I read with consternation the February 26th “Wespeak” about the experience of a student who sought to enact a “blockade” at Usdan to commemorate the shutting down of a street in Hevron, Israel. Passionate concern with social justice cannot be an excuse for misrepresenting the facts of history. Commemoration is most meaningful when the past that we call to mind is rooted in truth, not prejudice.
To call Israel an “apartheid” state is obscenely false. It is a lie predicated on ignoring the fact that the one and only democracy in the Middle East survives daily through a delicate, heart-wrenching and life-threatening balance between the state’s responsibility to protect the lives of its citizens and a genuinely humanist commitment to protect the rights of Palestinian dissenters. In Hevron, where Jewish children have been murdered in cold blood on the playground, the closing down of a street for one part of one day is not “apartheid”—but a sign of just how tough it is to survive with integrity—or, to put it simply, survive at all—as Jews in a sea of sworn enemies.
The day that pro-Palestinian activists can acknowledge Israel’s right to exist as well as her long standing dedication to the civil rights of those who seek to live in peace—history can appear less masked at Wesleyan and beyond.
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