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Letters to Artvoice

MANY LETTERS THAT SAY PHYLLIS BENNIS IS WRONG:

I am writing to express my dismay about your recent interview with Phyllis Bennis (“Israel and Us,” Artvoice v5n48&49). Somehow, out of all the countries in the world, many of which have brutal, repressive regimes, you felt it important for your readers to hear the distorted view of one “activist” who singles out the only Jewish nation in the world, and excoriates it for a variety of reasons, many of which are factually inaccurate. Israel has struggled against the surrounding Arab populations for almost 60 years, yet still manages to retain a vigorous democracy that includes Arab citizens as well as Jews and Arabs of all races. For some reason, of course not anti-Semitic, you felt that the only Jewish nation in all the world should be scrutinized differently from all other nations and held to an absurd standard not required of any other nation, no matter how benighted, murderous, or un-free. Thanks ever so much for your keen insight, and I’m ever so grateful that the alternative press is right on top of Israel, clearly one of the truly great threats to world peace. Perhaps, if Israel simply ceased to exist, the Middle East would see the sudden outbreak of peace. You should be ashamed of yourself.

Kevin B. Kulick

Immediate past president, Jewish Federation of Greater Buffalo

Phyllis Bennis is so wedded to her far left ideology—that anything Western must be bad and any third world people must be the righteous victims of imperialism—that when it comes to Israel she can neither get her facts straight nor muster any objectivity. Her interview is so rife with falsehoods, distortions and unfair insinuations that it is hard to know where to begin. But perhaps I bristle most about her allegations that America’s affiliation with Israel, as opposed to its Arabs neighbors, is racist in nature—and that’s why we really “can’t trust” the Saudis, Egyptians, Jordanians, etc.

Frankly, I believe that Americans rightly realize that we can’t fully trust the Saudis because they take our billions in petrodollars and funnel them into fundamentalist schools around the world that indoctrinate students to hate Jews and Christians as “infidels.” And that the Egyptians constantly denounce America in their state-controlled media, with copious statements such as “the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor must be knocked down”—which appeared in a front-page op-ed in Egypt’s major newspaper just a few weeks before 9/11. Ms. Bennis conveniently pulls out the epithet of “racist” to martial third world indignation against America and Israel when it simply isn’t true. However, quite to the contrary, she never admits to the racism and bigotry throughout the Arab world—witnessed in such behavior as the slavery and genocide of blacks in Sudan, the draconian state-mandated religious intolerance of Saudi Arabia, and the nearly absolute ethnic cleansing of almost a million Jews from throughout the Arab countries.

David A. Kronfeld

New York, New York

I have always thought highly of Artvoice and appreciate your running the announcements of our Biblical Archaeological Society of greater Buffalo meetings. But now I am very disappointed in your printing a misguided article by Phyllis Bennis which is full of factual errors, distortions, contradictions and just plain odd perspectives.

Her inaccuracies and distortions and contradictions are too numerous for a short e-mail, but here are a few:

She describes Israel as a nondemocratic democracy while admitting that Arabs have full rights to vote. In fact, until recently, Israel was the only Middle Eastern state that gave Arabs the right to vote in freely contested elections.

Ms. Bennis claims non-Jews can’t buy land in much of Israel. This is an old canard that anti-Israel agitators constantly repeat because land policy in Israel is quite unlike that in the United States and hence is confusing to the uninformed. Arabs and Jews have equal right to purchase land. But most of Israel’s land is held by the Israel Land Authority, a state agency, and is leased to Arabs or Jews rather than sold. Therefore, non-Jews and Jews have limited opportunity to buy land in most of Israel. It’s rather like the situation in Maryland, where houses are built on land that is leased to the builder for 99 years.

Ms. Bennis claims that the alliance between Israel and America is based on a mutual inability to trust the Arabs, and that this is due to Western racism. Unfortunately, her views have no basis in facts; they are founded upon a misinformed anti-American and anti-Israel perspective. She ignores the ongoing racial genocide occurring in Sudan, while chastising Israel for supposed racism, despite Israel’s heroic and successful efforts to rescue Ethiopian Jews by the thousands, bringing them to Israel and integrating them into Israeli society as rapidly as possible.

