panel to address what it meant to be a Jewish political artist. He said he had never thought of himself as a “Jewish political artist” but only as a “political artist.”  Then he thought some more. Of the works of art he had made, none concerned Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. And then he knew, at least for himself and probably many others: to be a “Jewish political artist” was to be an artist who avoided depicting the horrors inflicted on Palestinians. Of course, that is true for more than just artists. Many Jews who are very involved in human rights, ending poverty and war, and fighting for the underdog avoid criticism of Israel. They wrongly think that human rights are divisible; or that like ostriches they can hide their heads and pretend not to see what is clearly staring them in the face and makes them uncomfortable: the inhuman treatment of Palestinians.

Some of our willful blindness and refusal to act is a result of our ambivalence about condemning the actions of a people that have experienced pervasive antisemitism and the holocaust. Some of our hesitation to act results from the condemnation and opprobrium anyone, but especially Jews, encounter with even mild criticisms of Israel. Organizations that take a position against Israeli actions subject themselves to a loss of funding from foundations and individuals. Few can afford to do so.  As long as this silence continues, so will the U.S. billions in aid and arms that facilitates the killings of Palestinians. As long as this silence continues, more and more settlements will be built. As long as this silence continues, there will be more and more Gazas and more and more children murdered.

The lesson here is simple, but difficult to act on. We are, each of us, responsible for the murders in Gaza. Our silence is betrayal. Each time we hesitate to speak out; each time we moderate our condemnation we become accomplices in killing. The time, if there ever was one, to show courage is now.  Yes it will be difficult for many. As King said about the reluctance of some to oppose the Vietnam War:  

“Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainly; but we must move on.

We must take King’s words to heart.  We, each of us, “must move on.” We must begin somewhere even if it just means saying the issue is not off our agenda. Begin the discussion; begin to act; show that you care. And remember, “A Time Comes When Silence is Betrayal.”  That time has come.