[Jewish] Partners for Peace Event

[Gideon Bass]

Hi all!

Wednesday, October 18, 2006 (tomorrow), from 7:30 - 9:00 PM in FPH, Main Lecture
Hall the group Partners for Peace will be hosting an event in which an Israeli
Jew, a Christian Palestinian, and a Muslim Palestinian will speak about the
situtation and possibilities for peace. I encourage people to go, if nothing
else it will be interesting. However, I have done some research into this
organization, and there are some things people should be thinking about before
they come to the event:

Apparently, in the Israel/Palestinian conflict, only Israel commits human rights
violations. I have no problem with asserting that Israel commits human rights
violations – it does. The problem is having a section of their website titled
“human rights violations” that ONLY lists Israeli actions. There are plenty of
human rights violations committed by Palestinian groups, it would be nice if
they were at least mentioned.

Partners for Peace, on their website supports Divestment from Israel campaign,
and link to www.endtheoccupation.com. Again, I have no problem with a group
having these positions, but they shouldn’t claim to be politically neutral, as
that is dishonest

Also, Partners for Peace is closely tied with the group Council for the National
Interest (CNI). The Chairman of CNI has referred to Israel as "an ugly little
nation" and "a potential enemy of the United States." This is not an unbiased
group - this is a group that was created by a very biased group to appear
unbiased while still pushing a political message.

Also, from some (admittedly biased) pro-Israel articles I read, while they are
bringing in people representing all three of the religions in the area, there
are always two Palestinians and one Israeli, rather than the other way around.
There are Israeli Muslims and Christians, but the group doesn't bring in an
Israeli Christian or Muslim to have an equal number of Israelis and
Palestinians. Also, the Israeli Jew, who is supposed to be there to portray the
mainstream Israeli point of view, is always an Israeli who holds positions far
to the left of mainstream Israeli politics.

It would be like if we were trying to represent American politics by bringing in
Tom DeLay as a Republican, Pat Buchanan as an Independent, and Joe Lieberman as
a Democrat. Sure you have a Republican an Independent and a Democrat, but
neither Buchanan nor Lieberman are representative samples of Independents and
Democrats in America. So too the Israeli Jew and Christian Palestinians are not
representative of Israelis and Christians in the area, and thus the entire
debate is skewed farther to the anti-Israel side then is fair.

The worst part about this is to someone not educated about the issues, it would
seem that the debate is neutral and fair (each side has a representative), so
if the debate is one sided here, people can easily think that the results of
this debate fairly portray the issues involved.

That is why while I definitely accept that this group has a right to speak, I
don't feel comfortable supporting them when they have a political position and
disengenously hide it.

By the way, I had initially agreed to have JSU support this event, not having
done the research (bad idea!). I have since tried to get JSU's name off of the
list of sponsors, but if you see or here that we are supporting it, that's old
information and is not the case. We don't object to their coming, but JSU is in
no way officially supporting this event.

-Gideon