Esther Bates

Kenmore

Is it discrimination to limit the political rights of an internal potential enemy populaltion?

Is it folly not to?

Is war for survival limited by the niceties of political correctness?

What will America do when its existence is similarly threatened?

If Israel has no right to self defense, does this mean that to your reporter, Israel should not exist?

Questions to reflect upon.

Herbert B. Sunshine

US/Israel

Phyllis Bennis’ assertions are full of dangerous deceptions and misinformation. I will mention just few:

She views Israel as a racist state, yet she forgets to mention the alarming examples of racism in the Arab world, including enslavement of blacks in Saudi Arabia that continued a century after slavery ended in the West, or the ongoing racial genocide occurring in Sudan re-enforced by the violent Salafi Islamic theology which allows raping and enslaving women in times of war.

She emphasizes “Palestinian expulsions” by the Jews while the historical evidence shows that the majority of the Arabs who fled during 1947-1949 did so because their own leaders urged them, or due to their fears about what might happen to them during and after the war.

She denies that anti-Semitism has anything to do with Jews leaving the Soviet Union or Ethiopia despite ample evidence to the contrary, including endless amount of personal stories told by my own family and friends.

She claims that Israelis prefer “white, educated, violin playing surgeons” rather than “Ethiopian peasants.” The story of the rescue of the Ethiopian Jews is one incredible tale of tenacity, courageous and grand morality. Israel is the only country in the world that went to such lengths to rescue an African population when it airlifted Ethiopia’s Jewish community to Israel. Ms. Bennis’s claim is disgraceful and completely denies the huge efforts Israel undertook to save Ethiopian Jewry.

She can’t comprehend that Israel had built its own cultural and culinary tastes. She can’t fathom that Israel is a melting pot of people from many different cultures and ethnicities. She can’t grasp the fact that Israelis enjoy the Middle Eastern food and she also conveniently forgets that about 900,000 Jews, many of whom immigrated to Israel as refugees, were kicked out of Arab countries. One should only wonder, why does it bother her that Israelis enjoy the cuisine of that region? Why does it bother her that Israelis developed their type of independent Israeli culture?

While she claims that racism is the main motivation beyond American or Israeli policy, she has no proof or evidence to that claim.

It’s obvious that Mrs. Bennis despises Israel and Jews who live there. It’s also obvious that the Buffalo members who invited her to speak are sharing her sentiments. Lies that are repeated endlessly become facts. It’s a shame that Artvoice gives hand to these canards.

Rachel Lipsky

Amherst

I am disappointed that you chose to present such distorted information by “respected expert” Phyllis Bennis, who assumes that every Israel motive is evil, every Arab one pure. The US and Israel have an alliance based on shared democratic values, not racism. Among her many untruths, Ethiopian Jews in Israel have actually been airlifted and rescued from Ethiopia by Israel—the only time whites ever took blacks out of Africa to free them, not enslave them! Ms. Bennis: Have any Arab countries rescued the hundreds of thousands of black Muslims of Darfur, the victims of a years-long genocidal campaign?

In Israel, Arabs not only have full voting rights, as she admits, but they also have full religious rights, Arabic is an official language, and Arabs serve in the parliament. They may join the army, contrary to her assertion; they are simply not conscripted out of sensitivity to their Arab brothers. Many non-Jewish Israelis, such as Bedouin and Druze, do join the army. I dare Bennis to find such equal treatment for any Jew in an Arab country. She demands that Israel appreciate Arab culture; does she insist equally that Arab Muslims—not known for their great tolerance toward Jews, women, homosexuals, and Westerners—respect Judaism, the source of their religion?

