There are four key points we wish to address in response to the March 26 talk by Mr. Ruebner and Mr. Turaani:
1. The presentations at this symposium were completely one sided and did not represent the full spectrum of political views in Israel.
2. The one-sided presentations gave a distorted and overly simplistic view of a highly complex and drawn out situation.
3. Many of the statements made by the presenters and by some of the questions from the audience, falsely equated Zionism with racism or “ethnic cleansing.”
4. The speakers presented half-truths and historical inaccuracies as facts and absolutes.
Both presenters came from the perspective that Israel is solely to blame for the current situation in the Middle East. This is, of course, not the case; both sides share the blame. The organizers of this symposium did a disservice to the Rensselaer community by not presenting a more balanced perspective.
Since many of the students who came to this symposium may not be aware of the political complexity of the current situation in the Middle East, the one-sided presentations could result in these students having a distorted and overly simplistic view of the situation.
The statements equating Zionism with racism or “ethnic cleansing” are exactly the type of statements that have created anti-Semitism in the past. Again, these statements were especially problematic since they were presented without any opposing perspective. They were presented to an impressionable audience with little conceptual background on the politics and history of the region, leading to many walking away from this symposium with distorted and limited views of both Israel and the Jewish people.
Mr. Turaani put the blame of the conflict solely on the “Zionist aspirations.” The word “conflict” itself implies that there is more than one side to the story, yet this was hardly conveyed in the two-hour symposium. While suicide attacks were looked down upon by Mr. Turaani, he maintained that attacks on Israeli civilians were Israel’s own fault because they are occupiers of an oppressed people.
Neither he nor Mr. Ruebner admitted that if only the Arab nations accepted the 1947 UN partition plan as the first Israelis did (which left the current “occupied territories” in Arab hands) and if they had not attacked Israel upon its declaration of independence, or if Egypt and Syria had not closed the right of free passage to Israeli shipping, while mobilizing 250,000 troops, 2000 tanks, and 700 warplanes against a much smaller Israeli defense force, that there might not have been a 1967 war and that Israel would not have come into control of the West Bank or Gaza (the “occupied territories”) in the first place!
The Palestine Liberation Organization, chaired by Yasir Arafat was chartered in 1964 with the main purpose of bringing about the destruction of Israel. This could not have possibly had anything to do with the “occupied territories” since this was three years before the territories came under Israeli administration, but this information was, for some reason, left out of the discussion.
Israel is the only democracy in the region yet her policies are much more heavily scrutinized than those of Communist China. No, not everything Israel does is morally right; however, the blame does not rest solely on Israel. The RPI community deserves the right to hear the other sides of this story in a factual manner rather than as a political one-sided lobby. It is a pity that RPI would hold such an unbalanced forum. Although we do not blame the “Post 9-11 Open Response Committee,” we question what aims could be accomplished through presenting programs such as the Israeli/Palestinian debate on March 26.
Professor Steven Cramer, CHME
Joseph Gillman, AERO/MCHE ’02, RPI-Sage Hillel
Deborah Sigel, AERO/MCHE ’02, President RPI-Sage Hillel
