Editorials

So you look out your kitchen window, and in the yard next door the two brothers who live there seem to be fighting. You notice that they’ve got knives and that one of them seems to be bleeding a bit. What do you do? Go over there and stand between them? Call the police? Yell out the window to them, “Cut it out, right now!” Perhaps? Or do you pull down your shades and go on making  

dinner? 

Of all the above answers, the normal person with good intentions would say that the last option is the wrong one for sure. Which of the other three to choose is problematic, but it’s human nature, thank goodness, for most of us to want to try to do something to keep our neighbors from killing one another.  

That’s why no one should be surprised that some of us who are neither Jewish nor Moslem, neither Arab nor Israeli, people like Jimmy Carter and Kofi Annan and (not to claim any right to be in such distinguished company) the management of this publication feel that it’s our duty to continue to address, from time to time, the ongoing controversies in what used to be called the Holy Land. A Jewish correspondent directed our attention to Secretary General Annan’s wise words, which appear on the opposite page, saying that they expressed his own whole opinion on the topic, and we agree with him.  

The excellent Cal English department introduced me to John Donne’s powerful meditation on our relationships with one another: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind….”  

The spectacle of Donne’s religious descendants, today’s Episcopalians and other Anglicans, slicing and dicing one another around the world must be causing him to turn over in his grave. Many will say that Christians have always quarreled with one another, but that doesn’t make it right. And is it any business of those who are post-Christian, or who never were Christian, to scold them for it? Possibly. 

In the forties, fifties and sixties Southern whites used to warn the few Jews in their towns, many of whom had the bad habit of speaking up for the civil rights of local African-Americans, that segregation was none of their business, that they were outsiders who just didn’t understand the relationship of blacks and whites. The course of history might well have been different if they hadn’t ignored that advice and spoken up anyway. 

In the recent past all sorts of people in the United States and in Europe who have expressed opinions about the ongoing Israel/Palestine troubles have faced pressure to be silent from some who think of themselves as friends of Israel. Very recently the recipients of such pressure have found the courage to speak up about it, to say that it does more harm than good.  

Stories about attempts to silence critics of Israel have now appeared in The Guardian in England, in the New York Review of Books and in the Jewish Forward, among others. Just last weekend there was a story about it on NPR’s excellent On the Media program, with the Forward’s editor as guest. The top cover story in this month’s Harpers Magazine, about democratic trends within Islam, by Ken Silverstein, incidentally recounts the efforts of a parade of editors at the Los Angeles Times to gut a story he did on Hezbollah “for fear of offending supporters of Israel.” Reading between the lines, that’s probably why Silverstein no longer works for the Times.  

One of Christianity’s central stories, the parable of the good Samaritan, was told by Jesus to a lawyer who asked, “Who is my neighbor?” when he was reminded that religious law commanded him to love his neighbor. The meaning of the story has often been discussed and often disputed because it’s hard for people to accept the message that they should get involved in the problems of all kinds of others, not just of people in their own group, friends or family. It becomes even more relevant in today’s world of air travel and mass communications when we have all become neighbors whether we like it or not. 

But we sympathize with the complaints of our Berkeley readers who are more than tired of hearing about Israel and Palestine. This includes those who have personal reasons for caring about what happens there and for whom the subject is just too painful, those who don’t regard people across the globe as their neighbors, those who think local topics are more important, and even those who just think that local papers ought to focus on more pleasant topics. (One correspondent even suggested that we should ban the topic from our op-ed pages because an increasingly large percentage of Berkeley’s population is Jewish, a logic hard to follow.)  

We still have a backlog of letters elicited by Matthew Taylor’s eloquent defense of Jimmy Carter’s new book, but our sense is that once again our readers have had enough for a while. We agree with Taylor that Carter is a brave man whose work has been unfairly maligned, but a lot of space in major media has now been devoted to the same opinion. The book is still high on the best-seller lists, so perhaps it doesn’t need any more comments in these pages for a while. We’ll probably get around to putting the remaining letters on the Internet eventually, but we’re going to give us all a break by giving up printing any more of them, at least for Lent.