Despite Bennis’s efforts to paint Israel as a white colonizer (Bennis should know that the Arabs of 1930s Palestine fervently supported the Nazis; the Arab mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, worked directly with his hero Hitler), Israel is one of the most diverse tiny countries around. Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs, both Semitic-looking, are not distinguishable by color, and Israeli Arabs work side by side with Jews in such hospitals as Hadassah to rescue victims of terror, both Arab and Jewish. Arabs may and do vehemently protest Israeli policies without fear of harm. Can Bennis find such treatment of Jews in any Arab countries?

If Bennis is so worried about racism, I suggest she look at the leaders of the Palestinian Arabs, including Hamas, whose charter claims that the Jews are the sons of apes and pigs and that it is the duty of every Muslim to kill Jews. Palestinian children are taught the unmatchable joys of shahada (“martyrdom”)—i.e., blowing up Israeli civilians to go to heaven. I suggest she look at Jordan, where no Jew may ever become a citizen; Egypt, which runs daily blood libels against Jews in government-controlled newspapers; Saudi Arabia, where Jews (certainly not Israelis) are rarely allowed to enter and no non-Sunni Muslim may practice his religion; or Iran, where Jews live in fear of being branded—again—as Zionist spies and must listen to their president deny the Holocaust daily while threatening another one.

Bennis’s concern for human rights is hypocritical and based on deliberate misinformation. Why pass it on to your readers?

Sara Miller

Rego Park, New York

One day in the early 1980s, a man was abducted, beaten and dragged off to prison in his homeland of Ethiopia. On his first day of captivity he was hung up, a rag was stuffed in his mouth and his feet were whipped. For the next 27 months he lived in a small bug-infested room with 70 other prisoners and only a bucket for a toilet. His crime? He was a Jewish teacher. The ruling dictator of Ethiopia had recently forbidden the practice of Judaism, closing synagogues and Jewish schools. This edict followed the 1974 overthrow of Haile Selassie by Marxist-Leninists during which time 2,500 Jews were killed and 7,000 were left homeless. Those caught trying to flee were tortured. Yet, Phyllis Bennis says Ethiopian Jews “weren’t coming [to Israel] to escape anti-Semitism, they were coming to escape a terrific famine.” Yes, there was famine, but there was also the murder and imprisonment of thousands of Jewish Ethiopians. Even if Israel took in people “just” to save them from famine, why is that so objectionable to Ms. Bennis? Here in Syracuse, we are proud of our churches and other groups who have helped starving “Lost Boys” from Sudan and refugees from other places. Their actions are admirable. Fortunately, there is no activist akin to Ms. Bennis who would demand they defend themselves for saving people’s lives.

What happened to the Ethiopian man, Yakov Elias? When he was finally released from prison, he seized the opportunity to go to Israel with his wife and children. Today, Yakov’s 28-year-old daughter, Esti, is a law student. She no longer fits Ms. Bennis appellation of “Ethiopian peasant” because she has become one of Israel’s top models. Many other Ethiopian Israelis have achieved success. Is the situation perfect? Of course not. Nor is it in any country. But for Ms. Bennis, with her deep anti-Israel animus, nothing Israel does can ever be enough. Worse, she totally ignores the genocidal racism now rampant in Chad and Sudan, where Janjaweed Arab militias have been raping and mutilating women and wiping out entire villages. Millions have already been displaced and hundreds of thousands murdered or maimed. Must it take some link to Israel for Ms. Bennis to notice or care?

Lynn C. Koss

Syracuse, New York

As was clearly evident from her two-part interview, when it comes to Israel, Phyllis Bennis’s mind is quite made up. Unfortunately, so are many of her “facts.” Manifestly untrue was her assertion that post-World War II, the British allowed free Jewish immigration into Palestine. It took the end of the Mandate for the packed internment camps on Cyprus and elsewhere to “open up.” That, indeed, was the very basis for Exodus. As for the present, Arabs are not “excluded from [military] service.” While not drafted, they can and do enlist. Druze and Bedouin, in particular, serve in significant numbers. Arabs are also well represented in universities and fill high-profile positions throughout Israeli society, including the media, judiciary and diplomatic corps. What is truly remarkable about Israel, a country locked in statehood-long existential struggle with enemies waging war mostly on its civilian population, is not how separated its Arab citizens are, but how well integrated.

