Letters to the Editor

To the Editor:

I am writing to dispel any confusion that may have arisen from Jonah Liben’s article, “Peace in the Middle East” (Mar. 2). Mr. Liben writes of Hillel’s intention to distribute literature from the Jenin Freedom Theatre at an event that was part of its “Peace Week for Israelis and Palestinians,” an initiative evidently in opposition to Israeli Apartheid Week. 

Mr. Liben states, “Tonight, one of our groups is sponsoring an event that highlights the myriad grass roots movements in Israel that work to push the Israeli government toward peace with its Palestinian neighbors.”  He lists several groups, among them the Freedom Theatre. 

In fact, the Jenin Freedom Theatre is a cultural center based in the Jenin refugee camp, not in Israel. The precursor of the present-day theater was destroyed in a brutal attack by the Israel Defense Forces in April 2002, during “Operation Defensive Shield.” The Freedom Theatre’s mission is to restore the cultural life of Palestine that has been decimated by the merciless Israeli occupation.

Mr. Liben did not contact us, the U.S. representative of the Jenin Freedom Theatre, for information about the theater, and he did not request any material for distribution. If any material was, in fact, distributed, I do not know what it was nor where it was obtained. 

Constancia Dinky Romilly
President, Friends of the Jenin Freedom Theatre

To the Editor:

One word was conspicuously absent from Aleq Abdullah’s editorial (“The Politics of Fear,” Mar. 10): Intifada. As a first-year, Abdullah was born around 1992, which means she was 10 years old during Hamas and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade’s murderous heyday. Perhaps she doesn’t remember that Palestinian militants waged a bloody suicide bombing campaign against all centers of Israeli civilian life—that they bombed coffee shops and universities, buses and senior homes; that their campaign lasted almost five years and had the support of mainstream Palestinian leadership, as well as activists and intellectuals all over the world. But in her flippant attitude towards the civilian victims of a terrorist attack perpetrated by a Palestinian, Abdullah does more than simply skirt over the fact that Israelis were the victims of an organized and broadly-supported campaign of terror that specifically targeted a civilian population. She goes on to justify it, invoking the magic-bullet of “context” after fretting over a pro-Israel activist confronting her with the image of “an innocent Israeli meeting his or her end by the cruel, inhumane actions of a ruthless Palestinian.”
Inconveniently enough, over 700 Israeli civilians “met their end” in just that way, to borrow Abdullah’s aggravatingly passive phrasing. Abdullah is obviously bothered by this—but only because a few protestors had the bad taste to point it out to her.

About a year ago, Rashid Khalidi condemned Hamas’s rocket campaign against southern Israel at a panel discussion on Israel’s Gaza blockade. It is regrettable that Abdullah and her ilk cannot face their movement’s past and present with similar moral courage and choose to will its most shameful, nihilistic chapter out of their collective memory.

Armin Rosen
List College 2010