Sabeel’s Sister Elaine Kelley Supports JWPF Vigils
Sister Elaine Kelley has served as the Administrative Officer of Friends of Sabeel – North America (FOSNA) for almost a decade and is one of four FOSNA Steering Committee officers. Sister Elaine lived in the Bethlehem area for four years and was a contributing writer to the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. She has joined the Rev. Dr. Stephen Sizer, Anglican vicar and a respected authority on Christian Zionism, by adding her name to “Religious Leaders Support Jewish Witnesses for Peace and Friends“. With her signature she “affirm[s] the tactic of protesting outside a place of worship as appropriate and consistent with our prophetic and religious traditions”. We welcome Sister Elaine’s support and hope that her courageous example will be the signal call for other religious leaders to support our vigils, which are now approaching their seventh anniversary.
Thank you, Sister Elaine.
A Workers World Observation
The most recent edition of the Workers World Newspaper was distributed at last week’s US Social Forum, and its lead headline was “Global solidarity with Palestine”, with the subheading “More fallout from Israeli massacre”. So far, so good. Then, on the inside were three additional articles: “Protests across U.S. condemn Israeli massacre”, “Israel’s atomic ties to apartheid South Africa documented”, and the Workers World Party Statement: “Israeli terror must not pass”. They write freely about the attendance of Jewish activists at these protests, point out that “Jewish people from Germany” were on board one of the Free Gaza Movement caravans, but nowhere do they mention that the root cause of Palestinian suffering is the creation and maintenance of a Jewish supremacist state. They even throw a bone to a Philadelphia protest endorsed by Jewish Voice for Peace, a group that even the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN) had listed as soft Zionists. Hm-m-m…
We understand that the crime against the Palestinian people is being committed by a Jewish state with Jewish soldiers using weapons displaying Jewish religious symbols, and with the full support and complicity of the overwhelming mass of organised Jews worldwide*, but the casual reader could not determine this from the four articles in the Workers World newspaper. And so we wonder why Workers World gives Jews a pass, when, as a group, they enjoy no other peer in their support for the Jewish state. Talking about Israel without mentioning Jewish supremacism is like talking about South African apartheid or Jim Crow without mentioning White supremacism.
We went to their website and searched for the phrase “Jewish state”. We got one lone article as a result, and the phrase in the article was taken from an unreferenced quote by John Bolton. Then we searched for the phrase “Imperialist Nation” and got 2,911 hits. Searching for “Imperialist” netted 12,188.
Now we at JWPF have nothing against criticism of U.S. Imperialism, but when the largest, most easily identifiable community that supports Jewish supremacism in Palestine is not held to scrutiny, and the genocide of the Palestinian people is at stake, we wonder if there’s another agenda at play. If there are readers out there who know that WW does not support the “right” of Israel to exist as a Jewish state (the way Benjamin Netanyahu wants us to), please inform us, and include the appropriate references that support this claim.
Seven vigilers
Hiatus coming, don’t blame your ISP!
Henry Herskovitz
Jewish Witnesses for Peace and Friends
* “Jewish Power” by Paul Eisen
