humus_sapiens
10-14-2003, 12:49 AM
http://www.petitiononline.com/Peslsalu/petition.html
To: Palestinian Arabs
AN OPEN LETTER TO PALESTINIAN ARABS FROM
JEWISH CHILDREN OF HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS
You say that you suffer; therefore, you kill. You say that you are humiliated; therefore you hate.
It is because of your suffering and humiliation that twenty-five years ago, Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and Holocaust survivor, reached out to you. Today we do the same. We do not presume to understand the uniqueness of your position, but we do understand suffering and hate. You suffer because you cannot accept the vision of the Middle East with the Jewish nation of Israel. When Israel declared its independence, five Arab armies invaded, and you believed Azzam Pasha, the Secretary-General of the Arab League, when he declared, "... a war of extermination and a momentous massacre." Your leaders cried that the obliteration of Israel and every Jew was imminent, so they exhorted you to flee. How humiliating it must have been when those same Arab brothers closed their borders to you and forced you to spend a generation stateless while the same number of Jews who were expelled from Arab nations were embraced and integrated into the Jewish state. To compound your humiliation, you were again exiled from Jordan and then from Lebanon.
We expect that you view your suffering and humiliation differently than we do; nevertheless, we understand suffering. Many of our cradles were next to the still-smoldering ashes of a world destroyed. We understand the pain of growing up without grandparents, aunts, or uncles, of being afraid to ask our parents about the strange numbers on their arms, of hearing our fathers' nightmare screams, and of inadvertently glimpsing the unspoken anguish in our mothers' eyes.
We have seen our parents' suffering. At the end of World War Two, our fathers and mothers emerged from the fires of death camps into the "civilized" world that had been silent and blind as six million Jewish students, teachers, poets, doctors, peddlers, dreamers, rabbis, fathers, infants, and their mothers were ripped from their homes, tattooed with numbers to erase their identity, used in barbarous experiments, condemned to brutal deaths, and stacked in mass graves as the final insult to their humanity. Returning to their villages to search for surviving families, our parents encountered collaborators who had worked on behalf of the Nazi death machine and neighbors who had ransacked their homes. Liberated from concentration camps only to be forced into displaced persons' camps, our parents were surrounded by "good" citizens who in false innocence claimed that they knew nothing of one million Jewish children tortured and murdered. Yes, we understand suffering.
If suffering is a license to violence, however, then our parents had free reign to at least one hundred years of endless bloodshed. Who would have stopped them had they taken up arms and demanded their homes, property, and family heirlooms in Germany, Poland, Hungary and the rest of guilty Europe? Would anyone have dared to criticize them if they had sought vengeance against their assassins? Certainly, they had reason to hate and to teach their children to hate. If they had educated their children with textbooks which extolled revenge, they could not have been blamed.
Yet Jewish survivors of the world's greatest suffering neither sought death nor honored hate. With every reason for despair, Jews did not opt for destruction. Search history books, and you will find no gang of young Jews assassinating former persecutors. If they had, perhaps they would have been more understandable to the rest of the world. Instead, they chose to live and to create. Within one month after the war, survivors in every displaced persons camp established a theatre, presented musical productions, and printed a newspaper. Within two months, there was a rival newspaper. In an ultimate show of hope, they gave birth to us, and they did not teach us to hate.
Today, we, their children, number millions. We are doctors, professors, social workers, journalists, accountants, artists, lawyers, rabbis, parents and even grandparents. We support the arts, contribute to medical research, and provide help for the poor and orphaned. What we do not do is hate, for our parents taught us that hate consumes the one who hates. As children of Holocaust survivors, we follow the ancient Jewish tradition encapsulated in the directive, "Choose life!"
If you give up your allegiance to hate and your objective of death for yourselves and us, we can both choose life. If you use your suffering to create schools, roads, libraries, art, and hope, we can both thrive. If you accept the vision of two people coexisting peacefully within safe borders, we can both have a nation: you a Muslim one and we a Jewish one. However, if you insist on murdering our children, claiming all of Israel, changing the demographics to eliminate a Jewish state, or forcing Israel into suicidal borders, remember that we Jews have seared on our arms and in our hearts the extremes to which our enemy can go, and we choose to live. Should we ever entertain the notion of compromising with our survival, six million silenced voices remind us, "Never Again!"
