Thursday. June 20,1991 - THJE BULLETIN — 5
Excerpts from current world media
TORONTO SUN
Israel's learned to be wary
BY WILLIAM STEVENSON
The Six-Day War in 1967 has been muddled by misinterpretations leading to efforts to impose on Israel wrong surrenders today. I covered that war, and even at the time I was reprimanded by CBC for reporting what I saw. The United Nations Security Council upheld the position I took: That Israel had committed an armed attack or invasion against its neighbors, but was the victim of aggression by Arab states.
Yet popular opinion has been manipulated into thinking Israel should comply with U.N. restrictions placed upon it at the time. President George Bush in his March 6 address to Congress said the Arab-Israel conflict must be brought to an end grounded in U.N. Security Council Rsolutions 242and 338. Bush echoed Saddam Hussein*s argument that Iraqis seizure of Kuwait is the equivalent of IsraeKs *occupation^of the West Bank and Gaza.
This is false.
Resolution 242^ adopted after the Six-Day War, never condemned Israel; never demanded Israel's withdrawal; never called Israel an occupying power: It defined Israel's status in the West Bank and Gaza as that of a lawful administrator holding territories taken in a defensive war.
Resolution 338 followed another war, in 1973.1 had worked on a second book on the region and saw Arab preparations for thav73 war ;. '
Resolution 338 followed Resolution242, affirming its call for negotiations, nothing else.
Let's go back further. In 1948 the Arab states tried to strangle Israel in the cradle. The armistice followed in 1949 and was broken steadily by terrorists armed, trained and directed by Arab states. Syria shelled Israeli villages from the Golan Heights. Now Israel is pressured to give up the safety buffers, and trust the Arab statics althoug;h they never stopped attacking since they were pi-ohibited by the 1949 agreement from all hostileor warlike actions . . .
Resolution 242 and its reaffirmation in Resolution 338 put Israel under no obligation to withdraw froiii any of the territories taken in 1967 until, and unless, a peace treaty with aii Arab state creates a secure and recognized boundary, Israel is free to negotiate peace treaties that do not call for withdrawal ^..
Israel is said to be an occupying power by some, including. advisers seeking to influence the present U.S. administration,-on the basis that Resolution 242 referred to the West Bank as being '^occupied.** The term^was used in the sense that someone sitting in a chair occupies it. The U. S. secretary of state in 1969, William P. Rogers, gave it that meaning when he clarified the Nixon administration's view that Israel's political boundaries had to be agreed upon by the parties to the dispute. Like Rogers, the late Arthur J. Goldberg, then U..S. ambassador to the U.N., voiced the official U.S. government view that any Israeli withdrawal was to be negotiated between parties to the conflict.
Now President Bush speaks of Resolution 242's **principle of territory for peace." But Resolution 242 clearly put forwaid this -question of territory as an option^ not a principle: An option available to Israel.
Israel is represented these days as obdurate, the obstacle to peace iiBbe Mideast. In my humble opinion, Israelis would be derelict in their duty to future generations if they were to withdraw to the^l949 armistice lines without any guarantee the Arab states will not attack again. So far, no such guarantee has been forthcoming. Any other kinds of guarantee seem worthless so long as it is advantageous to U.S. foreign policy and the Arab states to twist Resolution 242 into meaning something else than it does in international law ...
Back in 1948, the British were supporting the Arabs for their own reasons of state. Who can blametoday's Israeli leaders for wondering what reasons of state, propel the Bush administration along its present path?
TorontaSm Mayll,1991
STEVENSON
Human rights Ignored
Israel Television recently telecast pictures of victims of the intifada's death squads. Far more shocking photographs of the tortured, burnt, hanged, quartered and garroted victims exists but are too shocking to be shown to the general public. Yet what was seen was enough to sicken even the least squeamish: a man tied to a post and stabbed to death, and old man axed, a boy of five bloodied, a woman beaten.