Bennis’s faulty conclusions derive from her many false premises. For her, Israel can do nothing right and only Palestinians can be wronged. Strikingly missing from any of her observations is any sense of context. The Separation Fence was not built capriciously or maliciously. Nor are certain roads restricted, not by ethnicity, but to cars bearing Israeli license plates, for no reason at all. Quite clearly, these now-proven measures are intended to reduce an ever-present threat of terrorism. They save both Israeli and Palestinian lives and limbs.

Bennis takes Israel to task both for turning its back on its Arab neighbors (when obviously the reverse is the case) and for expropriating Middle East cuisine and fashion. It’s a classic case of “Heads I win, tails you lose.” An on and on, in this vein, ad nauseam. Obviously Bennis takes herself very seriously, but no one else should.

Richard D. Wilkins

Syracuse, New York

I am saddened to read of the blatant lies uttered by Phyllis Bennis.

E. Levitt

Brooklyn, New York

One would normally expect someone claiming to be an expert on a topic to have a grasp of some of the most simple and basic facts. In the case of Phyllis Bennis and her claim to be an expert on Israel and Palestine, one’s expectations would not be met. I would expect an expert on anything relating to the Middle East to know, for example, who the Arabs are. Mrs. Bennis does not. I would expect them to know who the Jews are, and again this so-called “expert” fails. And I would expect something beyond complete ignorance of history, some vague knowledge perhaps of how the current situation came to be, and again Phyllis Bennis is apparently lacking.

Who are the Arabs? Mrs. Bennis claims that “In fact, 65 percent of Israeli Jews are Arabs…” This is a claim that is hilarious, sad, and 100 percent wrong. Arabs are an ethnic group, people with a specific history and lineage. Not all people or even Muslims in the Middle East are Arabs. No Arab would ever claim that the Jews who used to live in their country were Arabs. And the Sephardic Jews whom Bennis makes this claim about were forcibly kicked out of lots of different Islamic countries, including Morroco, Libya, and Egypt where very few people consider themselves to be Arabs, and Iran where they are mostly Persians and would be quite mystified by Mrs. Bennis claiming that Jews who had lived in Iran magically became Arabs by doing so.

I doubt that anyone would claim that the Kurds, for example, had magically become Arabs or Persians or Turks by living surrounded by, and under the rule of, Arabs and Persians and Turks for a millenia. But Mrs. Bennis seems to believe that Jews who lived in various countries became the ethnicity, or one of the ethnicities, of that country “…and another 15 or 18 percent (of Jews in Israel) are Slavs from Russia.” Very interesting. So, living in a country with around 160 different recognized ethnic groups, all the Jews, magically, became the Slavic one of those 160. None of the other 160 groups became Slavs, just the Jews did.

Is this just incredible ignorance, or something else? Why does one deny the identity of an ethnic group? Daniel Bar-Tal in his book Group Beliefs: A Conception for Analyzing Group Structure, process, and behavior documents that this is a common behavior for those who have a racist hatred of another group, those engaged in acts of ethnic cleansing, for example. The Nazis denied that the Jews were descended from the Jews of the Bible and claimed they were really decendants of the Khazars, who converted to Judaism in the tenth century. Often racists claim that they could not be anti-Semites because Jews are not a real group in any case.

For those who do not know, Jews from all over the world are closely related to each other on the patralineal side. About 50 percent of the men in all populations, except for the Ethiopains who seem to be unrelated genetically, of the Cohen line have the Cohen gene, a gene found in .5 percent of the rest of the world’s population. Five to ten percent of the non-Cohen Jews have this gene as well. Ashkenazi (those from Europe) Jews are unrelated matralinealy to the other Jews of the world, but the Sephardic Jews are closely related matralinealy to the Jews from South Africa (the Lemba Tribe), India, and China. All of the Jews, save the Ethiopians, are genetically very close to people from Syria and Lebanon, and to the Palestinians. Just maybe because we descended from people who were from that same part of the world.

