The world is changing. Yesterday, when most people were focused on Obama, Michael Ratner (who works at the Center for Constitutional Rights and pressed the lawsuit against Caterpillar springing from the killing of Rachel Corrie in Gaza in 2003) was thinking about Gaza. And in the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr.'s opposition to the Vietnam War–at a time when King couldn't really afford to spend political capital on other causes–Ratner realized that American Jews can no longer claim a
separation between their opposition to civil and human rights abuses
here (or in Darfur or Central America) and their support for Israel's
treatment of Palestine.
Then he told this story about the late great painter Leon Golub on his blog [emphasis Phil Weiss's]:
brings me to Gaza and the role of American Jews and, in fact, of almost all
Americans. For too long, and I do not exempt myself, most of us have
stood silently by or made only a marginal protests about the massive
violations of Palestinian rights carried out by Israel. I
recall a conversation I had some years ago with the political artist
Leon Golub, famous for his outsized oil paintings of torture carried
out by American mercenaries in Central America.
[like The Interrogation, left] Leon told me that he
had been invited to attend a panel to address what it meant to be a
Jewish political artist. He said he had never thought of himself as a
“Jewish political artist” but only as a “political artist.” Then
he thought some more. Of the works of art he had made, none concerned
Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. And then he knew, at least for
himself and probably many others: to be a “Jewish political artist” was
to be an artist who avoided depicting the horrors inflicted on
Palestinians. Of course, that is true for more than just artists. Many
Jews who are very involved in human rights, ending poverty and war, and
fighting for the underdog avoid criticism of Israel. They wrongly think
that human rights are divisible; or that like ostriches they can hide
their heads and pretend not to see what is clearly staring them in the
face and makes them uncomfortable: the inhuman treatment of
Palestinians.
