Just to set the record straight, the Lebanese woman who Bill refers to has, I believe some distant Jewish relation, but everyone else in his family is nominally a Lebanese Christian. Both of them are good friends who returned to Beirut some years ago where he teaches at the University of Beirut. While she probably did more to advance the Palestinian struggle in the SF Bay Area than anyone else I know, she had nothing to do with the advertisement to which Bill refers, the one that appeared in the SF Chronicle and the SF Examiner signed by 300 (it was and not 400) Bay Area Jews. It was in fact, drawn up by myself, and three other Jews, one the South African who Bill refers to, who met, coincidentally in an Israeli-owned delicatessen in San Francisco, and gave ourselves four days to get as many signatures as we could. If we had waited a week we would have more than doubled that number. I had only three refusals, a well-known lawyer cousin who represented the ILWU whose son was living in Israel, a musician who had just taken a job at a local TV station and was legitimately afraid of being fired if his signature appeared in that ad, and Todd Gitlin, who refused twice, stipulating that he would only sign it if the ad also condemned the PLO. We received national publicity on CBS and in Time or Newsweek, and were, predictably attacked as either being fictitious or self-hating Jews within the Jewish media. The NY Times ad that Bill referred to was circulated by a professor at UC Berkeley who had lost 33 members of her family in the Holocaust, and was signed by scores of Jewish academics, the exact number of which I don't recall. The response that she received in the mail from pro-Israel Jews was so vicious and and Nazi-like, to put it the proper perspective, that she could scarcely believe, particularly when some of it came on the letterhead of Jewish doctors and dentists. One interesting thing occurred around our ad. We received a call from an ad agency in Los Angeles informing us that an anonymous donor wanted to place our ad in leading newspapers around the country. When we requested the name of that donor we were told it could not be disclosed. Our small group smelled a rat. We thought how strange it would appear if this ad appeared in papers across the country with the names of 300 Bay Area Jews and we would have no idea who paid for it. Obviously, it would be attributed to Arab oil money and we would be dismissed as their tools which was how leaders of several Jewish organizations were already describing us. So I phoned the ad agency in LA and told the man that we didn't want the ad reproduced, and I was told that his client was going to do it anyway! Having worked at the LA Examiner, I had a pretty good idea of the papers that would be selected for the ad, and we got on the phones right away to stop its publication. Fortunately, my hunches turned out to be completely on target. Selected had been the NY Times, the Boston Globe, the Atlanta Constitution, the Washington Post, the Christian Monitor, the New Orleans Times Picayune, the St. Louis Post Dispatch, the Chicago Tribune, the LA Times and the Des Moines Register. Most of the papers had already decided not to accept it but several were, in fact, ready to run it, when they were contacted, and pulled it when they heard our objections. Who was the client? Obviously, some one, or some organization with a lot of money who was out to damage our credibility. Some organization that was without question, in our minds, working for Israel. Jeff Blankfort William Mandel wrote: > Tom Nagy doesn't recall a previous Israeli massacre that provoked reaction > in the U.S. as extensive as last week's. > When Menachem Begin conducted his aerial bombing campaign against > Beirut, on the excuse that it was sheltering Arafat's forces, two women at > KPFA, one a Lebanese (then the only Arab associated with the station, who > had hitherto confined herself to convincing the world that Arabs are human > by playing their music; she is married to a Jew) and a South African Jew, > both friends of mine, drew up a petition signed "Menachem Begin Does Not > Speak For Us." It was signed by four hundred San Francisco Bay Area Jews, of > whom not more than ten per cent were Left in any sense. Published as a large > ad in the S.F. Chronicle and then in the New York Times, it was the first > ever expression of Jewish opposition to Israeli military policy taken > outside Jewish circles as such. That was the beginning of the constantly > broadening public opposition to Israeli policy among American Jews, just now > given particular publicity by the statement of Rabbi Michael Lerner, who > long ago was a leader of the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley. > William > Mandel >
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