The death squads' victims include some who have indeed chosen to help tlib authorities. But many are not collaborators even by the most extended meaning of the wprd.^^T^ real crime is beihg^**non-cdllkbQrators'' with the i/i/(/27</a.' laborers whocouMnot orwouldndtpay tithes to the terrorist prganiza-tions, policemen who ari^sted thieves and robbers, teachers murdered before their pupils for not preaching the intifada gospel passionately enough. It is difficult to tell whether the child victims are beaten, maimed and killed for their own crimes or those of their parents.
As if to demonstrate the purpose and efficacy of the terror, no Arab would respond to the ITV reporter's questions about the killings. Nor would any of the Palestinian leaders say a single word of condemnation on camera. (Only one leader has condemned the killings in public).
The wanton murders have, after all, received the stamp of approval: qf the pLO- leaderships Y^ssir AAfat himself has^
boasted that he **reviews every file — if not before the execution, then after," which must be the PLC's version of due process, and none of the intifada leaflets has called for an end to the ;slaughter.
The media, too, have collaborated by underplaying these crimes. That Israel television gave it a minute or two of screen time is an achievemem in itself
But the most sickening silence is that of the self-styled human rigihts organizatipnis^ This is, after all, hardly a passing phenomenon. There have been 4S0 known murders by the death . squads — well over half the number of Arabs killed during actions against the IDF. In some weeks the ratio is five Arabs murdered by Arabs to one killed by the army.
At least 100 of the victims had been beaten to death. Others had been tortured with burning cigarettes, knives and boiling tar, and their limbs and genitals amputated. The iniOfaJaleadership, which has no compunction about ordering minors to throw petrol bombs and stones, uses them also as executioners. One 16-yera-old killed eight "collaborators'' before h^^^^ 'Caughtw
Yet not a peep has been heard from the numerous groups allegedly concerned with human rights.
The best known of these is the^^^k Betzcleni whichy together. witlithe^^A^ earned the Jinm^Ci^
Huinan Rights award in I>ecember 1989. Th&6iJsani^tion has ighoii&d governi^ of the rights of Jews in Judea
arid Samaria — in the Dahaisha affair, for example —-thus putting its impartial concern for human rights in doubt. Like its foreign financial supporters — the Ford Foundation, the Jimmy Carter Center and the New Israel Agenda — Betzelem
^ MEDIA REVIEWPage 7
Survivors tell
experie^^^^
1
By ETHAN MINOVITZ
"They used to say that Anyone who survived the $econd World War v^puld live ijn Utopia. But we still have a lon^ way to go." : Robbie Waisman, who was tiearly 15 when he was liberated from Buchenwajd, says hat the resurgence of anti-iemitism in europe is espe-iially painful for Holocaust Survivors like himself i Now a Vancouver resident, "fVaisman lost nearly all his Immediate familjr; But al-hough it's impossible to brget the past, it's too painful :6 remember continually, he ^aid during the Sixteenth Annual. Symposium on the holocaust. >
**Thinking of it oh a daily basis would be absolutely impossible. A friend in Calgary was unable to put his memories aside. He ended up in the asylum in Ponoka," in , Alberta, ^he symposium, orgaiiized by tii^aniNJUveir Holocaust Centre Society incpoperation with the StandihgCommittee on thbHolocausit, drew 1,000 Greater^ancouver High-school students to UBC's Instructional Resources Centre last month. Five hundred attended on each of two days of sessions.
Waisman, who found his sister — the only other member of hisfamily to survive the Holocaust — four months after liberation, "realized the enormity of the war" two months afterward. "For the first time, 1 cried."
He said he has wanted t6
retumto the Buchenwald site, but his wife wiU nptallpw him to do so. His address, ^hy We Must Remember," was a response to guest speaker Lilly Kopecky, a Toronto Survivor of Auschwitz, Bir-kenau and Ravensbruck.
Kopecky, who spoke to students on **The Uniqueness of the Holocaust," did return to Auschwitz in 1978. "It hurt," she recalled.
"I wanted to take some Canadians to the block where I was, and the director of the Auischwitz museum and I had .a good fight. The^block was opened just for a few hours— now it's open to all.
