Sun, Aug. 31, 2003

April 15, 2002. Jews from around the country gather in Washington to "Stand With Israel" against terrorism. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, a supporter of hard-line Israeli policies, is booed for saying, "Israelis are not the only victims of violence in the Middle East. Innocent Palestinians are suffering and dying...as well."

Since when is enforced silence about human suffering a Jewish value? Since when is not knowing a Jewish value?

In fierce battles over media coverage of the conflict, opposing sides exhibit totally different understandings of what is happening. In the era of the Internet, the issue is less what information is available and more what people will allow themselves to take in.

I learn about devastating attacks on Israeli Jews just by opening my morning paper; but for descriptions of Palestinian life under occupation, I must turn to: the Israeli newspaper Haaretz; Rabbis for Human Rights; B'Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, and vivid, painful e-mail from eyewitnesses.

It all gets filtered through my own sensibility. I am a Jew with a profound consciousness of Jewish victimization through history. But, for me, victim and victimizer, oppressor and oppressed are not mutually exclusive categories. For decades I've worked for Palestinian rights and for Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation. I cannot speak in general of when criticism of Israel crosses the line into anti-Semitism. I can only speak of when my lines are crossed.

To chant that Sharon is another Hitler, to use swastikas on signs, to equate Zionism with Nazism, to minimize the Holocaust is to step over my line. To present Israel as the world's worst violator of human rights is to step over my line.

But to say that U.S. citizens have a special responsibility for Israel's violations, given the massive support our own government provides, does not. To condemn Judaism as a religion because of Israel's behavior steps over my line; yet to hold Jewish institutions and community leaders accountable for their support of virtually all Israeli policies - bad as well as good - does not.

If Israel presents itself as the state of the Jewish people and uses Jewish symbols in its exercise of state power, those symbols are fair game for criticism.

It is hard for non-Jews to speak out. Yet those who do so align themselves with the Israeli reservists who refuse on principle to serve in the Occupied Palestinian Territories "to dominate, expel, starve and humiliate an entire people" and with thousands of Jewish dissenters around the world who root our activism in Jewish history and the best of Jewish traditions.

Hilda Silverman of Boston is a member of Visions of Peace with Justice in Israel/Palestine.

© 2003 Philadelphia Inquirer and wire service sources.