Public Comment

Is Dan Spitzer fooling anyone when he calls himself a progressive? One aspect of Spitzer’s Jan. 30 letter to the Berkeley Planet is the use of disingenuous “facts” to create insupportable assumptions in the public mind. Thus the statements about what was offered by Israel to the Palestinians at the Clinton Camp David meetings are riddled with falsehood, but his letter attacking Joseph Lifschutz isn’t really about what Arafat allegedly rejected. (If anyone needs to know what Israel actually offered the Palestinians at camp David—there was no formal proposal--I suggest Israeli Professor Tanya Reinhart’s excellent and well documented book, Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948. It’s all there). 

This ploy by Spitzer is used to bolster the idea that Arafat was being unreasonable to insist upon discussing the “right of (Palestinians) to return” to their towns, land, homes from which they fled in 1948. Unfortunately for Spitzer and Zionism, international law is quite clear about the right of any displaced people to return. Supporters of the Israeli state continue to insist that all efforts to assure implementation of this right are the hard evidence that Israel’s right to exist is under serious attack. What they are doing in that case is conflating the idea of the right of Jews to live in the middle east in a democracy--free from persecution--under a secular (i.e. non-Muslim) state that guarantees full political rights to all, with the idea of the right to a Jewish State announced by a Hungarian, Theodore Herzl, in 1896 and declared real by British imperialism in the Balfour Declaration after World War II (1917). A Jewish State is what Israel proclaims itself. For those of us—hopefully a majority of Americans and a majority of Jews—who believe in secular democracy, there can be no allowances for religious states regardless of how congenial that religion’s teachings on justice may be. Unequal rights for classes of citizens is understood to mean discrimination against some groups for the benefit of others.  

The fact that 3.5 million Palestinian civilians continue to live in a hell under Israel’s military domination and the accompanying constant terror-- having no citizenship in any country, absent the right to vote to influence the governance of Israel, that State which governs them against their will, destroys their homes and farmlands, forbids them passage from place to place within the occupied territories, prevents them from working and steals their resources; this condemns Israel to the label of rogue state in violation of international human and democratic rights. The UN General Assembly has been clear on that. Jimmy Carter did a great service to history and justice when he called the Israeli state correctly, an apartheid state in his title. Almost anyone who witnesses what is going on in the occupied territories today can not but come that same conclusion.  

Marc Sapir is executive director of Retro Poll.