[Peace-discuss] Articles by Emily Hauser

[David Green]

Emily Hauser will be speaking twice to the general
public this Sunday, February 16th: at Channing-Murray
Foundation at noon and the Urbana IMC at 4. Following
are some articles which will inform you of her general
perspectives on the Middle East conflict.

"WITH A BROKEN HEART”

After decades of failed peacemaking attempts, it's
apparent the only solution is 2 states-- Israel and
Palestine"

By Emily L. Hauser. Emily L. Hauser lives in Oak Park
and has written about the Middle East for much of the
last decade.

Published June 25, 2002

I have a seemingly unending supply of tears inside me
now. My 3-year-old can tell I'm crying even in the
dark. When I stop, he says "Mommy, do you feel
better?" And I lie and say yes, because he's my baby.
But for once in my life, no amount of crying helps.

I'm an American-Israeli Jew. I grew up in Lake Bluff
but later moved to Tel Aviv, where I went to school,
became a reporter, became a citizen, built a life. My
Israeli-born husband and I came to this area so that I
could get my master's degree at the University of
Chicago, but we'll be going back home in two or three
years.

Of course, right now our home is in turmoil, an uproar
of fear and loathing. Family and friends alike, on
both sides of the ocean and with varying degrees of
panic, tell us we'd be crazy to return. What they
don't understand is that we have to. All that we once
loved about our country is going up in flames, and we
have no choice but to go back and try to make it
right.

I am told, by the Israeli government, the American
government (executive and legislative branches),
Israeli public opinion and world Jewry that loving
Israel today means not questioning its government's
actions. Means believing that an indiscriminate war of
attrition against a weakened and demoralized civilian
population is the right answer, the only answer, to
Palestinian terrorism. I cannot believe it.

I cannot believe that my love for Israel can only be
expressed by ignoring international law, universal
ethical norms and Palestinian humanity.

I cannot believe that driving tanks through people's
yards, imprisoning them in their homes, killing their
12-year-olds and their 2-year-olds, will do anything
but deepen their already bottomless desperation,
justify their hatred, spur them to greater violence.
(Would we be any different?)

People tell me that we have no other option, that we
tried--the Oslo accords were just, Ehud Barak made a
generous offer at Camp David--but that for the
Palestinians it still wasn't enough, and they
responded by blowing themselves up, to kill us.

But the people who believe that the Oslo accords and
Barak's offer were good for the Palestinians have
allowed themselves to be duped. In spite of Oslo's
promise, in its wake (and in no small part because of
official Palestinian corruption) Palestinians found it
harder to make a living, send their kids to school,
live a life of dignity, than they had before. And they
were still under occupation, whether admitted or de
facto. Barak's "generosity" would have left the
Palestinians with Gaza and part of the West Bank - the
information available to well-informed sources
indicates as much as just over 90%, to less than 65% -
to be split three ways, by slivers of land under
Israeli sovereignty, and surrounded by areas under
Israeli sovereignty, either permanently or
"indefinitely." Generous - or humiliating?.

None of this excuses terrorism. I'm devastated each
time my countrymen are killed, sickened by the
calculation that adds nails to explosives to maximize
casualties, and deeply, deeply horrified by the very
notion that a person would allow his or her flesh to
be shredded and splattered, to kill me, my son. We,
too, have lost our 12-year-olds and our 2-year-olds.

W.H. Auden once wrote that "those to whom evil is done
do evil in return." That's what we are doing, all of
us, returning evil because evil has been done to us.
All of us. The difference is that on my side, we have
combat helicopters.

The ratio of Palestinians to Israelis killed during
this intifada is about 3 to 1--not surprisingly, dying
in greater numbers has not encouraged the Palestinians
to lay down their arms.

I say these things, and know that I've put myself
beyond the pale. That I'll get threatening phone calls
(as I did after writing a letter to this paper in
April), that people will stop talking to me (as some
of my Israeli friends already have). I feel alone and
drifting, unwelcome at home or in my faith community,
unsure of how, even, to breathe some days, for the
sheer horror of it all.

But all of that is nothing, my tears are nothing, my
sense of despair is nothing, in light of the war being
waged by my government against the Palestinians.

It's a luxury to indulge my anguish--there's no time.
The only answer is to fight for a just solution: two
states, each with a viable government, infrastructure
and culture. Each equal before the other, each
populated by citizens who are no longer frightened for
their lives.

It's the only answer.

The Bible tells us we were all created in God's image,
and that God prefers justice to sacrifice. "Seek peace
and pursue it," it says in the Psalms. In great
sorrow, with a heavy, broken heart, it's all I can do.


Copyright © 2002, Chicago Tribune


"TOO MANY KIDS CAUGHT IN THE CROSS-FIRE"

By Emily L. Hauser. Emily L. Hauser is an
American-Israeli. She reported on Israel and the
Palestinian Authority from 1991 to 1998

Published August 4, 2002

Look at a child you love. Touch his hair, her skin.
Look into those eyes, those bottomless eyes, those
eyes that radiate more light than the sun and the moon
and all the stars. Then imagine, for a split second,
if your mind will allow in even that much horror,
imagine that girl, that boy, dead. Killed in your
arms, next to you, holding your hand.

