BENNINGTON, VERMONT / ZIKHRON YAAKOV, ISRAEL-The Shalom Alliance is working to advance the cause of peace and justice and combat the very intolerance that Richard Evers displays. Evers' letter is filled with absurdly spiteful suppositions and mendaciously venomous rhetoric from start to finish.
The fact that he is a Jewish atheist, as he proudly proclaims, has no bearing on his purported subject. Many other Jewish atheists, some of them citizens of Israel, support its right to exist free of terrorist threats. Indeed, some of Israel's Zionist founders - such as Herzl, Nordau, Jabotinsky, and Ben Gurion - were secularists, agnostics and/or atheists.
Evers, furthermore, assumes erroneously that Judaism's traditional theology of chosenness is central to the message of Shalom Alliance's letter.
That letter does not display, as he feebly tries to argue, "self-involvement," implying indifference to others' suffering. (Evers's ramblings are, by contrast, a casebook illustration of self-aggrandizing self-involvement!) The Shalom Alliance's request for sensitivity about "a deeply troubling rise in antisemitism" and for public commentary that takes into account this concern in no way constitutes the sort of religio-ethnic triumphalism Evers supposes.
He also insinuates, mean-spiritedly, that Jewish people's commitment to our own survival means disrespect for other people.
His description of the conflict over Jewish and Arab territorial claims in the Middle East reveals lack of rudimentary historical and political understanding.
Reasonable minds may differ over the prudential and even ethical validity of Israel's military tactics in its campaign against Hamas. However, to conflate that issue with the larger question of Israel's legitimacy as a nation - and of Americans' support for that nation - is unacceptable. We are as indigenous to that land as the Iroquois and Dakota are to this one.
The mud that Evers lobs at the Shalom Alliance recoils upon him. He celebrates the so-called "Nakhba." And what was that? A failed campaign to wipe out the fledgling state of Israel in 1948 and in the process commit murder and mass displacement of the new nation's Jewish population.
Also worth noting: During the period of Jewish-Arab tensions in British mandate-era Palestine, the principal Palestinian leader was Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, grand mufti of Jerusalem, a Nazi sympathizer who consorted with Hitler. Hamas continues in the same ignominious tradition. Evers, in his uncritical sympathy for the Palestinian national cause, sides with people committed to genocide against Jews.
His smear tactics are unrelenting. He goes on to comment about the attempted murder of three Palestinian students. While that attack was reprehensible (immediately upon learning of it, I wrote a letter to my local paper to condemn it), Evers uses it to blur the line between support for Israel and malice toward Palestinians, as if the former automatically assumed the latter - a blatant falsehood.
Concern for the well-being of one group is not an invitation to assaults upon another.
Evers's attempt to defame the Shalom Alliance is wrong-headed and shameful.
Rabbi Seth Daniel Riemer
Bennington, Vermont / Zikhron Yaakov, Israel
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