Jeff Halper’s OPINION piece is in response to Rick Hellman’s negative piece below on the Kansas City Sabeel Conference

Opinion

Providing Sabeel conference with Zionist perspective on peace

By: Rick Hellman, Editor    
November 10, 2006

A couple of people asked me how it went at the Friends of Sabeel North America conference, which the Village Presbyterian Church hosted last month, and at which I spoke at a breakout session.

It went fine, and I think I might have even won points for Israel with a couple of attendees. Anyway, that was my goal.

I thought long and hard before accepting the invitation to speak, which was extended by conference organizer Janet Baker, a very sweet lady who heads the church's justice, peace and environment committee, and the Rev. Tom Are, senior pastor of the Village Church.

To their credit, they reached out to the normative Jewish community -inviting me and Rabbi Mark Levin of Congregation Beth Torah to speak during the Oct. 20-21 conference. They understand how critical the Jewish community has been of the Presbyterian Church USA and its moves to divest from certain companies that do business with the Israeli government. That strategy was undertaken under the leadership of the Jerusalem-based Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center. Sabeel - with its Israel-is-crucifying-Arabs rhetoric and half-hearted (at best) support for a two-state solution - has become anathema to the mainstream Jewish community.

And while at its biennial convention this summer, the PCUSA as a whole backed away from the pro-divestment stance it took in 2004, Sabeel keeps pushing the issue, as witness the conference here.

The question, as Rabbi Levin put it to me after he accepted the invitation to speak, was: Would the expected 300 attendees hear only calumnies heaped upon Israel, or should they be exposed to some counter-balancing information that might explain why, for instance, Israel has built a "security barrier" along the Green Line that has cut cross-border terror attacks dramatically, and is not an "apartheid wall."

Thus, I chose as the topic for my breakout session "Disputation: A Zionist Perspective on Peace." Disputations were rigged debates staged during the Middle Ages between Jews and Christians (often apostate Jews, who knew their Bible and Talmud) with the goal of proving the superiority of Christianity. This referred to the fact that several of the speakers featured at the Sabeel conference were Jewish critics of Zionism, whom Arab-centric groups like to tout. People like far-left U.S. think-tanker Phyllis Bennis and the Israel Committee Against Housing Demolition's Jeff Halper.

I didn't attend their breakout sessions, but I've read their work, and it needs responding to. So in my talk, attended by about a dozen people, I rebutted three favorite tropes of the anti-Zionists:

* The West Bank and Golan Heights are not under "illegal occupation." The attacking Arabs of 1967 are required under U.N. Resolution 242 to make peace, and they never have; on the contrary.

* Israel is not an apartheid state. Arabs there are far freer than Jews in any Arab-Muslim state, and

* Democratic Israel's military self-defense measures against stateless terrorists cannot be considered war crimes.

For there to be peace, I said, the Arabs must, in the formulation attributed to Golda, love their children more than they hate us, truly accept the Jewish state and split the land between the river and the sea. And for that to happen, there may have to be a thoroughgoing Islamic reformation, ditching the Dar al Islam/Dar al Harb doctrine that promotes "bloody borders."

I did what all the strategic pro-Israel thinkers say to do: Stress that Israel wants peace; has taken risks for peace; and hates the harm she must do to others in order to defend her citizens. I offered up the lesson of Sadat: Look what he did, and look what he got: Love and all Egyptian land back from Israel; a bullet in the head from the Islamists. Now who is it again that's thwarting peace? One questioner asked "Aren't there Jewish extremists, too?" So I forthrightly condemned Baruch Goldstein, noting that Hamas didn't begin bombing buses until after he shot up the mosque in Hebron, killing 29 Arabs at prayer in 1994.

But I forgot to contrast the euphoria of Sadat's visit to Jerusalem with the depression I felt at Yitzhak Rabin's assassination at the hands of right-wing Jewish zealot. I want to feel that euphoria again. So I repeated my standard line, which comes from my heart: I refuse to give up hope.