UNMIA

Note: This article is a much expanded version of the first comment on this subject that the UNM Daily Lobo refused to print.

by Lynn Provencio - On Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2007 I went over to Dane Smith Hall at UNM in Albuquerque to hear the presentation of “Three Jerusalem Women Speak”, which was billed as being alternative voices speaking for peace and non-violent solutions to the Israeli-Arab conflict. Actually none of the women was from Jerusalem, but maybe they just didn’t want to reprint their pamphlets.

The “Women Speak” tour is a production of “Partners for Peace“, and is sponsored by UNM (International Studies Institute, Religious Studies, Womens Resource Center, and Women Studies) and the Middle East Peace and Justice Alliance (MEPJA), (which is affiliated with the Albuquerque Peace and Justice Center and the International Solidarity Movement, a part of the International Communist Party).

The guest speakers were:

• Wejdan Jaber: A Muslim Palestinian, Ms. Jaber was awarded a USAID “Clinton Scholarship,” in 2000 and a Master’s in Public Administration and International Management from the Monterey Institute for International Studies, Monterey, California, in 2002. Born in Gaza, she currently lives in the West Bank city of Ramallah and works for the Filastiniyat NGO, which seeks to improve women’s standing in PA society and politics. The organization is not a “peace” organization, being firmly committed to seeing the end of Israel, as is seen in the Arabic portion of the website.

• Abir Kopty: An Israeli Arab Christian who was born in Nazareth, Ms. Kopty was nominated as one of twelve “People of the Year” in Israel in 2005 by Ynet news. She has served as Media Coordinator and Spokeswoman for Mossawa, the Advocacy Center for Arab Citizens in Israel, Haifa, studied in London, and is a part of several left wing Israel-Arab organizations. Ms. Kopty believes in the right of return and that the Palestinian nation encompasses Palestinians living in Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan and other countries. While working for more equality for Arab-Israeli citizens, she is also politically active in “ending the occupation”.

• Hagit Ra’anan: A Jewish Israeli who was born, raised and is currently living in Tel Aviv, Ms. Ra’anan is a member of the Bereaved Families Forum and founder of Bridges of Peace. In the first week of the war in Lebanon in 1982, Ms. Ra’anan’s husband was killed in by Palestinian guerillas outside Beirut, and she miscarried their child. After several years of mourning and depression she decided to try to bring peace between Israelis and Arabs through personal healing and improved personal relationships, especially with children. She sets up programs to put “peace poles” up throughout Israel, and works with several other Jews and Arabs in the Bridges of Peace program, along with the Bereaved Families Forum and working with “Partners for Peace”.

More detail about the speakers is available on the Partners for Peace website.

While I was able to record the introduction and Ms. Ra’anan and Ms. Kopty’s talks, to my regret I missed recording Ms. Jaber’s talk due to a technical glitch. The quality of the video is not the best, and after recording most of the presentation, I was told to stop when the question and answer session started. Despite that, I believe you can get a good idea of the nature of the presentation, and hear for yourself these “alternative voices for peace”.

I found Hagit Ra’anan to be more impressive than I had originally expected. To be honest, I found the idea of solving the Arab-Israeli conflict through school programs, peace poles and mourners’ dialogs to be too “pie in the sky” and thought Ms. Ra’anan would be an air head. Far from it. She was by far the most impressive and real speaker, and I was surprised to find myself thinking of her as a battle weary visionary instead of what I had first imagined.

After Hagit Ra’anan, the next speaker was Abir Kopty, who has been well trained as a spokesperson for the Arab agenda. Ms. Kopty is involved in Israeli Arab advocacy in Israel. Based upon her talk and her website writings it is obvious that while she is concerned about the inequities in Israeli society for Arabs, she is even more concerned with seeing the end of Israel and its replacement as a Palestinian Arab state. Going to her website in Arabic I saw that she frequently waxed poetic on the theme of pan-Arab dominion, the brotherhood of all Palestinians everywhere in the world and their return to “Palestine”, and the anticipated end of Israel. As she said towards the beginning of her talk, she is a Palestinian, not an Israeli, and as she said in concluding her talk, the only way there will be peace is to end the occupation.

