Coalition for Justice in Israel/Palestine Responds to Allegations of Anti-Semitism

Letter to the Editor
Stanford Daily
Tuesday, April 30, 2002

As a co-organizer of Laurie King-Irani's April 23 talk on the war crimes case against Ariel Sharon, I take exception with Daniel Silverberg's letter of April 24. The case concerns Sharon's role in the 1982 massacre of over 1,000 Palestinian civilians at Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut, while the camps were under Israeli army control and Sharon was Israeli Defense Minister.

An Israeli commission of inquiry found Sharon "personally responsible" for the massacre, but he has never faced criminal sanctions. Silverberg portrays the Sharon case as an illegitimate exploitation of international law for political ends. In fact, Sharon's prosecution would be no more and no less political than the trials of Adolf Eichmann and Slobodan Milosevic, the indictment of Augusto Pinochet, or the Nuremberg, Yugoslavia or Rwanda tribunals.

Both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have expressed support for criminal investigation of Sharon's role in the massacre, notwithstanding his current position as Israeli prime minister. Far from "grossly undermin[ing]" the emerging human rights regime, as Silverberg puts it, Sharon's investigation would demonstrate that that regime is reaching its maturity. As King-Irani emphasized, the case is not directed only at Sharon but at all Israeli and Lebanese perpetrators of the massacre.

Silverberg also labels the Sharon case as one-sided because it does not take into account Palestinian human rights abuses. While both sides have committed abuses, that does not mean there is any equivalence between the Israeli and Palestinian sides. It cannot seriously be argued that abuses by the apartheid-era South African government were equivalent to abuses by the African National Congress, or that abuses by Serbian forces in Kosovo were equivalent to abuses by the Kosovo Liberation Army. To assert such an equivalence in the Israeli-Palestinian context is to turn a blind eye to the power asymmetry between the two sides, the aggregate harms involved (Israeli abuses far outweigh Palestinian ones), and the record of Israeli ethnic cleansing, military occupation, colonial settlement, apartheid-like discrimination, acquisition of land by force, and defiance of international law.

As for Silverberg's argument that greater war criminals than Sharon remain at large, that may be true but it does not minimize Sharon's culpability.

Then there's Silverberg's knee-jerk attempt to slander as anti-Semitic anyone who supports holding Sharon accountable "during this delicate time." By this logic, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, two pillars of the international human rights movement, are anti-Semitic. The effort to bring Sharon to justice has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. It has everything to do with a long history of brutal Israeli state practices and the excesses of alleged mass murderers whose crimes go unpunished because they happen to belong to U.S. client states.

Silverberg may not be able to differentiate between the religion or ethnicity of the perpetrator and the crimes they're accused of committing, but the rest of us can. Slinging epithets is no way to conduct a debate -- it's just a facile technique to stifle opposing viewpoints and avoid confronting the issues.

I note that Silverberg equates attending the King-Irani event with "protest[ing] against Israel." This is a clever move to disguise the fact that Silverberg was not present at the talk he so freely criticizes. I'm all for a vigorous debate on the Sharon case and other aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but let's at least try to take ourselves halfway seriously.

Bryce Giddens
Coalition for Justice in Israel-Palestine