Letters to Editor: Loren Berman

To the editor:
In her March 17, 2010 op-ed, “The end of Arab diplomacy,” Rhonda Shafei rightly argues that what will expedite the peace process in the Middle East is not retaliation, but rather the “eradication of the … impulse to want to push back at all.” But she misidentifies the source of that impulse. She proposes that Israel is the source of Arab strife and that unity in standing up to Israel will bring peace to the Arab world. But because the Arab Summit was nicknamed the “Jerusalem Summit”­—rather than, for instance, the “Somali Refugees in Yemen Summit”—Arab leaders conspicuously and indolently deflected their own issues onto the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, thus downplaying and ignoring their own faults. While the Arab governments should care about their Arab brethren, the primary solution to the issues at hand is not to prevaricate on one’s problems towards another nation’s, but rather to address one’s own issues. Confronting and eradicating human rights abuses would be a great start. The Summit’s host country, Libya, has an exorbitant amount of documented human rights violations, including an absence of free speech, religion, and the press. And what about Syria, whose president has still gone unpunished after orchestrating the assassination of Rafiq Hariri in 2004? In Jordan and Lebanon, prisoners are often held uncharged in unsanitary conditions and are forbidden to meet with lawyers. In addition to de facto gender apartheid, in Saudi Arabia, freedom of religion is nonexistent. Sure, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a contentious issue, but before peace can emerge, the Arab nations must first make an active effort to fix their own problems. Reflection, not deflection, is the solution to Shafei’s “sandbox dilemma.”

Loren Berman, General Studies/Jewish Theological Seminary
Apr. 19, 2010