In Arab propaganda terms, that translates to the destruction of Israel, since her leaders and associates state directly and often that all of Israel is an occupation. She was saying that the only peace would come through Arab victory. Ms. Kopty may be said to be a peace activist from her Pan-Arab point of view, but certainly she has not worked for an alternative non-violent path for peace.

The last speaker, Wejdan Jaber started out in a likable way talking about her student days at the Monterrey Institute in San Francisco, and the love of students for partying, which drew applause from the students present. She showed pictures from her days at Monterrey, including her “best friend” who was an American Jew who supported the Palestinian cause. It is reassuring to know that some of Ms. Jaber’s best friends are Jewish. She moved from those pleasant times to her long and difficult return flight home, which took seven days because she was not allowed back into Israel. She claims it was because of not having papers, which was probably part of the problem. It may also have had to do with her associations. Obviously she did finally make it back to Gaza. She left Gaza for Ramallah when Hamas came to power in Gaza, since she is not religious and is a follower of Fatah. Ms. Jaber’s talk aroused the most comments because of the amazing claims that she made. Because I did not capture it on film, and because she provided so much material to illustrate basic points, I’ll cover her talk in more depth.

According to Ms. Jaber, Gaza is a prison of 1.8 million people, where millions starve to death every day. Gaza must indeed be a magical place. She described the misery of 1.8 million people being crammed into an area of 139 square miles, having less than $2/day to live on, all because of Israel and the occupation of Gaza. She did not mention the very high birthrate, the corruption and violence of their government and militias and their oppression of Gazans for politics and profit, or the gratuitous attacks by their militias across the border in Israel as contributing factors to their misery. Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza was not mentioned by Ms. Jaber.

Next, Ms. Jaber made the confusing statement that all Gazans were being collectively punished for the action of one man in electing Hamas, and this was against international law. During the question and answer period, one person asked who was the one man that Gaza was being punished for, what was that action that the one man did, and what international law was being broken. Ms. Jaber was not able to answer coherently. Evidently she had learned her script wrong.

Ms. Jaber stated that in Judea and Samaria, the Palestinian police were honest and were effectively protecting citizens and keeping order. She said that there was no need for a fence for Israeli security since there was no threat from Arabs in Samaria and Judea, and there was no need for any IDF presence in Judea or Samaria. She said that the Palestinian police prevent Arab suicide bombers from reaching Israel every day, and are dedicated to protecting both the Arab and Israeli public. She also pointed out that the Palestinian police had recently rescued two IDF soldiers who had wandered into an Arab area by accident. This at last was true, and an admirable act on the part of those PA police. If only it were the norm. Palestinian police have often been the perpetrators of terror, as they have a rotating membership with the Arab militias who are dedicated to trying to destroy Israel. Their units are often used to launder terrorists who need to be “rehabilitated”, and to soak up parts of splinter groups into the larger ranks of the Arab military.

Ms. Jaber’s group in Ramallah, Filastiniyat, attempts to open Palestinian society towards its women and youth, so that they can be involved more in government. The group’s Arabic website points out with pride that Palestinian women have played an active part in the intifadas against Israel. She did not have much to say about their women’s rights efforts, since her focus was in demonizing Israel, not in talking about the systematic cruelty against women and children in Islamic society.

Ms. Jaber did mention that normal people do not encourage their children to become murderers and suicide bombers, and if a society did that, it would be abnormal. It was unclear whether she meant to imply that Palestinian society was abnormal, or whether she meant to imply that it did not produce murderers and suicide bombers. Since she had just acknowledged that Palestinians became suicide bombers and murderers, she would seem to be saying that her society was abnormal, but it is hard to believe that she intended that. Her talk was very strange and illogical for an educated woman.

