In a June 21, 2011 "Special to CNN" (
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/06/21/alice.walker.gaza/), Alice Walker, the 67-year-old author of "The Color Purple," seeks to explain why she is participating in the flotilla to Gaza planned for later this month. In a cynical message in which she struggles to interject the names of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, James Cheney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman (Schwerner and Goodman were Jews who were murdered in Mississippi when they drove south with Cheney to protest racial discrimination in the U.S. - yes, Walker would have us believe that she's participating in the flotilla in memory of these Jews), Walker writes:
"And what of the children of Palestine, who were ignored in our President's latest speech on Israel and Palestine, and whose impoverished, terrorized, segregated existence was mocked by the standing ovations recently given in the U.S. Congress to the prime minister of Israel?
. . . .
As adults, we must affirm, constantly, that the Arab child, the Muslim child, the Palestinian child, the African child, the Jewish child, the Christian child, the American child, the Chinese child, the Israeli child, the Native American child, etc., is equal to all others on the planet. We must do everything in our power to cease the behavior that makes children everywhere feel afraid."
So bottom line, we are to understand that Walker will be participating in this flotilla for the benefit of the world's children, including Jewish and Israeli children. Sorry, Alice, but I don't buy it.
Naturally, there is no mention in Walker's piece about the advanced anti-tank missile, which was smuggled into Gaza and fired at a yellow Israeli school bus two months ago, killing one Israeli child.
And what about the some 12,000 mortar shells, rockets and missiles fired from Gaza at Israeli civilian targets in recent years, many timed for when children in southern Israel traveled to school in the morning? No mention by Walker of how Israeli children living in the proximity of Gaza preferred to wet their beds at night rather than risk leaving a "safe room" in their homes in order to relieve themselves, thus avoiding the need to find shelter within 15 seconds if a rocket was launched.
No mention, either, of the countless Palestinian suicide bombers, who took great efforts to detonate themselves at the entrances to shopping centers, where young women and their children congregated (see, for example:
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3179915,00.html).
No discussion, of course, by Walker of Gilad Shalit, who was abducted from Israel into Gaza by Hamas, which over the course of five years has refused to allow the Red Cross or anyone else to see him (see:
http://www.jpost.com/NationalNews/Article.aspx?id=226409).
But wait, there's more. Walker's CNN piece refers us to her blog (
http://alicewalkersgarden.com/blog/), where she further describes her experience of waiting on line to enter the West Bank from Jordan and being questioned by an Israeli at the border:
"At some point I said to him, seeing him really as I might have seen my own (misguided) son: Don't you realize this behavior, of making old men, mothers, little children, wait in long lines pleading with you to visit their families is wrong and is bad for you? I couldn't bring myself to use the "N" [Nazi] word, but I did say: Don't you think this behavior - insulting, threatening, humiliating - makes you all seem German-esque? I meant the old German-esque, of the late Thirties and Early Forties, not the current German-esque."
So here we have it again: Walker waited in line (she didn't make use of the lounge), the passport control persons were not nice (sometimes they're not nice to me), and she was questioned at length, and on this basis Israelis are being compared with Nazis, although Walker makes certain not to disparage Germans of today.
I wonder if Walker had ever seen the aftermath of a Palestinian suicide bombing and had been forced to retrieve the limbs of "old men, mothers and little children," whether she would persist in this vein. Afterall, it was Palestinian suicide bombings which resulted in the closure of the border between Israel and Gaza, through which thousands of Palestinians workers once passed each day on their way to jobs in Israel.
But let's examine Walker's Nazi analogy a bit further. In the 1933 German democratic federal elections, the Nazis emerged as the largest party and came to power. In the 2006 democratic elections in Palestine, Hamas, whose charter calls for the murder of all Jews (not just Israelis) and the obliteration of Israel, swept to power in Gaza. No mention of the Hamas charter or even Hamas in Walker's blog entry.
In addition to Jews, whom else did the Nazis persecute? Answer: among others, homosexuals. The attitude of Hamas toward homosexuals? According to Mahmoud al-Zahar, a co-founder of Hamas and a member of the Hamas leadership in the Gaza Strip, who was asked whether homosexual marriage would be permitted in Gaza (
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article575744.ece):
"Are these the laws for which the Palestinian street is waiting? For us to give rights to homosexuals and to lesbians, a minority of perverts and the mentally and morally sick?”
Needless to say, there is no mention in Walker's blog item of Palestinian persecution and murder of gays.
And if that is not enough, Walker also doesn't bother to mention how women in Gaza and the West Bank are repeatedly the victims of "honor killings" by male relatives, who have been punished with sentences of six months or less for such atrocities.
I favor a two-state solution to the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis along the 1967 lines with land swaps, but I also have no illusions about the intentions of Hamas. And whereas I want the Palestinians to live in dignity and independence in their own land, neither Fatah nor Hamas is prepared to acknowledge the right of tiny Israel (nine miles wide at its waist) to exist within any borders whatsoever.
This upcoming voyage to Gaza by Walker is not about Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Cheney, Schwerner or Goodman, as Walker would have us believe. Rather, this is about the blind refusal to seek balance and acknowledge evil, which is to be found aplenty in Alice's beloved Gaza.