I don't know how parents survive. I don't know how
their lungs continue to function, their blood to flow,
their legs to propel them forward. But the highly
regarded Israeli human rights organization, B'Tselem,
reports that, in the past 22 months, the mothers and
fathers of about 125 Palestinian kids age 14 and
younger and 35 Israeli children of the same age have
had to learn how to go on.

I'm an American-Israeli in a constant state of despair
over the war Israel is waging against the Palestinian
people. I'm never more horrified than when the victims
of our vastly superior military force--whether through
intent or negligence, it just doesn't matter--are
children.

Earlier this summer, Randa al-Hindi was riding in a
taxi with three of her children; at a roadblock
outside Gaza City, Israeli soldiers in an armored
carrier thought they saw "suspicious" figures in the
car. Rather than shoot out its tires, demand that the
riders disembark, take a closer look, anything, they
fired into the cab, killing Randa and Anwar, her
2-year-old daughter.

One Friday in May, 7-year-old Amid Abd Alsamad abu
Sief was on his way to the mosque with his father.
Friday prayers are the high point of the Muslim week,
so he was, no doubt, well-scrubbed and wearing his
best clothes; I picture him running to keep up with
his dad. He was shot dead by Israeli soldiers. His
father was critically wounded.

Perhaps the most infamous example is this: 12-year-old
Mohammed Aldura, shot dead in September 2000, as his
unarmed father, waving frantically and shouting "Don't
shoot!" tried to shield him with his own body, as
soldiers fired round after round after round. For 45
minutes.

There are, of course, devastating cases of the murder
of Israeli children: suicide bombings at
establishments frequented by teenagers, on public
buses, at an ice cream parlor. Thoughts of the
Palestinian sniper who shot 10-month-old Shalhevet
Pass, in the head, in her father's arms, still leave
me breathless.

It is easy to understand when the parents of murdered
children lose their minds in grief and turn with
ravenous anger on those responsible. The almost
incomprehensible thing is when they do not.

Five years ago, Israeli Smadar Elhanan was killed by a
Palestinian suicide bomber while shopping for school
books. She was 14. Today, on the door to her parents'
Jerusalem apartment there is a bumper sticker that
reads "Free Palestine."

Smadar's father, Rami, recently told the London Mirror
that the blame for his daughter's death rests squarely
on the shoulders of Israel's government.

"Our daughter was killed because of the terror of
Israeli occupation," he said. "Every innocent victim
from both sides is a victim of the occupation."

Rami's father survived the Holocaust; his grandfather,
aunts and uncles all perished. He and his wife
responded to their own tragedy by joining the parents
of a Palestinian boy killed by Israeli soldiers,
forming a group called the Bereaved Family Forum. If
there is a more godly response to a history of hatred
and death, I don't know it.

The heart's immediate response to these stories is to
cry out for an end to the violence. It is, however,
easier to demand that the killing end than to stop it.
Not because people are animals, but because people are
people. Because life is made up of infinitely more
than just being alive.

This is what the occupation means: Malnourishment
among Palestinian children is on the rise, a result of
the curfews Israel has imposed on the towns and
villages it has seized; as of April, Israel had
demolished more than 225 homes since the outbreak of
the intifada; in the last quarter of 2001,
unemployment among 20- to 24-year-olds in the Gaza
Strip stood at 45 percent, in no small part because
most are no longer allowed to seek work inside Israel;
Palestinian ambulances are regularly kept from
reaching people wounded in Israeli actions, while the
sick or injured or pregnant are frequently detained
for hours on end at Israeli roadblocks while on their
way to the hospital.

It is, to my mind, a wonder that anyone growing up
under these circumstances is able to find any hope at
all. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak once
said that if he had grown up in a Palestinian refugee
camp, he too would be wearing a mask and fighting the
occupation.

Though its leaders and people are loath to admit it,
Israel is the one with the power to put a stop to
bullets piercing little girls' skulls or bombs ripping
through little boys' limbs. It is true that withdrawal
from the territories will not put an immediate halt to
the violence or, of course, the hatred, particularly
not if the terms are, as in the Oslo accords, patently
unbalanced in Israel's favor. That is the excruciating
price we will have to pay for subjugating another
people for 35 long, brutal years.

Ending the occupation is, however, the only place we
can start.

I am stupefied by the fact that I don't hear more
Israelis wondering why a person would tape explosives
to their skin and blow themselves to smithereens. Why
are so few discussing the fact that, since this
intifada began, for all our pain and despair over our
own dead children, more than 3 1/2 times as many
Palestinian boys and girls have been killed in a
population less than half the size of Israel's?

And why do we not consider the fact that the vast
majority of those blowing themselves up are hardly
more than children themselves?

