Last night I heard Palestinian doctor Izzeldin Abuelaish speak at the Cooper Union in New York, in a conversation with Christiane Amanpour, an event that was canceled at the 92d Street Y uptown because the Jewish writer the organization had lined up to counter or balance or provide context (you give me the euphemism) to the doctor had dropped out of the event.
I had two strong impressions: 1, the Jewish community is in really pathetic shape if this is the sort of Palestinian it is censoring, and 2, Christiane Amanpour completely embraces the Israeli narrative of the peace process and the Gaza conflict.
1. Abuelaish lost three children to an Israeli attack on his home in the Gaza conflict of 2008-2009. Because he was a popular doctor at a hospital in Israel, his story became widely known, and he has now published a book. I Shall Not Hate. The doctor is a very resilient individual. He was raised in a refugee camp, the son of victims of the Nakba. I believe Ariel Sharon now claims his ancestral lands. Still he determined as a boy to succeed and he has. And in that tough indomitable spirit, he declares that he doesn’t hate the army that killed his children and that his remaining five children also do not hate. All they want is to succeed, he said. They are now in Canada. I am not persuaded that all of his children have forgiven Israel. The doctor is a tough nut. Later when I asked him about the Goldstone Report’s demand for accountability for attacks on civilians, he got impatient with me and said that we must move on, we must move on. He does not seek war crimes prosecutions in his family’s case. I find myself deeply moved by Abuelaish’s story, even as I find his emotional and political lessons unpersuasive. As an older Jewish gentleman commented to him after, The people you choose to forgive are only there because they can’t forgive what was done to them 3000 years ago, when they were turned out.
So, my point: If this is the sort of Palestinian that the liberal New York Jewish community can only hear if his story is counterbalanced by the daughter of a Jewish victim of a terrorist attack 25 years ago, well we are in deep deep trouble. And we are in deep trouble. This sort of ethnocentric blindness is why Jim Crow flourishes in the land we embrace as a democratic miracle and a deliverance.
2. Amanpour said that the Palestinian Authority “has also not missed the opportunity to miss an opportunity” in the peace process. “Some of the most extraordinary things have been offered,” she said, first by former Prime Minister Ehud Barak in 2000 and more recently, what we have heard about what former P.M. Ehud Olmert offered. The Palestinian leadership, she said, has not prepared its people for the “tough compromises,” it has failed to step up and tell the people about the “hard, hard things” that await them under a deal. The right of return, she said, will never take place for all the Palestinian refugees.
I found this lecture extraordinary (from a public figure who wanted to be photographed at the podium Abraham Lincoln had used in 1860 during his presidential run). Amanpour showed no awareness of Israel’s failure to respond to the P.A.’s haplessly generous offers, as reflected in the Palestine Papers, and its insistence on holding lands deep in the West Bank. The Palestine Papers show that the P.A. was more than willing to compromise. She said nothing about the ongoing settlement project and Obama’s inability to stop Israel. She said nothing about the Goldstone Report and its effort to bring accountability for the atrocities of ’08-’09– even as she lauded the onset of “accountability” of leaders in the Arab world, thanks to the revolutions.
I realized later that Amanpour, whose bling momentarily blinded me when her watchface turned to catch a stagelight, operates in the Establishment American bubble. When you live there you inhale such gases as, The two state solution is still a live option, it can deliver a viable Palestinian state, and Obama can bring it off, and Israel did nothiing wrong in Gaza. If you want to be a player in Washington, you have to inhale these gases, and Amanpour does. Before long we will burst the bubble and people even in Washington will have to accept the reality, of Jim Crow and half the population denied rights on a racial basis, and the entire territory under Israeli control; but I fear that breaking the bubble will take the kind of strenuous effort that Lincoln needed to break the slave power.
