Amnesty Int’l Official Censors Himself in Talk on Israeli Abuses (Then Offers Great Lesson)

As indicated below, last Sunday I went to the Church of the Messiah, the Episcopalian Church in Woods Hole, MA, to hear Joshua Rubenstein of Amnesty International. Rubenstein had been invited by a local study group on Middle East issues that offers a few events each summer, all in the wake of 9/11. Glory be to God.

Rubenstein's subject was “Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.” Wow, I thought; a speaker with utter authority—Amnesty International, which works with the amazing B’tselem—is coming to this scientific community with tons of smart Jews to detail the moral red lines that the Israelis have crossed again and again in the name of security.

Disappointment.

It was a paltry crowd, I’d say 40 people, and most of them had the look of parishioners, i.e. gentiles who are steeped in this stuff. They've read Jimmy Carter's book, they were coming to learn more. The local Zionists hadn't shown up, nor the scientific Jews.

Worse, Rubenstein didn’t speak on point. He spent only a few minutes on his professed subject, offering the usual dry summary of how long the fence is, how it goes inside the green line, how many settlers there are, and how the checkpoints are intended to disrupt Palestinian life. To his great credit, he told one horrifying story, about Khaled Daud Faqih, a Palestinian baby who died in March at midnight at a checkpoint inside the West Bank, when his family were just trying to get the infant, who had suffered a seizure, from the village to a hospital in Ramallah. Soldiers stopped the car for an hour because of a bureaucratic insanity, papers. I don't think Rubenstein even mentioned his name, though. And that, alas, was the whole life of the talk: One bloodcurdling incident, wrapped in an hour of Context.

Let us have Context!! What is Context? The rubber padding that will allow people to consider Israeli abuses for just one second. The Context that the New York Theatre Workshop was demanding before it would put on the Rachel Corrie play. So Rubenstein’s main business was a tortured explanation of why Amnesty International even examines Israel. Showing that Amnesty looks at the Palestinian abuses too, that it decried suicide bombing in a report issued in Gaza. And so no one would accuse Amnesty of singling Israel out, he spoke of how many hundreds of reports Amnesty has done, including the former Soviet Union, South Africa, etc.

We should call this sort of Context what it is: self-censorship. In the South Africa case, in the Soviet Union case, you would go to an Amnesty speech and get a litany of abuses. You'd walk away trembling. Rubenstein was holding back on such a performance out of deference to Jews in the audience who might be offended. Why not have it out? Why not have free speech?

As it turns out, there was an angry Jew in the crowd. A Zionist guy stood up at the end to question Rubenstein about Where is the Palestinian peace movement? and Rubenstein answered his question but the moderator didn’t let the guy have a followup. Screw that. The whole lecture was aimed at that fervent guy; I thought he should have been given all the airtime he wanted, and let the parishioners hear him out.

Having blasted Rubenstein, I must add that I got a lot out of his speech. On two points. At the end of the speech, the Episcopalian minister (I believe Deborah Warner) said, “How do you maintain hope?” Rubenstein said that his long career has been full of surprises: that South Africa moved, that the wall fell in Eastern Europe when no one in his right mind thought that would happen, that the two sides in Northern Ireland are reconciled even if they won’t shake hands, and that South America used to be a cone of violence, disappearances and torture, and now it isn’t. He saw that; he believes it can happen here. Imshallah.

The second great point Rubenstein made was about universalism. He said that without a resolution of the human rights issues, peace cannot be achieved, and the only way that can happen is through dialogue. The French and Germans killed more of each other than any two countries on earth and who worries about separating them today. They were reconciled through talking. Then he said, “I am frustrated that so much of the debate [here] goes on between Israeli Jews and other Jews.”

In one sense, Rubenstein was talking about the breakdown of communication between Palestinians and Israelis, but what I took away was that Jews like to think of this as an inter-Jewish discussion. It is the criticism I made of the otherwise impressive piece on Avrum Burg in the New Yorker: Jews feel this is a conversation among Jews. Rubenstein, a Jew who lived in Jerusalem in the 70s, was striking a blow against particularism. He was saying that others have the right to judge this situation. He was offering the Jewish community a basic universalist lesson: you should see Israel as others see it. Too bad so few of us were there….