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Open letter to Nadine Gordimer

Dorothy Naor

2008-05-13

http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/48045

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This letter is written in the wake of your justification to Dr. Haider Eid of your intention to attend a Writers' Festival in Israel.

I write to you as an American-Israeli Jew who ignorantly immigrated from the US to Israel 50 years ago. I came then to raise my children as Jews in a Jewish country. Only many years later, after much experience living here in Israel and much research, did I finally realize how misguided I'd been about Israel—what it was meant to be and what it is.

Let me begin with a question: how would you, an individual so widely recognized and admired both as author and as courageous rebel against apartheid, how would you have felt about a celebrity who during the height of your efforts against apartheid would have agreed to come to South Africa to attend a public function of the kind that you propose now to attend?

Would you not have felt that it was a debasement of all the efforts that yourself and others—particularly of those who were calling for sanctions, boycott, and divestment—were engaged in? Would you not have realized that however respectable and honest the intentions of the celebrity in coming to South Africa, that the government would use his/her attendance at the function for its own purposes?

Do you not realize that even though the writers' festival that you intend to come to is not sponsored by the Israeli government, the event nevertheless will be associated with the 60 years of so-called Independence celebrations? Do you not realize that your criticisms of Israel's policies will be so much stronger if instead of expressing them while attending a forum in Israel you state them as explanation of why you refuse to attend?

I deeply hope that it is still possible to convince you to not come, at least not as a guest to a public function. For you to attend a formal affair organized by Israelis in Israel--be it literary, academic, or other--is to undercut the endeavors of those of us who call for change, and believe that boycott, sanctions, and divestment from Israel can help bring about that change.

Israel is a disaster for Israeli Jews as well as for the indigenous Palestinians. Not that there is symmetry—for, as I'm sure you realize, there can never be symmetry between occupier and occupied, oppressor and oppressed.

Nevertheless, Israel, instead of being a safe haven for Jews, is the contrary. Where else since WWII have Jews gone through 10 wars and battles in less than 60 years? Where else since WWII have over 23,000 Jewish soldiers been killed in violence? Where else in the world do so many Jewish youngsters suffer from post-traumatic distress symptoms following their army service (and during it) because of what they experienced and what they did to Palestinians? Where else in the world do over 80,000 Holocaust survivors live in dire poverty, ignored by their government, which has money for expansion but not for them or for health, education, or social benefits?

Peace could have come long ago had Israel's leaders wished it. There have been many opportunities for peace (e.g., the Saudi Arabian proposal). But because Israel's leaders deem expansion more important than life, they not only do not protect Israelis but demand instead of Jewish inhabitants to be forever prepared to live by the sword. As Professor Robert Aumann, an American-Israeli Nobel Prize Laureate, has argued, the country is more important than lives; Israel's continued existence, he says, rests on readiness to sacrifice its young: "We are too sensitive to our losses, and also to the losses of the other side . . . In the Yom Kippur War, 3,000 soldiers were killed. It sounds terrible, but that's small change."*

'Small change,' indeed! Yet the acts of Israel's leaders from Ben Gurion till today clearly imply that to them lives are 'small change.' Thus, for example, Israel's present government instead of furnishing the long-suffering residents of Sderot either peace or shelters to protect them from the missiles fired from Gaza, tells the people of Sderot to learn to endure. Israel's leaders hold the residents of Sderot hostage so as to use their sufferings from missile attacks as propaganda.

Some of the above data is elucidated in a petition that Israelis recently sent to the United Methodist Church in support of its proposals to divest from companies that contribute to the occupation: http://www.PetitionOnline.com/Israelis/petition.html More data is available in two compilations that I prepared as handouts for my speaking tour in the United States in March and April this year. I would gladly send them to you (and to anyone else interested) by email or other means, if you wish.

Rather than celebrating 60 years of Israel's existence, there is every reason to reconsider the establishment of an ethnographic state—a Jewish state—whose criterion is not democracy but demography, whose leaders care not an iota for peace but for expansion. For centuries Jews, Muslims, and Christians lived in Palestine in amity prior to Zionism. They could again live together in peace. But this will not happen until there will be justice, freedom, and security for Palestinians (including the right of refugees to return).

Your agreement to come here to participate in any official or semi-official function undermines our endeavors to bring justice, freedom, and security to all who love this land—be they Jews, Muslims, Christians, or seculars.

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