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Purely Commentary
Cynthia Ozick's Deeply Moving Appeal to Palestinians
to Relate to Human Values . . . Serious Lesson in the
Equation of the U.S. - Panamanian Defensive Issue
By Philip
Slomovitz
An Appeal to the Conscience of the Terrorists
A people, like an individual, must live with a conscience. It can not survive on brutality, on a platform of inhumanity
of man to man.
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In the 30 years of Israel's sovereignty, in the 80 years of pioneering to establish a good life in their ancient homeland
in Eretz Yisrael, a friendly atmosphere could have been established between Jews and Arabs and territorial problems
could have been resolved amicably.
But terror took hold of the minds of depraved people. Terror set in and became exemplary on March 11, 1978, for a
group functioning as PLO who continue to embark on a prograni of murder and lies.
In the resultant mass murder of 35 Israelis there was snuffed out the life of a competent photographer, the American
Gail Rubin. She was photographing birds when she was shot. They murdered a 14-year-old clarinetist. His cousin, the
eminent American short story writer, Cynthia Ozick, was shocked not only by the horror of the event but also by a news
story in the New York Times, March 12 which stated:
A Palestinian military spokesman in Beirut said the attack had been carried out by members of Al Fatah,
the largest guerrilla group in the Palestine Liberation Organization. He asserted that 33 Israeli soldiers had
been killed in the attack.
Miss Ozick, shocked by the afh-ontery of calling the victims Israeli soldiers, a method of spreading the Big Lie that
has been embraced also by the USSR anti-Israel Kremlin propagandists, thereupon addressed a message to "Dear
Palestinian Spokesmen." It was published as a N.Y. Times Op-Ed Page article March 16 and it will undoubtedly be
recorded among the most moving documents inspired by the tragic events in the Middle East. Here it is:
Dear Palestinian Spokesman:
When you say that your friends
killed 33 Israeli soldiers in last
weekend's terror attack on the road
near Haifa, do you mean my cousin
Imri? Your friends shot him in the
throat. He was not a soldier. He was
14 years old, and played the clarinet.
Now I am not sure what the men-
tality of a terrorist might be, since
unlike you, I have never had one for a
friend; but it seems logical to assume
that if you have murdered someone,
you might like — even if only out of
idle curiosity, but especially out of
ideology — to know something about
the life you have taken. So please let
me tell you a little bit about my
cousin Imri. I Promise you it won't
occupy much of your time, because if
someone is murdered when he is only
14 years old, how much can there be
to tell?
In fact, Imri's life was so brief, and
there was so little he ever had a
chance to do, that I might as well
begin with his grandfather and
grandmother.
Imri's grandfather is a poet, a
lover of the English Romantics.
He has won some fine prizes for
his work (including the Brenner
Prize, named after an early
Zionist who vowed that Jews
were no longer going to be mur-
dered just for being Jews), and he
has translated Walt Whitman into
Hebrew; but he is rather elderly
now, so these days he mostly sits
in his little garden reading
Wordsworth and Keats and Shel-
ley and Blake.
The garden is rather special. It is
in the backyard of a house not far
from the Lod airport (where some of
your other friends murdered a group
of Christian pilgrims not so long
ago).
When Imri's grandparents built
the house — a simple concrete cube
filled with volumes and volumes of
poetry — it was entirely surrounded
by sand. But Imri's grandmother,
though very frail, put down seeds
and nourished and raised up her
"babies"— a whole orchard of flower-
ing fruit trees.
Imri's mother and father are
passionate musicians. They play
first and second flute in the
Jerusalem Symphony — or at
least they did until last weekend,
because Intri's father may never
play again. One of your friends
blew up his hand.
IMRI TEL
About two years ago, Inari's father
came to America for a time to teach
flute at Ithaca College. It was hard to
tell which he loved more — music or
his students. Tears fell from him
when the term drew to an end and he
had to say goodbye.
Imri's oldest sister, Anva, a
dancer, just had her second baby, and
so what happened was this: Imri and
his brothers Nir and Adiel and his
little twin sisters Vivi and Cori and
their parents all piled into the family
car to drive up to Haifa to see the new
baby. After the visit, they were on
their way home to Jerusalem, just
behind a bus, when your friends
started throwing grenades and
shooting at them, at first on the road
itself and then from inside the bus.
When Imri's father, who was driving,
got hit, Imri's brother Nir managed
to grab the wheel and save his fam-
ily, even though his leg was stream-
ing blood. In the horror of the explo-
sions and the pursuit it was a little
while before anyone realized that
Imri was dead.
All right, now about Imri himself.
He was mainly a quiet boy, private
as some adolescents like to be, and a
good student. Until not long ago he
was still quite small, but in the last
few months his family had begun to
marvel at how he was springing up.
He was going to be tall, like his
father. He was fond of stamp-
collecting, and when his mother
toured with the orchestra she always
brought back interesting foreign
stamps for him. His instrument was
the clarinet; he was a member of a
youth orchestra in Jerusalem. He
used to grumble over his clarinet be-
cause it was second-hand and some-
what woebegone; but only two days
before your friends killed him he had
the delight of learning that he was
going to get a better clarinet.
And that is about all I can tell
you about your victim Imri. I
warned you it wouldn't amount to
much. The main thing, you know,
is that he was never going to kill
anyone or anything — not even a
fish or a chicken, much less a fel-
low human being. He was only
going to make beautiful sounds
on his clarinet.
Imri's grandfather, when he was
not much older than Imri during the
First World War, used to write
pacifist poems; and once after the
1948 war he began a lyric about
Bialik, the Hebrew poet, that in the
most natural way turned into a
prayer for fraternity between Arabs
and Jews. And after that Imri's
grandmother kept on growing trees
and flowers in what used to be sand,
and Imri's whole family kept on
sending music, one of the languages
of peace, up into the Middle East air.
