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WHAT STRANGERS? WHAT GATES?: Review

New York Times, 1986

Copyright New York Times Company Sep 28, 1986 ;ISSN: 0362-4331 ;CODEN: NYTIAO

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  • Title:
    WHAT STRANGERS? WHAT GATES?: Review
  • Author: 1880's., Ronald Sanders ; Ronald Sanders, author of ''The High Walls of Jerusalem,'' a history of the Balfour Declaration, is writing a history of Jewish emigration from Central and Eastern Europe since the
  • Subjects: SANDERS, RONALD ; Shipler, David K
  • Is Part Of: New York Times, 1986
  • Description: ''I personally feel,'' a woman named Deborah Reich tells the author, ''that the major psychological mechanism operating on both the Jewish and Arab sides for the past several decades now has been denial. Golda [ [Meir Kahane] ] said there is no Palestinian people; Arafat said the Jews are just a religious group. You're going to tell me who I am? That's what they do, on both sides. It really is two legitimate claims to the same square inch of turf.'' Now this is familiar stuff; but what makes it fresh is that it is coming from the mouth of a young American Jew working in Israel in a program to promote Arab-Jewish cooperation, and doing so in a mood reminiscent of that of the old pioneers. ''I think,'' she says, ''that bi-cultural cooperation is more beautiful than a people who has been dispossessed for two thousand years having its own state. It's not that that dream isn't beautiful, but this dream is even more beautiful.'' I was even inspired to come up with an American illustration of my own when, at one point, Mr. [David K. Shipler] extended his moral disapproval to the many Jews who were reluctant to take their medical problems to Arab clinics and hospitals during a strike by Israeli doctors in March 1983. I remember several years ago meeting an American Christian woman living in Jerusalem, where her husband had been brought by his career, who had strong pro-Arab sympathies and was testy regarding the Jews, but who admitted that she had gone to the Hadassah hospital to give birth to both of her children. Has the day come yet when the choice of an Arab or a Jewish hospital in such circumstances would be a matter of indifference to a person of Western culture? When it does, then perhaps some of the other quasi-American prejudices noted among Israelis by Mr. Shipler may also disappear. BUT this too is a family quarrel. For it is noteworthy how often the moral criteria to which Mr. Shipler resorts, as a gentile American of conscience, are the same as those that would be applied by any Jew of conscience, American, Israeli or other, however varying their conclusions might be. These above all include criteria deriving from that ultimate reference point for the moral history of our time, the Holocaust. ''The Holocaust never quite leaves Israeli Jews alone,'' Mr. Shipler writes. ''Arabs use it against them,'' he continues, ''and they use it against Arabs. Jews use it against other Jews. Even the president of the United States, it seems, can use it against the prime minister of Israel.'' ''Mr. President, I know what is a holocaust,'' wrote a deeply offended Prime Minister Menachem Begin to President Reagan after Mr. Reagan had used the word to describe the Israeli bombardment of West Beirut.
  • Publisher: New York, N.Y: New York Times Company
  • Language: English
  • Identifier: ISSN: 0362-4331
    CODEN: NYTIAO
  • Source: ProQuest Central
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