By Susie Davidson

Advocate Correspondent

The complexities of the Middle East situation were very much in evidence on May 10 at the First Parish in Harvard Square.

Though not billed as an event promoting any particular mindset, one was inundated, upon entering it, with literature calling for an end to U.S. aid to Israel. This tone proved prescient as speaker after speaker returning from an April 23-30 mission to Gaza, the West Bank and Israel, decried Israeli treatment of innocent Palestinians.

Cambridge Peace Commission’s Nancy Murray (also a member of the Boston Coalition for Palestinian Rights) began by conceding that the group met with no Israeli officials. Although they had contacted four ministries, it was Israeli Independence Day week, when many offices were closed. Thus, Palestinian areas and spokespeople comprised their entire experience.

Massachusetts ACLU Executive Director John Roberts lashed out at settlement construction, invasion of the Palestinians’ 22% of the country, bulldozers and olive tree razing. CPC Director Cathy Hoffman detailed traumas of Palestinian children (40% of Palestinian casualties since September 2000 were under 18, she said). Nothing was spared: sizes of holes blown into buildings; 38% unemployment rate; actualities of injuries; separation of hospitals from patients; sparse interiors of refugee tents; humiliation endured by Palestinians at (family-disconnecting) bypass road checkpoints; the arbitrary, illogical whims of road guards.

"It is," she concluded, "a situation of daily exposure to people who are taught to hate you."

Co-organizer Janice Hayden bemoaned 24 hour curfews and military devastation in Hebron. Former Zionist Marty Federman spoke painfully of his wretching soulsearching (Abraham, in his utter hospitality, he contended, would have claimed the land for both sides of his descendents). "How can we, from ghettos, enforce curfews?" he beseeched…"from pogroms, attack an innocent population?"

Ravi Dixit of the Arab Association for Human Rights raised analogies to apartheid and Jim Crow segregation. But the most saccharine proved to be Dessima Williams, a Brandeis instructor (as she repeatedly invoked). "The Palestinians have done nothing wrong!" she announced. "They are a civil and vibrant society!" But there is hope, she assured the crowd. "They say ‘We will not be good victims!’"

Five whole minutes of questions were then allowed. "Although I belong to the Arab-Israeli Dialogue," a man stood and said, "and agree that Israel does sometimes commit atrocities, so do the Palestinians, on a regular basis. How can you stand there and call this an impartial presentation?"

"U.N. Resolution 181!" an attendee shrieked (seeming to forget that while accepted by Israeli Arabs in 1947, it was rejected by Palestinians). "The Palestinians execute their own citizens suspected of collaborating with Israel by firing squad!" a woman countered. "They hate them? Didn’t Suha Arafat just say she hated Israel? Wasn’t a boatload of explosives bound for Gaza just intercepted?"

Needless to say, peaceful negotiations did not ensue.

Outside, Hillel Stavis of Cambridge ("the belly of the beast" as he termed it), offered his thoughts.

"24 hour curfews?" he asked. "Well, when you have nonstop automatic and semiautomatic shelling coming from the hills above and below Hebron, what else can you do?"

"Certain things were not to be said here tonight, and the Jews on this panel are complicit."

"Fascism stems from naivete."

"I am absolutely stunned," added Steve Antler of Brookline, "by the denial of the fact that there has been a vigorous peace movement in Israel long before there had been an Intifada. Did you once hear the word Fatah or Hamas?"

"There was a staggering naivete about Palestinians as practitioners of a civil society," stated Brookline’s Richard Landes, himself a member of the Arab-Israeli Dialogue. "We will not be good victims? What strikes me is the preciousness of being victimized to the Palestinian identity, how they urge their children to come forward as victims. They embody the quintessence of seeking to be good victims!"

"Plenty of people can tell you how grotesque the comparison with the Holocaust is, Birmingham…" he continued. "I’m unaware that there were mortar shells and subatomic weapons being launched by the blacks in Birmingham."

"Though the majority of what was said tonight could well be true," Jeff Stone of Milton indicated, "they lose credibility when they don’t mention the other side’s reprehensible acts of violence."

Few Jews, unlike this panel’s participants, will deny that mistakes are made on both sides. But one can take heart in the words of Israeli defense minister and Labor leader Binyamin Ben-Eliezer following this past weekend’s violence. Retaking land returned to Palestinians in peace accords, he said, was not at all his intention. Rather, Israel’s retaliatory actions were short-lived, and for the purpose of achieving security goals.