Slowly, step-by-step, the movement supporting justice for the Palestinian people has been growing in the United States, despite the overwhelming support for Israel by the U.S. government and both ruling parties.
One indication of this movement was evident at a Nov. 10 public meeting at the State University of New York in New Paltz when an audience of 145 people, almost half students, listened to “the Palestinian side of the story.”
“The great majority of Americans have been exposed only to the official views of Israel and the United States, and not to the views of the Palestinian people,” said Donna Goodman, the MC and main organizer of the event. “Tonight’s meeting is intended to correct this imbalance.”
Nine speakers did so by discussing various aspects of the different points of contention between Israel and its U.S. patron on one side and the Palestinian people on the other.
The meeting was co-sponsored by the Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter and Peace and Social Progress Now, both associated with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, New Paltz, and the regional group Middle East Crisis Response, an organization in solidarity with the Palestinians. The campus sponsor was the Muslim Students Association. A dozen local groups endorsed the meeting plus two national peace organizations, the ANSWER Coalition (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) and United National Antiwar Committee.
Two speakers in particular, Lillian Rosengarten, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who was the only American on the recent Jewish Boat to Gaza, and Faris Giacaman, a young Palestinian student at Bard College, symbolized the breadth and the unity of the meeting.
Referring to the assumption that Israeli policy toward the Palestinians is “being carried out in the name of all Jews,” Rosengarten strongly intoned: “This is a lie. No! Not in my name. Never will I support apartheid, racism and ethnic cleansing. Israel’s policies come with the highest price of suffering.”
Giacaman was critical of the notion that Israelis and Palestinians should engage in a “dialogue” about their differences to achieve peace, stating this “completely ignores the historical context of the situation in Palestine … [between] the colonizer and the colonized, the oppressor and the oppressed. … Whenever there’s a polarization on a given issue, there’s always this unhappy tendency to assume that the truth lies somewhere in the middle between both narratives. But in cases of oppression, it simply doesn’t.”
Other speakers included Jack A. Smith, editor of the Activist Newsletter and co-chair with Goodman of Peace and Social Progress Now; Joel Kovel, the professor, activist and author of “Overcoming Zionism,” among other books; Palestinian American Nada Khader, director of the WESPAC foundation and a former UN Gaza consultant; Mariam Haris, a Muslim student studying at SUNY New Paltz; Jane Toby, SUNY NP teacher and recorder of Palestinian women’s histories; Hannah Schwarzchild of Philadelphia, a member of American Jews for a Just Peace; and Paul Rehm, a Christian pacifist who was part of a recent peace mission to the West Bank.
Smith discussed the broad aspects of the Middle East situation, stating: “The U.S. is Israel’s political, military and economic protector, and Israel functions as Washington’s pro-Western, nuclear-armed military surrogate in the region, but there’s a contradiction in this relationship. America’s drive for regional domination is increasingly compromised by Israel’s long subjugation of the Palestinian people. Washington seeks the creation of a weak and subordinate Palestinian state, legally independent of Israel, that will no longer be a detriment to U.S. geostrategic ambitions.”
