Another short vid we made for VJMovement in Holland. Uri Avnery is the brightest light on the Israeli left, and he speaks from a lot of experience. He came to Israel in 1933, a 10-yr old fleeing Nazi Germany. He has endured not only endless criticism, but beatings and assassination attempts, to get his message out that peace with the Palestinians is the only way. Read Avnery’s weekly column (in English) here.
Once in awhile we’ll post videos we have made about other peace activists. Rabbi Menachem Froman does not avoid paradoxes – he lives in the West Bank settlement of Tekoa, but he has spent many hours meeting with influential Palestinians, including Yassar Arafat and Sheikh Ahmed Yassin (the spiritual head of Hamas, assassinated by an Israeli missile in 2004).
When I asked Rabbi Froman if he were willing to live under a Palestinian government after a 2-state solution is reached, he smiled and said, “I am a citizen of the state of God”. Full of humor and hope, he said, with another big grin, that “Allahu Akbar” – “God is great” in Arabic – is translated into English as “Yes, we can.”
We made this video for the VJMovement in Holland. Please consider subscribing to this great site – we will be making more videos for them in the future. For more info and writings by Rabbi Froman, see here.
Almost all of Khaled’s work is controversial to someone. When I first tell Jewish friends about “the Arab man who opened a Holocaust museum,” they say something like “amazing”, and basically think he’s a saint.
Yes, part of what Khaled is doing is courageously confronting Arab/Moslem denial about the Holocaust (he was after all, on the way to the December, 2006, Holocaust Conference in Tehran, when the Iranians denied his visa at the last moment.)
But then later, when they (again the Jewish friends) learn that he sometimes puts photos of the Nakba next to Holocaust photos in his tiny museum, or worse, confronts Israelis (even Israeli soldiers) with Holocaust photos, my Jewish friends change their tune.
I’m re-posting the video clip above (won’t do this often, promise) that some of you may not have seen. One acquantance emailed me when I first put it up, saying Khaled is “simply using the Jewish martyrs of the Holocaust to make a case for himself. There is no connection or even slight similarity between the atrocities carried out by the Nazis and the Arab-Israeli conflict.”
She asked what I thought, so I answered her – yes, the Separation Fence (which cuts through the village in the video, separating them from many dunams of olive trees and thus income) has cut down drastically on suicide bombings. But why is the Fence not built on the Green Line? And why not even near the settlements in the West Bank, but many hundreds of meters east of them, apparently to allow future growth for the settlements?
The woman never wrote back. So yes — Khaled is indeed not a total saint, he wants to help his fellow Palestinians achieve (what he thinks is) justice. I tell friends (the ones still listening) about one of Khaled’s operating principals, Gandhi’s satyagraha, “to convert, not to coerce, the wrong-doer.”
Displaying Holocaust photos is definitely less harmful than throwing stones (as some young Palestinians do at the weekly demos against the Fence). Would the photos shame an Israeli into trying to change its government’s policies? Or would they just offend?
What do you think?
[And by the way, a young Palestinian was killed several weeks ago at the exact spot where we shot this video, when he was hit in the chest with a tear gas cannister, and bled to death.]