Copyright © 2002, Chicago Tribune


"WASHED IN THE BLOOD OF THE LAMB, ETC."
Emily L. Hauser
(a slightly shorter version of this essay appeared in
the Chicago Tribune on November 17, 2002)

Those of us for whom the struggle for peace and
justice is a spiritual act often quote our Scriptures
to validate our efforts. We talk about "true" Judaism,
Christianity or Islam, and decry the ways in which our
religions have been distorted. We adorn our walls and
(in my case) bulletin boards with beautiful quotes,
words we believe God gave to humanity: "Seek peace and
pursue it," says Psalms. "Do unto others as you would
have others do unto you," Jesus exhorts his followers.
"Those who keep from evil will dwell amid gardens," we
read in the Qur'an, "in their wealth, the beggar and
outcast had due share." God, we say, is all about
peace and justice.

What, then, are we to do about the other words in our
Books, words we often choose not to discuss?

"As for those peoples that warred against Jerusalem,"
reads Zechariah 14:12, "their flesh shall rot away
while they stand on their feet." Or this passage from
John, where Jesus talks to "the Jews": "You belong to
your father, the devil .. The reason you do not hear
[God] is because you do not belong to God." In the
fifth chapter of the Qur'an: "the only reward of those
who make war upon Allah and His messenger. will be
that they will be killed or crucified, or have their
hands and feet on alternate sides cut off . in the
Hereafter theirs will be an awful doom."

Usually, people like me ignore these passages. We push
them aside, or counter with quotes we like better.
When we do this, though, we are lying.

An individual's understanding of the Creator comes
from life experience; so it is with communities. Each
of the world's religions - monotheist, polytheist,
animist, druid - came into being in the framework of a
particular culture. Many arose in response to
perceived failures of another faith. Some focussed on
establishing a discrete community on this earth;
others sought to transcend the earth; many juggled
both colossal tasks. There were political struggles
and bloody battles to fight, slights to overcome, the
weak-willed to encourage, traditions to establish and
pass on.

The faithful had to find ways to contend with and
understand slaughter, drought and bounty, and could
only do so with the tools at their disposal. We can
only be the people, the communities, we are. So, the
Israelites institutionalized slavery. St. Paul made
wives subordinate to husbands. The Qur'an recommends
amputation for thieves. We can look it up chapter and
verse - it's really there, in all its sordid glory,
flesh rotting, Jews being of the devil, infidels
crucified.

This issue came home to me in a most personal way
recently. Born a Protestant, I moved to Israel as an
adult and decided about 13 years ago to convert to
Judaism. Temporarily back in Chicago, I decided, for
reasons best described as unclear, to become Bat
Mitzvah this past September, at 38. The scriptural
portion I was assigned was Zechariah 14, and I found
myself learning to chant the very verse quoted above -
and as a fluent Hebrew speaker, I understood every
word. My portion covered the whole chapter, so I had
also to contend with pack animals dropping dead and
plunder being snatched. These verses almost literally
stuck in my craw. I found they took me days to learn,
and I would often stumble, forget the tune, as I came
up against them in practice. The music was lovely; the
words horrific.

I found comfort in Zechariah 14:9, a reference to the
messianic age: "And on that day, the Lord will be One
and his Name One." That, I said, is what matters to me
- the notion that we will one day grow beyond our
differences and worship at the same altar. This other
stuff, this war stuff - I'll learn it and move on.

But I couldn't, if for no other reason than that I
sang the words in practice every day, for months.
Terrible images of war and retribution, and a bitter,
vengeful God, over and over again. I found I couldn't
deny that these ideas are also part of my heritage, as
legitimate as the soul-stirring ideas which guide and
comfort me - undeniably, incontrovertibly, there.

And then it came to me - and as a person of faith, I
do believe that this was a blessing, not something
from my own limited wisdom - that "as legitimate"
doesn't mean "decisive."

The prophet who set down those words was writing from
within the midst of a broken, vanquished people, a
people which had in recent memory seen battles as
horrific as those he described. They were living under
the control of what could only have seemed an
unfightable Persian Empire, and any real, substantive
changes must have appeared impossible, requiring at
the very least a Divine restructuring of the world.

But: In spite of all the horrors they thought
inevitable, the prophet and his people were able to
envision something more, something beyond the brutish
existence they knew. "And on that day, the Lord will
be One." We learn at the end of the chapter that the
time will come when all the peoples of the world will
come to Jerusalem to worship - not as Jews, but as who
they are. Not defeated people offering tribute, but
God's children, offering praise.

I would submit that our challenge today is this: to
deny nothing in our Scriptures, but rather to learn
from them how to acknowledge the times in which we
live, and transcend them. If we aren't honest about
reality - either canonical or current - we will not be
able to transform it.

For me, an Israeli Jew who longs for an end to our war
with the Palestinians, I believe this means that I
must pray for the wisdom to see the evil done on both
sides - and then look past it. To fight for real
justice, a solution that acknowledges the suffering
and supports the dignity of Palestinian and Israeli
alike. To do any less would be an affront to God.

"He has told you," we read in Micah, "what is good and
what the Lord requires. only to do justice and to love
goodness and to walk modestly with your God." I can
only pray for the strength to try.


Emily Hauser, Israeli-American writer: