Former RU dean Schulman advocates for Palestinian rights
Michele AlperinSPECIAL TO THE JEWISH STATE
January 2, 2009
Former RU dean Schulman advocates for Palestinian rights
By Michele Alperin
Ruth Schulman, retired associate dean of the Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology at Rutgers University and a lifelong Zionist, had last been to Israel four years ago on a “goodbye visit” with her husband Mel, who had pancreatic cancer. She missed Israel, but felt it was too painful to return by herself and realized that an ordinary tour probably wouldn’t work for someone as familiar with Israel as she was.
So when she received an email about a trip titled “In the Land of Justice,” sponsored by Rabbis for Human Rights, she felt it was beshert, a Yiddish word meaning “destined to be.”
Speaking Dec. 16 at the Jewish Center in Princeton to a crowd of 60, a number of whom not all of whom shared her perspective on Israel, Schulman opened with a conciliatory statement: “Some of what I say may be upsetting to some of you and some was and is upsetting to me.”
After reviewing her strong attachment to Israel, Schulman moved to her most recent trip, which was difficult for her, yet inspiring in its own way. “It was extraordinarily painful for me,” she said. “I saw and heard things that made me feel I couldn’t breathe, that I wanted to vomit. Yet I returned with a renewed commitment to the country I love, because of my profound admiration for the amazing heroes.”
Schulman offered some background on the issues of Palestinian land ownership that are a focus of Rabbis for Human Rights. She turned first to her experiences with Israeli checkpoints. For Israelis and for her tour group, waits at these checkpoints are negligible, for example the checkpoint she passed through on the way to her kibbutz, Kfar Blum, described as “going through the equivalent of an E-Z Pass toll booth for Israelis with Israeli license plates.”
When Schulman arrived at a checkpoint called “the Terminal,” for Palestinian men going from the West Bank to their jobs in Jerusalem, therefore, it was quite a shock. In this large concrete building, the group viewed an area like the customs hall in an airport in the United States, except that there was no carpeting, the walls were bare, and there was nothing to sit on. “Although there were dozens of people, there was absolute silence,” she recalled. “It felt like a science fiction, dehumanized movie set.”
The group was made privy to the details of the security checks on Palestinians by a woman Schulman described as “one of my heroines, a grandmother in her mid-60s, Hanah Barag, the founder of Machsom [checkpoint] Watch.” The 400 women in her organization staff the checkpoints from 6 a.m. to as late as necessary, 365 days a year, and report to the Israeli public on what they see through Machsom Watch’s Internet site.
At the Terminal, Barag told the group, each man goes through three separate security checks, including a body search. At the third check, which Schulman’s group witnessed, men are lined up at what looks like a subway turnstile, where they first must place their hands on a biometric plate, then put their permit up against a thickly shielded glass booth, and, finally, when they get an OK, put their magnetic ID cards through a machine.
The men are required to stand silently while they wait, and there are no bathrooms. Above the glass booth is a platform where soldiers stand at attention with Uzis pointing at the men going through the turnstile. Barag observed to Schulman’s group, “The feeling that every Palestinian was a terrorist started in ‘67 when we thought we could control another people. We are taught to make the Palestinians docile. The goal is to humiliate these men.”
Next Schulman described her group’s visit to Hebron, led by Michael Manekin, a former officer in the Israel Defense Forces who had enlisted for an extra year of service in the exclusive Golani brigade. He is cofounder of a group called Shovrim Shtika, Breaking the Silence, an organization that gives soldiers an opportunity to speak anonymously about their experiences in the army, something they are often unable to do with family and friends. What inspired him to start the organization was an experience he had as an officer.
He had trained his men to be as humane as possible and wanted to give them practice in a real situation, so his commander allowed him, as practice, to take his soldiers to a particular house in the middle of the night and bring in a 64-year-old grandfather for questioning.
His soldiers awakened the family, sending men to one side of the room and women and children to the other. The men were told to squat near the wall and their hands were tied; but to be humane, the soldiers helped the men smoke cigarettes while they were tied up. Instead of pointing guns at the screaming women to quiet them, they simply asked them to be quiet. The soldiers searched everything and were careful to put things back and tried not to break anything. The grandfather was then taken in and questioned and brought back to his family in the morning.
Manekin observed about the experience: “What does this do to a family? The fear and the brutalization are never forgotten. And it was all for no reason, except for me to train my team.” He explained that for 40 years, actions like these are taken for no apparent reason, under the banner of security, then added, “You can’t be a mensch in an inhumane system.”
Manekin takes groups into Hebron to witness the situation in the territories, despite legal efforts by the settlers to prevent groups from coming in except to pray at the Cave of Machpelah.
Hebron has been divided into two sections since the early 1990s. One section, under Israeli control, includes about 600 Jews and 35,000 Palestinians. It includes what was formerly Hebron’s main marketplace and its industrial sector. Israel sectioned off the second area, which comprises about 140,000 Palestinians, under Palestinian rule.
It was right after the checkpoint at the entrance to Hebron that Schulman noticed that their bus was being accompanied by three jeeps in front and five more trucks to the rear, all filled with army, police, and border police holding submachine guns.
Schulman’s group also saw murals drawn on the wall along the road, and she described one she found particularly offensive. “The picture was supposed to be the Messiah led on a donkey, with the face of Baruch Goldstein, and on the hills the people waving to the Messiah all had on orange shirts, like the settlers who came down to prevent the Gaza withdrawal wearing orange,” said Schulman.
For Schulman, the worst image from the day was the Magen David sprayed on the bolted door of each Arab house. “This was horrendous because all I could think of was Kristallnacht,” said Schulman. “This was proposing a different way of being a Jew: you wear a kippah so people will fear you, you have a Jewish star so people will fear you. It was a terrible sight and made me very upset.”
At the question and answer portion of her talk, Nelson Obus offered his own interpretation of the situation in Israel, opening with his own Zionist credentials. “You and I have very different opinions of things,” he said to Schulman. “I’m a supporter of One Israel and on the board of the ZOA.” He then laid out issues that particularly concerned him: why Jewish rights groups don’t work for the property and rights of Jews forced out of Arab lands; why Jews did not move Palestinians out of the West Bank and Gaza early on, perhaps to Jordan; why he hadn’t heard any outburst about what happened to Jews in the Chabad house in Mumbai; why Jews could not go easily to Hebron to pray at the burial spot of people central to their religion.
Obus concluded with a passionate statement of Israel’s role, after the Holocaust, as a safe haven for Jews. “If you create a state after the Holocaust, don’t you think it is an acknowledgement of the need to protect Jews from rampant anti-Semitism around the globe?” he asked. “I can’t ignore what happened when Jews were singled out and don’t understand why there is not more concern with Jewish human rights.”
Schulman responded that Jewish human rights are concerned for the human rights of everyone. “I am concerned certainly with Israelis, but it doesn’t start and end with us,” she said. “We are part of a world. It would have been nice if Arab countries took in Palestinians, but now that we have control of the land where they live, what do we do? How do we protect the Jewish state and without subjugating another people?”
Cantor Murray Simon of the Jewish Center observed: “What is different about Israel than even the United States is that we tend to hold Israel to a higher standard than the rest of the world. We have to answer to a higher authority, and when we don’t see this idealistic state we wanted to create, it bothers us tremendously.”
Schulman responded that Israel is in a position of tremendous power and strength. “Do you use this power in a way that crushes other people in such a way that they have nothing to lose and will rise up?” she asked, explaining that many Palestinians don’t have jobs. “If you give them the sense of being human and allow them to do what they do, they may not be as interested in setting fires.”
After questions about the graffiti and whether painting over it regularly might put a stop to it, Schulman noted that she had also seen ugly graffiti on the Palestinian side of the wall and emphasized that meeting with Palestinians had not been easy for her. “I had a lot of trouble with the Palestinians I talked to and met and their values and what they said. It’s not just, ‘We’ll be nice and we’ll be brother.’ It doesn’t work that way. On the other side there are some people working, but there aren’t enough. Is this because they are working so hard to stay alive or are just not interested?”
In response to a question about whether she saw any evidence of other Arab countries or non-Jewish states trying to improve the economic, educational, or social situation of the Palestinians, Schulman said, “Money flowed in after Oslo, but there was a lot of graft and corruption.”
Next came a statement from an Israeli, Moshe Lavid, whose son had been in the Israeli army. He said: “I think your sensitivity threshold is very low. What about the victims in Netanya after the attack on Passover? I think you should apply the same sensitivity to Jewish victims.”
Lavid emphasized the necessity of the machsomim, or checkpoints, citing the absence of suicide bombs in the last five years. He attributed the problems at the checkpoints to the age of the soldiers in charge: “They are not mature. They don’t know how to behave. It’s not a job for 18-year-old children.”
Lavid added that educating Israeli soldiers to be more moral was fine, but he worried that when people give talks like Schulman’s to a wider audience, say at Princeton University, then they become propaganda fodder for the Palestinians. He did acknowledge, however, that his Princeton-raised son had hated working at the checkpoints and had tried to be as humane as possible.
Nira Lavid, Moshe’s wife, spoke about her son’s experience at checkpoints, adding that she did not see long lines when she visited: “On a checkpoint our son stopped a caravan of vegetables and fruit from the West Bank (to allow the Palestinians to have some income),” she said. “It wouldn’t stop, and with remote control they detected a bomb. The driver opened the door and ran out and a few minutes later the entire truck exploded. It could have been our son plus his friends.”
While serving on the West Bank, the Lavids’ son was attacked by an old woman. “In the name of human rights, he didn’t do anything,” said Nira. “He let her throw big rocks, and he was bleeding.” Eventually his friends saved him by shooting in the air, and Lavid said she later advised her son, “You kill first before you’re being killed.”
Several more observations followed. Peter Johnson spoke about what he saw as the two biggest problems looming in the future: demographics and a water system that is diminishing in size and increasing in pollution. Hazel Stix spoke about an exhibit at the Frist student center at Princeton University about women at the checkpoints; she was concerned that there was “not a word about why the checkpoints were there — nothing to say, ‘This is terrible, but this is why.’”