Well, I just thought you would like
to hear about one obscure 14-year-
old who happened to become a target
of yours, because why shouldn't you
know who it is you hated enough to
kill? And now that your friends have
murdered Imri and blown up his
father's hand, there will be that
much less music in the world, and
that much less civilization. .
It could be, though, that you
didn't really tell an untruth when
you called Imri a "soldier." On
our battered planet there are al-
ways, after all, two armies — the
army of guns and the army of
clarinets. Death flies out of one
and beauty from the other. hurl is
a fallen soldier in the army of
clarinets, and in the end your
most intractable stumbling
block, your deepest contest, will
have to be not politics, or your
Soviet arms suppliers, or land, or
your propagandists abroad, or
your multiple perversions of the
vocabulary of idealism, or your
fellow Arabs who have impris-
oned and despised and morally
crippled and corrupted you for
the last 30 years, or your hatred of
Jews, or what you call "self-
determination" while denying it
to another people, or your vow to
dismantle Israel, or your putting
military uniforms on boys just
Imri's age and teaching them ter-
rorism, or even your bloodthirsty
braggadocio; or anything like
that.
No. You will have to grapple with
what you know to be your chosen
enemies — rank after rank of the
singing clarinets: the army of civili-
zation. Your guns cough in brutal
eyeblink blasts and shatter human
bones. Your friends, by stealth and
ambush, murdered Imri. You are
terribly proud of this, and crow it
over the airwaves. No matter. Civili-
zation is more tenacious than the
death you bring. Paperbag trees, and
Keats in a garden near an airport,
and the long, long voice of the flute,
and the singing clarinets — these are
the soldiers you will have to defeat. If
you can.
The shock of what had occurred was great and the Cynthia Ozick appeal to reason deeply moving. Yet, only a day
later, also in a N.Y. Times Op-Ed Page article, Sabah Kabbani, Syria's ambassador to the United Nations, under the
title "Carter, the Palestinians and Israel," threw in the barb at Israel with a rejection of the state's very existence:
If resorting to violence is to be used as the pretext to deny the Palestinians the right to establish their
state, Israel herself should not have as her Prime Minister Menahem Begin, the former leader of the Irgun,
a notorious Jewish terrorist group which carried out the massacre of 250 defenseless Palestinians in the
village of Deir Yassin on April 9, 1948 — five weeks before Israel was established.
This is the spirit that dominates hate. Is it too much to expect that even the vilest of haters might respond with heart
and mind to the Cynthia Ozick message? So fir the horizon is gloomy, even for those who say they are "cautiously
optimistic" about Anwar Sadat.
`Panama and Israel': Equating
Defense for People in Peril
Panama is in the limelight. Israel is in the limelight.
Much is made of the duty to protect the lives of Americans
in Panama in the year 2000. They have protection now from
American troops.
Similarly, there is need for protection for Israelis — and
the duty to assure them the right to self-protection.
Americans in Panama are 1,500 miles from home; Is-
raelis are nine miles from danger. How do the two neces-
sities for human rights equate — or contrast? Near East
Report, the organ of the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee, commented editorially on the two related is-
sues:
Last week, Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd
(D-Va.) suggested that the Administration's prop-
osed package sale of advanced fighter aircraft to
Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel be postponed
until after the Panama Canal Treaty has been
voted. Undoubtedly, Senate preoccupation with
the treaty precludes close scrutiny of the arms
sales.
Ironically, the treaty has not only impinged on
the arms sales issue, but it has underscored
America's concern with issues of national sec-
urity as they relate to territory. It took the United
States 13 years of tough negotiations to conclude
a draft treaty with Panama. And even though
Panama is 1,500 miles from the United States and
the treaty will not be fully implemented until the
year 2000, the treaty concerns itself with future
U.S. navigation rights, the right of military inter-
vention and the status of the 30,000 U.S. residents
in the Canal Zone. After the treaty is fully im-
plemented, these Americans will be allowed to
live in the Zone even though Panama will have full
soverignty over the region. They will not have to
accept Panamanian citizenship.
Anyone who accepts the view that the United
States has the right to be vigilant in protecting its
security interests in Panama must surely recog-
nize Israel's legitimate security interests in the
future of the Sinai, the Golan Heights, the West
Bank and the Gaza Strip — areas which have
served as staging grounds for Arab aggression
against Israel. These territories, captured by Is-
rael in a defensive war of survival in 1967, are not
1,500 miles from Israel's frontiers. The West Bank
is nine miles from Natanya and the Mediterra-
nean. Israelis must be concerned with the disposi-
tion of these lands today — not in the year 2000.
Israel is a small country of 3% million citizens
surrounded by 140 million Arabs; it is not a
superpower.
Thus, any Israeli government has an obligation
to its citizens to protect Israel's vital security in-
terests. A magnanimous Israeli offer to return all
the territories in advance of a negotiated peace
settlement may please an impatient Carter Ad-
ministration, but would place Israel in dire
jeopardy.
The Israeli government has expressed a readi-
ness to take bold risks for peace. Already, Egypt
has been offered sovereignty over all of Sinai,
with demilitarization and security arrangements
to be worked out. Israel has proposed to end its
military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza
Strip and to extend self-rule to the Palestinian
Arabs living there. But in comparing this
negotiating position with the State Department's
posture on Panama, it becomes clear that a dou-
ble standard is being applied.
Perhaps this will add to the pleadings made in behalf of
Israel. At least it is on the record in support of the policies
for a defensible Israel.