November 1989, Page 25, 49

Seeing the Light

Lessons From My Son and My Grandfather

By Rachelle Marshall

Like almost all Jews of my generation, I was indelibly marked by the calamity inflicted on the Jews of Europe between 1933 and 1945. Growing up safely in New York during those years, I knew that I was alive only because my grandparents had decided to come to America. Others in my family were not so lucky. During the late 1930s there was constant anxiety in our house as my father talked endlessly on the telephone trying to secure safe passage for relatives still in Europe. The newsreel I saw in 1938 of bearded Jews on their hands and knees in a Vienna street, surrounded by jeering crowds, men and women could suddenly become savage.

So after World War II it would have been unthinkable to me not to welcome the establishment of the state of Israel. At last, I thought, the Jewish people had a safe haven. During the 1950s and 1960s it never occurred to me that there was any inconsistency in working for civil rights in America and giving my full support to Israel. The only "Palestinians" I knew about were Jews like my Uncle Simon, who had settled in Palestine in the 19th century to escape the Czarist pogroms.

For nearly 20 years I assumed that whatever the Israeli government did was for self-defense, and thus justified. The first, imperceptible doubt arose the day after Israel's victory in the June 1967 war. "What a triumph!" I exclaimed at breakfast after a look at the headlines. "Israel is finally safe."

Our 12-year-old son, Jonathan, looked skeptical. "Why is Israel any safer than before?" he asked. "Doesn't conquering more territory just mean making more enemies?" I reminded him that he hadn't been alive during the Holocaust and therefore couldn't possibly understand the relief that Jews everywhere must be feeling. To my shame, I accused him of being too rational.

As the days passed and I read news reports from the Middle East that suggested the conflict was far from over, Jonathan's questions occasionally troubled me. But, at the time, US involvement in Vietnam was uppermost in my mind, so much that in December 1967 I spent three weeks in jail for helping to block the entrance to the Oakland Army Terminal.

The carpet bombing of Vietnam by B-52s and the use of napalm and white phosphorous against defenseless peasants struck me as not so different from the Nazi ruthlessness we had once condemned. When the Honeywell Corporation announced it had developed an "improved" napalm that would stick to the skin longer, I realized that the Germans had no monopoly on evil.

When I later came to read about the Middle East, the knowledge that my own country was capable of committing atrocities gave me a degree of objectivity that enabled me to accept information about Israel that I would earlier have dismissed as Arab propaganda. The learning process began a year or two after my breakfast table confrontation with Jonathan, when an article appeared in the Stanford Daily that harshly criticized Israel's treatment of Palestinians.

The Jewish people face their greatest threat from an Israeli government that makes a mockery of Judaism.

I was angy and wanted to reply, but I couldn't counter the author's facts with facts of my own. So I went to the library and began reading-starting with Christopher Sykes's Crossroads to Israel and Maxime Rodinson's Israel and the Arabs, and going on to books by Israelis and others. It wasn't until much later that I was willing to trust works by Arab authors such as Sabri Jiryis and Edward Said. I took two courses on the Middle East at Stanford and went to hear most of the speakers who came to the campus, including Muhammad Hallaj and Ibrahim Abu-Loughad. I was shocked when they were nearly shouted off the stage by members of the audience.

The light began to dawn as I learned that the Jewish haven I had welcomed was established on land the Palestinians had a right to claim as their own. I learned about the methods that Jewish forces had used to expel over 700,000 Palestinians from their homes, such as the fiery barrel bombs that burned through Arab villages, and the massacre of 250 men, women and children at Deir Yassin. I learned about Arab terrorism and about Israeli reprisal raids. From Menachem Begin's book, The Revolt, I learned about Jewish terrorism and of the dedication of Jewish zealots to extending Israel's borders to include the east bank of the Jordan.

The more I read, the greater my sense of betrayel. A large part of what I had been told about Israel and its neighbors was based on myth, I realized. And the myths continued to be repeated in most of the newspaper and magazine articles I read that dealt with the Middle East. But then I found that the price of challenging the conventional wisdom came high.

In the mid-1970s I began writing letters to the editor that were critical of Israel's role in Lebanon, specifically its devastating bombing of civilian villages and its support for the Phalangist forces. The printed replies (and anonymous letters) were short on factual arguments but called me everything from an anti-Semitic Jew to a communist. The nice local rabbi, a hero of the Selma civil rights march, called me in to ask me not to wash our dirt linen in public. "It can only do harm to Jews when we criticize Israel," he said.

The hardest thing was that relatives and friends expressed pain, and sometimes anger, over what I was doing. One of the guests at a family birthday party said to me in all seriousness, "You are an enemy of the Jews."

My husband and children were shocked by this reaction, but what reassured all of us is that we soon came to know, and work with, a group of Israeli and Palestinian graduate students at Stanford who believed fervently that both peoples could peacefully coexist, as equals, in separate independent states. At the time, this was a daring position for either Israelis or Palestinians to take. The sanity and humaneness of these students reinforced my own belief that a two-state solution was the only way to settle the Middle East conflict and therefore assure Israeli's security.

Despite this intellectual conviction, there were times when the accusations by fellow Jews that I was doing harm to Israel by what I wrote and said made me wonder if perhaps I was a kind of traitor. Then a chance discovery about my grandfather changed everything.

He had come to America just before World War I and died before I was born. All I really knew about him was that my parents and aunts and uncles revered him, that he had founded a Hebrew-language newspaper in New York, and had helped to raise money in America for schools in Palestine. One day while I was browsing in the library, I found his name, Abraham Lubarsky, in the index of a book and learned that he had been an associate of Ahad Ha Am.

Ahad Ha Am (whose real name was Asher Ginzberg) was already a hero of mine. He was one of a small group of Russian Jews called "cultural Zionists" who favored the establishment in Palestine of a homeland for the Jews but believed that they had no right to rule the entire country. The Arab inhabitants, Ahad Ha Am wrote in 1920, "have a tangible right based on generation after generation of life and work in the country. The country is their national home, too, and they too have the right to develop their national potentialities as far as they are able." (Zionism, Gary Smith, ed., Harper & Row, 1974.) My grandfather's entry in Encyclopedia Judaica says that he was "especially close to Ahad Ha-Am, whom he stimulated to write his first famous essay."

The Legacy of Cultural Zionists

It is now too late for the kind of multicultural nation in Palestine that Ahad Ha Am and my grandfather envisioned. But their insight that Arabs and Jews would have to live together as equals in the land of Palestine if there was to be peace between them is as valid today as it ever was. The "cultural Zionists" believed the identity and survival of the Jewish people depended not on wielding power over others but on establishing a community that would preserve and put into practive centuries of Jewish teaching and tradition. Central to the Judaism they valued were the words of Amos: "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream."

If they were alive today, Ahad Ha Am and my grandfather would undoubtedly have felt obliged, as Jews, to speak out against acts of brutality and injustice no matter who committed them. And I think they would have believed, as I do, that today the Jewish people face their greatest danger not from Palestinians seeking self-determination, but from an Israeli government that is making a mockery of Judaism.

Rachelle Marshall is a free-lance writer living in Stanford, CA. She is a member of New Jewish Agenda and writes frequently on the Middle East.