When asked why Palestinian schools so often encourage jihad and hatred of Jews, Israel and Christians, she said that wasn’t true and the Palestinian schools did not teach that, and that she did not learn such things in her family or school. Evidently she picked up the prejudice and hatred later in life. However, as an educated woman, she would have to be aware of the fact that these things are well and publicly documented from many original sources: from text book examples and children’s TV programming, to the many recordings of Arab children singing songs and screaming poetry about killing Jews. When challenged about this, Ms. Jaber looked around the room and rolled her eyes often. This was evidently the best reply that she could think of.

The question and answer period began with a local “peace and justice” activist relating a story that Arab friends had told him, that the IDF soldiers pooped in their hands and rubbed it on Arab cribs and baby things in Gaza. When Ms. Ra’anan answered that this was either untrue or an isolated instance, and not certainly not the policy of the IDF, another “peace and justice” activist chimed in that she had seen it often. I am surprised that the IDF lets such a person follow them around in so many of their operations.

In fact these stories are told frequently by Arabs to gullible western liberals, who believe them readily when even Israel-unfriendly UN commissions debunk them. The first man lamented, “where did all this hatred come from?” and shouted in a tortured voice that Rachel Corrie had been run over TWICE. This is a gruesome but unsurprising fact, since having run over her, the tractor driver would have to move back off of her in one direction or another. These foolish statements had no bearing on the subject at hand, but were evidently planned in order to arouse disgust at Israel amongst the students.

I myself wondered, as did the first peace and justice questioner, why all the hate? Why have these high class American academics, who have not been harmed by Israel, decided to devote themselves to helping destroy it? Would they have speakers come to try and convince students that Portugal or Saudi Arabia was evil and should be destroyed? Would UNM support such presentations if any other nation or ethnic group was subject of their hate speech?

Ms. Jaber had made a point of emphasizing that the Arabs from Gaza shot thousands of HOMEMADE rockets into Israel in order to be liberated. While on one hand she bragged about the very large number of unanswered rocket attacks on Israel, on the other hand she insisted scornfully that the rockets were “homemade” and did little or no damage, and were caused by the Israeli aggression that sometimes followed their attacks. This is an oft repeated but really nonsensical statement. Is she claiming that her people are stupid and spend alot of effort shooting harmless tubes at Israeli towns? I myself think much better of the Palestinian Arabs than that, and assume there is certainly a logical reason for this action, and that they choose their weapons because they are the most cost effective for their stated purpose.

I pointed out that the “homemade rockets that did no harm”, which Ms. Jaber had emphasized actually had caused many casualties and a large amount of property damage. The bomb that destroyed the courthouse in Oklahoma city was also homemade. Homemade and harmless are not synonyms. Ms. Jaber backtracked slightly at this and admitted that the rockets had “killed somebody”, for which she expressed a mechanical regret, but not in the last month. I asked the whole panel why the Arabs in Gaza continue to attack Israel, and got no response.

The meeting ended with thank-yous and polite applause all around. What a shame, that UNM would condone and even sponsor such an extremely dishonest and biased presentation and present it as a “peace” effort, and even bribe students to attend by offering credits for it. There can be neither peace nor education without honesty.

I wonder seriously if some administrators have decided that open ethnic bias against Israel is one of the values of a “flagship” university, and if they don’t care that they are doing a disservice to their student clients by presenting lies and propaganda as authoritative truth.

Do the regents think sponsoring one sided litanies of ethnic hatred in public university classes is an appropriate use of public funds?

Will these enlightened and even-handed professors ever bring over Israelis in the “Land of Israel” movement to tell their side so that students may hear all sides of the story and be able to use critical thinking and analysis to have informed opinions? In spite of many appearances by Arab propagandists, to my knowledge nothing along this line has been done at UNM. The point is evidently to propagandize students to a political agenda, not to educate them.