Date: Tue, 26 Dec 2006 11:17:22 CST

CPTnet

26 December 2006

HEBRON REFLECTION:  The Double Standard, Part I -- by Jerry Levin

[Note: The following is an edited excerpt from a longer report that CPTer Jerry Levin sent to his supporters.  Another excerpt from the same report will appear tomorrow.  People wishing to see the original may contact Levin at guest.993507@MennoLink.org.]

        Let's be clear about this: I am opposed to the use of violence to resolve political, cultural, social, ideological, or theological disputes.  Or any dispute for that matter.  I can never agree with militant Palestinian leaders who rationalize the use of terror as a legitimate form of armed struggle against oppression and occupation.  I neither deny nor condone the tragic carnage and suffering of Jewish families whose members Palestinian militants have killed in terror raids.  How could I?  I am the grandson of an Orthodox rabbi, a refugee from the Eastern European pogroms at the end of the 19th century and one of the first American rabbis to embrace Zionism.

        Nevertheless, I comprehend Palestinian militants' unwillingness to abandon the kind of insurrectionary guer[r]illa warfare that international law recognizes as legitimate by occupied peoples.  I comprehend it because of the more extensive campaign of terror waged against defen[c]eless, harassed, humiliated, and provoked Palestinians every day by Israel's occupying arm and armed squatter-settlers.  There's a semantic double standard applied here that those situated outside the borders of Israel and Palestine don't experience.  But I do here in Hebron.

        The double standard is simply this: Any act of violent resistant to the occupation by a Palestinian is "terror," but the terror employed by the Israeli army is only the State of Israel engaging in its legitimate "right to defend" itself.

        Palestinians, of course, do not have a right to defend themselves even though it is their land that is being occupied. It is their land being relentlessly, diminished by the wall and the expanding perimeters of the hundreds of settlements inside the West Bank as well as the Gulag that is Gaza.
  I'm old enough to remember Nazi propaganda that tried to characterize the underground resistance movements in countries Germany occupied as the aggressors and its own brutal terror crackdowns as the Third Reich's right to defend itself, even though Germany itself was not under occupation.

        Defending a land grab is not the same as defending one's home turf. Palestinians are not occupying Israel.  The Israeli military is not withstanding an invasion of Arab colonialist hordes.  Thousands of violent Israeli squatter-settlers are not languishing in Palestinian prisons without charge. Palestinian occupiers are not demolishing the homes of Israeli citizens nor shutting off entry to Israeli cities towns and villages.

        Nazi leaders were h[anged] for killing noncombatants in defen[c]e of their predatory regime's right to defend itself.  Yet, Israel's leaders are applauded when acting similarly with the West Bank and Gaza.  They have done so, of course, on a much smaller scale.  The effect, however, is the same.  As Israeli leaders like to piously pronounce, "When you save one life, you save the world."  Well, conversely, when you kill one life in a terror attack masqueraded as exercising one's right to defend oneself, then one is killing the world over and over again.

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Date: Thu, 28 Dec 2006 14:56:42 CST

CPTnet

28 December 2006

HEBRON REFLECTION:  The Double Standard, Part II

[Note: The following is the second part of a two-part edited excerpt from a longer report that CPTer Jerry Levin sent to his supporters.   People wishing to see the original may contact Levin at

guest.993507@MennoLink.org.]

        People on the outside do not experience the semantic double standard because it takes place beneath the radar of western mass circulation journalism. And they do not experience it because the old journalistic aphorism, "if it bleeds it leads" usually -- although not always -- applies only to Israelis.

        For instance, when Palestinian militants captured a single Israeli soldier earlier this year, the western media reported it as another act of illegitimate Palestinian terror, rather than a legitimate guer[r]illa operation.  The press rationalizes the massive Israeli response that has killed scores of Palestinian civilians in retaliation for the capture as acts of legitimate self-defen[c]e by Israel's army.  Of course, the army does apologize for its "mistake" if the number of noncombatant Palestinians still dying in Israeli's pursuit of the soldier's release reaches such a level that the military establishment cannot soft-pedal the carnage.

        The manner in which the Israeli military is continuing its campaign of terrorizing warfare, brutal occupation and rule of Palestinian land is clearly most comparable to what the civilized world agrees are the kinds of crimes committed by rogue states.  Yet, the press is disgracefully not reporting those similarities or at least not doing so effectively.

        So there are no official demands (with teeth anyway) coming out of the West for an end to this terrible double standard.  No demands that Israel cease its roguish violence of terror and dispossession or submit to international controls of its nuclear weapons program.  You rarely hear western leaders of consequence criticize the Israeli military or government when they rationalize their constant use of terror (the killing of noncombatant children, women, and men) in the West Bank or Gaza as Israel defending itself.  But those same leaders are all over Palestinians when they assert their right to defend themselves.

        So after almost forty years of colonizing brutality in the West Bank and Gaza, the occupation double standard -- underwritten by U. S. military and economic aid -- is, as it has most always been, the elephant in the room that few mass circulation news outlets talk about.

        Therefore, Hebron, where CPT works, continues to be mostly out of sight and out of mind in the west.  It is in Hebron that the occupation elephant in the room has been fiendishly characterized by graffiti painted on the door of a Palestinian home in the Old City of Hebron that says, "Gas the Arabs."  It is signed, "JDL", the initials of the "Jewish Defense League".  Where and when did you last read about that?

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Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) seeks to enlist the whole church in organized, nonviolent alternatives to war and places teams of trained peacemakers in regions of lethal conflict.  Originally a violence-reduction initiative of the historic peace churches (Mennonite, Church of the Brethren and Quaker), CPT now enjoys support and membership from a wide range of Christian denominations.

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