"But I wptft go back to visit
a\one^
When the teenaged Kopecky was forcerniarched to Birkenau in August 1942, there was one >vater faucet for 12,000 women. A red dish, which inmates had tp keep Ued around their J>odies, served as bpth a food bowl and a toilet.
Taken on a "death march" to Rayensbfuck in January 1945, she cpntracted hepatitis.
**ThankG-d hp doctor ever saw me," she recalled. **If a German doctor would have seen me, I wouldn't be here today. I would have been gassed."
At one point, Kopecky fell unconscious. She woke up one night — she doesn't know how long she had been unconscious — and realized she was alive.
Taken into a wprking squad, and seven other wdihbri vyould each receive jpne piece of bread a day for
pulling German aircraft into the woods when fliers returned from sorties. After the war, she learned that her knees and spine were badly hurt. Later, she required artificial hip implants.
'*For us Survivors, time has not been able tp dull our senses of loss," said Kopecky.
But, stressed Waisman: "Not to remember the Holocaust would be a betrayal of those who perished.
"I was told many times by the elders in iriy camp that if, by some miracle, I survived, it would be my duty to tell of those who did not."
Both noted that they had sometimes gone to extraordi-nai7 lengths to survive. For Waisman, survival meant proving he was Useful to the Nazis. Used as a slave laborer, he would hide on the Way to his barracks so that an inspection wouldn't reveal that he was a child.
Kopecky remembered that being busy trying to help others prevented her from worrying spiritually .-^Somc; of hef_ fellow inmates taught younger children.
And the members of a women's orchestra in Birkenau — led by thenieceof Gus-tav Mahler — kept sane by makinga chess game from the wooden boards of ther beds. They Would play chess at night, using figures fashioned from bread.
The impending danger was discussed among Jews before the Second World War started, Waisman recalled, but the threat was not taken with full seriousness. In 1939,
he said, fellow Jews would come to his family's home arid talk about what might happen under Adolf Hitler.
"My father said, *We don't have much to worry about. How many people can he possibly kill?' One thousarid was then thought a huge number.
"Nobody had any suspicion that six ri>illion would die ^ that anyone would go to eliminate an entire nation," he added.
Kopecky found her nightmares about her experiences disappearing after many years, but they returned earlier this year, when Iraqi Scud missiles fell on Israel. "It was a different feeling.' I had nightmares, but this was earieir to take than the nightmare in Auschwitz.*^
During a panel discussion moderated by Hadassah-WIZO of Canada immediate past president Naomi Fran-kenburg, former UBC religious studies department head Williarii Nicholls stated that the Holocaust could have started in a counti^ other than Germany. Anti-Semitism changes form through the ages, said the professor emeritus. ■
"Now, it's much more political, and includes falsification of history in Europe and the Middle East."
In response to a student^ UBC history professor Ted Hill, another panelist^ traced the history of death camps from late 1941 or early 1942, but noted that Hitler had talked about extermiriatihg the Jews years earlierv But modern anti-Semitic propa-
E.Minovitz
SIXTEENTH ANNUAL Symposium on the Holocaust included panel (top) with Hadataah-WIZO of Canada Imniedlate past president Naomi Frahkenburg, Robbie Waisman of Vancouver, guest speaker Lilly Kopecky of Toronto, UBCIilstbry profesBorTed Hill and former Ui9C lellalousstudiM department head William Nicholls. Bottom: Waisman listens as Kopecky addresses'SOCL high-school students.
ganda developed in Germany at the end of the 19th century, he said.
Hill and Nicholls agreed that education can help prevent anti-Semitism and other fornis of hatred.
**There are no racists in the cradle. People aren't bom racists^'' ^Nichb^^ audience Tof mostly non-
Jewish students. "What you tell your children about Jews and about other people affects the rest of their lives."
Kopecky was introduced by Dr Helen Karsaiof the Western Association of Holocaust Survivor-Families and Friends. Graham Forst, co-chairman of the I Standing Committee birrihe^ hosted the symposium.