Re: On the Palestinian solidarity conferences.

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

At 10:04 AM -0500 10/11/03, LouPaulsen wrote:
> > Can you, and would you, defend the "right" to kill Oriah Ilan and
> > children like her in the name of liberation, convincingly to actual
> > activists and potential recruits in the solidarity movement?  And
> > if you can and would, would your defense _in any way_ further
> > Palestinian struggles for liberation?
> > --
> > Yoshie
>
> You must be under a lot of personal pressure out there.  I haven't
> been atrocity-baited like this

The questions that I have been raising here don't primarily concern
how to respond to those who approach solidarity activists with a
plainly hostile intention to "atrocity-bait," to use your term.  They
are meant to address, first of all, the sort of conflict that led to
the Arab and other members' resignation in protest from New Jersey
Solidarity, in other words, the cases when solidarity activists have
moral questions of their own, independently of whatever those who are
hostile to Palestinians have to say.  According to the testimony of
Summer Sharaf, a former member of NJS and a current board member of
AWARE (awaremovement.org), one of the decisive disputes that led to
the break was the refusal of the current NJS leaders to draw any line
between legitimate and illegitimate targets in armed struggles for
liberation, especially the refusal to say that it is not legitimate
to attack children.  To quote from the public statement issued by the
Arab members who resigned from NJS: "We have had debates against
Steering Committee persons who hold tight to the idea that there are
no Israeli civilians and when confronted with 'even the kids?' the
reply was 'yes, everyone's fair game'."  Charlotte Kates, however,
maintains that "[n]o one has ever had such a conversation regarding
'children' and 'fair game.'"  I'll give Charlotte a benefit of doubt
here and assume, for the sake of debate, that the idea that Israeli
children are "fair game" for Palestinian attacks -- the idea that
outraged Summer Sharaf and others -- was not and is not the belief of
current NJS leaders.  Nonetheless, it is not at all clear where
exactly Charlotte Kates and NJS draw the line between legitimate and
illegitimate targets, legitimate and illegitimate means, etc.  Lack
of clarification sends a signal to others: (at worst) "we refuse to
draw a line, _anything goes_ in a struggle for liberation"; or (at
best) "we don't really know what to think, so we'll maintain our
embarrassed silence."

At 10:04 AM -0500 10/11/03, LouPaulsen wrote:
> since the debate over the Yugoslavia War at Roosevelt University,
> where a woman from the audience, actually part of the pro-war team
> and loaded for bear, got up for the first question of the audience
> question period and fired this one in my face:  "What do you say to
> the 50,000 Bosnian women who were raped by Serbian troops?"

I hope that you don't mean to imply, by this comparison, that
B'Tselem's documentation of civilian casualties is as unreliable as
estimates of rapes extrapolated from a small sample during the
Yugoslav War.

At 10:04 AM -0500 10/11/03, LouPaulsen wrote:
> I don't run from challenges like this, Yoshie.

A genuine moral question based on facts, rather than
"atrocity-baiting" based on propaganda, isn't what may be called an
external "challenge," from which one can choose to run or not to run.
It arises from collisions among one's own moral sentiments, political
ends and means, and objective circumstances -- or it doesn't.
--
Yoshie

* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/>
* Calendars of Events in Columbus:
<http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>,
<http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/>
* Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/>
* Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/>
* Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio>
* Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>


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