To: Palestinian Arabs
AN OPEN LETTER TO PALESTINIAN ARABS FROM
JEWISH CHILDREN OF HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS
You say that you suffer; therefore, you kill. You say that you are humiliated; therefore you hate.
It is because of your suffering and humiliation that twenty-five years ago, Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and Holocaust survivor, reached out to you. Today we do the same. We do not presume to understand the uniqueness of your position, but we do understand suffering and hate. You suffer because you cannot accept the vision of the Middle East with the Jewish nation of Israel. When Israel declared its independence, five Arab armies invaded, and you believed Azzam Pasha, the Secretary-General of the Arab League, when he declared, "... a war of extermination and a momentous massacre." Your leaders cried that the obliteration of Israel and every Jew was imminent, so they exhorted you to flee. How humiliating it must have been when those same Arab brothers closed their borders to you and forced you to spend a generation stateless while the same number of Jews who were expelled from Arab nations were embraced and integrated into the Jewish state. To compound your humiliation, you were again exiled from Jordan and then from Lebanon.
We expect that you view your suffering and humiliation differently than we do; nevertheless, we understand suffering. Many of our cradles were next to the still-smoldering ashes of a world destroyed. We understand the pain of growing up without grandparents, aunts, or uncles, of being afraid to ask our parents about the strange numbers on their arms, of hearing our fathers' nightmare screams, and of inadvertently glimpsing the unspoken anguish in our mothers' eyes.
We have seen our parents' suffering. At the end of World War Two, our fathers and mothers emerged from the fires of death camps into the "civilized" world that had been silent and blind as six million Jewish students, teachers, poets, doctors, peddlers, dreamers, rabbis, fathers, infants, and their mothers were ripped from their homes, tattooed with numbers to erase their identity, used in barbarous experiments, condemned to brutal deaths, and stacked in mass graves as the final insult to their humanity. Returning to their villages to search for surviving families, our parents encountered collaborators who had worked on behalf of the Nazi death machine and neighbors who had ransacked their homes. Liberated from concentration camps only to be forced into displaced persons' camps, our parents were surrounded by "good" citizens who in false innocence claimed that they knew nothing of one million Jewish children tortured and murdered. Yes, we understand suffering.
If suffering is a license to violence, however, then our parents had free reign to at least one hundred years of endless bloodshed. Who would have stopped them had they taken up arms and demanded their homes, property, and family heirlooms in Germany, Poland, Hungary and the rest of guilty Europe? Would anyone have dared to criticize them if they had sought vengeance against their assassins? Certainly, they had reason to hate and to teach their children to hate. If they had educated their children with textbooks which extolled revenge, they could not have been blamed.
Yet Jewish survivors of the world's greatest suffering neither sought death nor honored hate. With every reason for despair, Jews did not opt for destruction. Search history books, and you will find no gang of young Jews assassinating former persecutors. If they had, perhaps they would have been more understandable to the rest of the world. Instead, they chose to live and to create. Within one month after the war, survivors in every displaced persons camp established a theatre, presented musical productions, and printed a newspaper. Within two months, there was a rival newspaper. In an ultimate show of hope, they gave birth to us, and they did not teach us to hate.
Today, we, their children, number millions. We are doctors, professors, social workers, journalists, accountants, artists, lawyers, rabbis, parents and even grandparents. We support the arts, contribute to medical research, and provide help for the poor and orphaned. What we do not do is hate, for our parents taught us that hate consumes the one who hates. As children of Holocaust survivors, we follow the ancient Jewish tradition encapsulated in the directive, "Choose life!"
If you give up your allegiance to hate and your objective of death for yourselves and us, we can both choose life. If you use your suffering to create schools, roads, libraries, art, and hope, we can both thrive. If you accept the vision of two people coexisting peacefully within safe borders, we can both have a nation: you a Muslim one and we a Jewish one. However, if you insist on murdering our children, claiming all of Israel, changing the demographics to eliminate a Jewish state, or forcing Israel into suicidal borders, remember that we Jews have seared on our arms and in our hearts the extremes to which our enemy can go, and we choose to live. Should we ever entertain the notion of compromising with our survival, six million silenced voices remind us, "Never Again!"