The reason Sephardic Jews do not call themseleves “Arab Jews,” as she suggests they should, is because they are not Arabs at all. What she sees as “denial of even their own culture” and “cultural domination” by the Ashkenazi Jews is really the process of forging a new nation and culture. If she knew anything much about this topic she might note that, while the Sephardi no longer use Arabic, the Ashkenazi also no longer use Yiddish. Both now speak Hebrew, and Israeli culture is profoundly Israeli, not European or Arab, with Yemeni musical influences and the musical traditions of the Ashkenazi both blending into the rock played in the discos, for example. Funny too how she dismisses the acceptance of Middle Eastern food and dress, which she notes later, as having anything to do with Israeli culture or being in any way native to it. She seems to do what she accuses others of, seeing Israel as European despite the evidence. So 65 percent of Israeli Jews have lived in the Middle East for the last 3,000 years or more, but falafel and tabbouleh are new to us, and foreign imports?

But still, given the bizarre belief she has that every Moslem in the Middle East is an Arab, and every person in Russia is a Slav, perhaps she is just incredibly ignorant on the topic she claims expertise in.

One might hope this was true, but then how do we explain this seemingly willful ignorance of the history of the topic of her “expertise”?

For example, her assertions that Israel’s trade relations with Europe were somehow because they just decided, “Well, we don’t need to have trade and normal relations with all these folks (the other countries in the Middle East)” due to the “series of wars and tensions.” In fact, Israel has been more than willing to do what it can to make peace and have normal relations with it’s neighbors, neighbors who attacked it the minute Israel declared it’s existence, and with the exception of Egypt have never made peace with them. These countries are in a state of war, officially, with Israel, and have been for the entire existence of the country. Yet somehow she wants to blame Israel for not trading with them? Why? Did Israel invade Iran and Saudi Arabia and Iraq? I think not.

But far more stark an example is this one; “The Jews who come from the Arab (sic)countries—in some cases, not all—viewed themselves as escaping—escaping anti-Semitism, escaping whatever.” Yes, let us be radically revisionistic with history and deny that over 600,000 Jews were forcibly removed from all of the Islamic countries of the Middle East from 1948-1951, and that they had their homes and posessions stripped from them in the process. Whole communities of tens of thousands were reduced to zero or less than a hundred in a few short years, and it was not because all of the people in those communities suddenly decided that they wanted to lose everything they had and move to a country with a very uncertain future, at war with seven far larger countries as they were, where they could live in a nice tent. We would not want to tell the truth about which side in this conflict conducted ethnic cleansing. While there are over a million Palestinians who are citizens in Israel, there are less than a thousand Jews left in all the countries of the Islamic Middle East combined.

Mrs. Bennis’s complaints about the Right of Return laws that allow any Jew to become an Israeli citizen, which she claims is “thoroughly undemocratic” also expose her bias and her lack of knowledge of history. See, there was this little war called World War II, shortly before Israel came into existence, and Jewish refugees tried to get out of Europe so they would not be killed, something called the Holocaust was happening, and most countries in the world refused to let them in, including the US where the head of immigration said the ideal number of Jewish immigrants would be “Zero.” And that war came after many centuries of Jews being kicked out of the countries they were living in. Every single European country expelled all of the Jews at one time or another. There was even a term that was popular, the Wandering Jew, and they did not wander by choice.

The fact is that Israel is not like every other country, it is more legitimate. If the Pakistanis, or pretty much any other population of a country save Israel, all needed to go live in other countries, there is no evidence that they would face hatred and violence everywhere they went. Israel is the only country with a demonstrated need to exist, a need to exist so that Jews always have a safe place to go, a country that will welcome them. People who hate Jews, and here the evidence suggests Mrs. Bennis can be included, take this law that exists because of the large numbers of racists who hate Jews and try to harm us, and claim that it means Israel has racist and undemocratic policies.

