An open letter to Senator Kamala Harris of California:
Dear Senator Harris,
I am an 81-year old resident of Alameda County and I have lived here for 19 years. I grew up in the U.S. northeast and in France, and I have also lived in Scotland and Israel. I am Jewish and I am a committed Palestinian solidarity activist.
It therefore pains me to know that you have been drinking the pro-Israel Kool-Aid. With your international background – not to mention your law degree (I come from a family of lawyers) – I would have thought that you might have understood the brutal reality that is today’s Israel. Your pandering March 28, 2017 speech in front of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) was a disgrace which only reflected and highlighted your ignorance and your willful blindness to the brutal and grotesque reality that is today’s State of Israel. Unfortunately, your recent 2018 remarks to AIPAC have not yet been made public.
I had so hoped that you would be a California politician whom I could support, of whom I could be proud. It seems, though, that you have chosen to pander to moneyed Zionist interests. Your support for Israel is the diametric opposite of a path to peace in the Middle East. I am so sorry that you are not the politician that I was hoping you’d be.
If you should ever wish to become informed about the “real Israel”, there are easy ways to do this: read Jewish-Israeli historian Ilan Pappé; read Jewish Israeli-American author and activist Miko Peled; read Jewish-Israeli Ha’aretz journalists Amira Hass and Gideon Levy. And please do read Jewish-American writer and analyst Max Blumenthal. I particularly recommend Blumenthal’s 2013 best-seller Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, which is a real page turner; the book is an easy read, with some of the chapters only two to three pages long.
Senator Harris, not only have I lived in Israel, I have hundreds of family members there, most of them descended from German-Jewish immigrants to Palestine in the early 1930s. I am in touch with many of them, and I am also in touch with many Jewish-Israeli friends who still live in Israel. I know whereof I speak.
I should also mention that three of my Jewish-Israeli family members (including a 9-year-old boy) were killed in the West Bank in July 2002; they were shot at point-blank range by, presumably, Palestinian snipers while they were traveling by automobile to a friend’s home for Shabbat. So I am not untouched by the violence afflicting Israel-Palestine.
Unfortunately, Israel is not the wonderful sanctuary for Jews that most of us were told that it was. The Jews did not make the desert bloom because the desert was already blooming as a result of the efforts of Palestinian farmers. Palestine was not a land without people for a people without a land. (Read Walid Khalidi’s 1984 Before Their Diaspora: A Photographic History of the Palestinians, 1876–1948.) The Zionist effort was and is a project built on murder and ethnic cleansing. Please do not add your support to such criminality.
With every good wish,
Alice Diane Kisch
Emeryville, California
(This post first appeared on Facebook and Kisch gave us permission to republish it. –Ed.)
My respect to you, Ms. Kisch. May your appeal to Ms. Harris not fall on deaf ears.
ALICE DIANE KISCH- “I had so hoped that you would be a California politician whom I could support, of whom I could be proud.”
Now who has been drinking kool-aid? Zionist Jews effectively own the Democratic Party. You simply cannot run for anything significant as a Democrat without pledging your fealty to Israel. Period. That will not soon change. For those who may have missed it, I once again quote and link to an article telling about how Tom Hayden had to declare his loyalty to Israel to even run as a Democrat for the California State Assembly.
“In fact, Hayden had to, in his words, be “declared ‘kosher’ by the ultimate source, the region’s representative of the state of Israel,” Benjamin Navon, Israel’s Counsul-general in Los Angeles.
In other words, in this article Hayden was describing, in an unusually concrete way, how the state of Israel, through its state officials and their compliant American partners, was effectively managing—exercising veto power over Democratic Party candidates, at the very least—American elections down to the level of State Assembly. In any constituency “attuned to the question of Israel, even in local and state elections,” Hayden knew he “had to be certified ‘kosher,’ not once but over and over again.” (Jim Kavanagh) http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/10/27/tom-haydens-haunting/
Thank you Ms. Kisch for writing and Mondoweiss for publishing the letter.
@- Keith – Frankly, I don’t think it is helpful to accuse people who write such letters of “drinking cool-aid.” This was an open letter posted on FB, and clearly meant to influence more people than Kamala Harris. Are there any people who read Mondoweiss that do not understand that the vast majority of Democratic politicians are in the Zionist Lobby’s pockets? I see no need to reiterate the obvious. Letters and other protests put politicians under pressure to change their views and what we need is more rather than less resistance to business as usual.
Alice! it’s been such a long time, great to hear your voice. i sincerely had no idea you were now 81, you always seemed so young to me. thanks for all your awesome activism over the years. sending my love and hope you get this message.
Slightly off topic. New from Zioland that Ahed Tamimi has allegedly accepted a “plea bargained” 8 month sentence NB by a military court in “non-occupied” Palestine for the horrific offence of slapping and kicking a foreign soldier who had illegally entered her family`s property. Yet to be confirmed as is the rumour that the Gruppenfuhrer “Judge” as part of the plea bargain dropped the charge of looking at the ZioStormtrooper “in a funny life threatening way”.
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/palestinian-teen-ahed-tamimi-reaches-plea-bargain-to-serve-8-months-i-1.5933423
Same” judge” who insisted that the trial should not be heard in public so as to protect her as a minor. Bless his cuddly little Zionist soul.
Of course the Zios think that this will divert the international spotlight away from Tamimi because fundamentally the majority of them are clueless fanatics either declared or still in the closet.
So lets at least try to give give them a clue. The brave heroic magnificent IDF “medic” Elor Azaria is due to walk free in May after serving less than two thirds of his 14 months sentence for coldly and casually putting a bullet in the head of a defenceless and unarmed Palestinian – you know following his Zio medical training on protecting and saving lives etc. At the same time an 18 year old girl will go to prison (ZioFascist” standard ) for the horrendous crime of yet again victimising a poor Jewish Israeli by slapping and kicking him to try and force him out of her family`s property when she was 16 yrs old and so dangerously life threatening.
Every single day that Ahed serves in prison is one further nail in Zioland`s coffin.