Israel is a very small country, if Mrs. Bennis had ever looked at a map of the Middle East she might have known this (how does one claim expertise on a topic without ever looking at a map of the region in question?). Israel cannot possibly let in everyone who wants to live there, as a large country like the US could, and still does not. The reason Israel exists is because Jews needed, and still need, to have a country that is sure to never have anti-Semitic policies, where they will never be persecuted by the state as Jews were even here in America, where my grandfather was denied admission to university and my mother could not swim in the city pool due to their ethnicity. Let in ten million random people and there is no place for any more Jews to live, and since it is a democracy allowing Jews to be the minority opens up the possibility of state persecution of Jews again, defeating the whole purpose for Israel’s existence.

No one has any problems with Kurds wanting their own country, or any other ethnic group wanting their own country, including the Palestinians. But people like Mrs. Bennis have a problem with Jews wanting their own country, only Jews should not have a country based on ethnic identity. Because…they are not Armenians or Finns or Japanese or…because they are Jews.

Mrs. Bennis, your grandfather fled from pogroms, and now you are fighting hard on the side of the modern day Cossacks, helping them fight to destroy Israel and massacre the Jews who live there. Shame on you. I cannot believe that someone who writes books on this topic and works for a think tank on this topic could possibly have such an amazing lack of knowledge as you display. One can only conclude that you are telling lies and trying to decieve the reader in order to serve your own hatreds and biases. Not every critic of Israel is a racist, but the racist ones like yourself are. Jewish or not, you hate Jews.

All of these lies, and more that I will leave for now, seek to paint Israel as illegitimate, as a European colony, as a racist and undemocratic state (never mind comparing them to the rest of the Middle East), populated by a random group of people who are not an ethnicity at all, who trade with Europe and not the countries they are at war with out of whim and free choice, whose people could have gone anywhere they liked, or simply stayed where they were, but instead they decided to be mean and go take Palestine. All of these lies add up to an inevitable conclusion about the person telling them; they are motivated by racism and hate. Shame. You should be very ashamed of yourself, Mrs. Bennis. Nothing good comes from racist hatred.

Carmi Turchick

Buffalo

AND ONE LETTER THAT SAYS PHYLLIS BENNIS IS RIGHT:

The two-part Phyllis Bennis interview in Artvoice is extraordinary, not only because it brings to light accurate details regarding the Israeli/Palestinian conflict which are often conspicuously omitted in the media, but also because Bennis joins an honorable and select group of Jewish peacemakers: teachers, journalists, and religious figures, who are not afraid to speak out against the repressive government in Israel. Like Israeli journalists Gideon Levy and Amira Hass, and religious leader David Weiss, she bravely rallies against the dehumanization of Arabs living in Israel. Like them she reminds us of the brutal occupation with its penal wall, its inhumane check points and its proliferation of illegal settlements on the West Bank.

Bennis is tough. At her UB lecture recently one saw a slight figure on stage, facing an audience stuffed with righteously indignant pro-Israeli sympathizers and apologists—where often, the only sounds were the hisses. She remained resolute, responding to angry inquiries with a natural dignity and wisdom. In place of petulance and hysteria, she faced her critics with clear and documented facts which were indisputable. She was unpretentious, almost modest in the manner in which spoke, as if her presence there was part of a mission, designed to help end the violence in Israel, and so doing, stop the deaths of Jews, Muslims and Christians living there and in the Middle East. There was not a second of self-aggrandizement, which I believe endeared her, not only to those sensitive to the injustices perpetrated by the government in Israel, but also to those who disagreed with her overall assessment of the cause of the turmoil.

As in her AV interview, she charged the Bush administration with recklessly and knowingly contributing to the problem in the Middle East by supporting the occupation. In her address, she offered a modicum of hope. It could be summed up nicely in a response she made to a Bruce Jackson question asked in the AV interview regarding hope for the future: “Ending the support for the Israeli occupation and changing our policies so that they would support equal rights for all within the region would go an enormous distance toward ending the hatred that exists toward the United States.”

Norm Tederous

Williamsville