Israeli American poet and activist Moriel Rothman-Zecher visited City College Oct. 1 to share several personal stories that helped influence his current outspoken activism to help end the war in Palestine.
To an audience of students and faculty members assembled in the Cultural Awareness Center, Rothman-Zecher first described when he was 9 years old in Ohio. A fierce act in defending a friend from being bullied instilled in him a mentality of ‘good violence:’ using violence to stop another act of violence or injustice happening in the world.
“I would find a way to be violent in order to pursue justice and stop the violent people who are doing injustice,” said Rothman-Zecher. “Specifically for me having been born in Israel, the good violence that I wanted to do was pursue justice through the Israeli military.”
Rothman-Zecher said life in Israel as a young Jewish teenager is very different than growing up in a western society like the United States. In Israel, all Jews except for the highly orthodox, are required by law to join the military at age 18. Palestinians living in Israel are exempt from this draft.
“All Israeli Jews and all my friends were prepared to go into the military; it was all anyone talked about,” said Rothman-Zecher. “It was really interesting for me because it wasn’t that my friends were saying ‘I want to go and kill the Palestinians.’ They would say, ‘I want to go and be a part of this system admired by society.’”
According to Rothman-Zecher, a soldier in Israel is glorified and well-respected. For veterans it would be easy to acquire a well-paid and comfortable job position after their service is done. With this idolized view of enlisting in mind, and the influence he received from his American Jewish Community, Rothman-Zecher believed the military was a perfect way to carry out his concept of ‘good violence.’
“They’re using violence to stop our enemies, to stop terrorism, to stop everyone who wants to kill us and I want to be a part of that,” said Rothman-Zecher. “At the same time, I was very active in the civil rights movement, so I also wanted to pursue some form of anti-racism or injustice or inequality in this context. So on one hand, I wanted to be a freedom writer, and on the other hand, I wanted to be some sort of freedom fighter.”
In the end, Rothman-Zecher surprisingly chose to be a freedom writer instead of joining the military. He was privileged in having liberal parents. They were supportive of his choice and were able to take him to the United States after high school to escape the draft.
Rothman-Zecher enrolled in Middlebury College, a liberal arts school in Vermont to study Arabic. During a break in the semester, Rothman-Zecher began to see evidence of the massacre happening on the Gaza Strip. On Dec. 25, 2008, several news outlets reported that somewhere between 300 Palestinians were killed during Israeli airstrikes and his concept of ‘good violence’ began to crumble away.
“When the amount of human life taken in a specific attack has to be approximated in the dozens or in the hundreds, there’s something very seriously wrong going on with hundreds of people being killed in one day,” said Rothman-Zecher. “As I’m reading the news I’m trying to make sense out of what’s happening, and I think it’s a rare thing in life that we come to a conclusion that we don’t want to come to. This was one of those times in my life, and it actually happened in part because of someone who I knew.”
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That ‘someone’ Rothman-Zecher knew was Ahmar. Ahmar was head of the Arabic language department where Rothman-Zecher tutored at Middlebury College. Ahmar was also Palestinian and had family living in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead in 2008-2009, a 22-day conflict led by Israel on the Gaza Strip. The conflict committed a long list of war crimes. Casualties included over 1,400 Palestinians, 82 percent of whom were civilians.
“The Israeli army first started with the bombing campaign and then entered with ground troops into Gaza. Amar’s two brothers and his father were working at their farm in Gaza, and circumstances unclear, the Israeli soldiers started shooting them,” said Rothman-Zecher. “One of his brothers got hit in the shoulder and died almost right away. The other brother got hit in the leg, and his father is yelling to the soldiers, ‘We’re not armed, we’re not combatants, and my sons are bleeding!”
Rothman-Zecher described that the army refused to let an ambulance through for six hours and the brother bled to death on the ground. After hearing this story, Rothman-Zecher promised himself if he ever returned to Israel after completing college, he would start to seriously work on ways to challenge the Israeli occupation in Gaza.
This event fueled Rothman-Zecher’s passionate view of the direction Israel’s foreign affair policy is currently heading.
After some research on the war, Rothman-Zecher found out that a successful talking point in major media outlets is to influence the Israeli propaganda regarding Palestine by stating Gaza is no longer occupied.
“In 2005 the Israeli government unilaterally withdrew its settlers and soldiers from the physical territory of the Gaza Strip,” Rothman-Zecher said. “Yet Israel remains entire control over the borders, over the airspace, the electromagnetic fields, Gaza’s seaports- everything that goes in and out of the Gaza Strip is controlled by Israel. So I decided to get more involved in activism and action against the occupation”
Rothman-Zecher moved back to Jerusalem after graduation and worked for several human rights organizations, such as Rabbis for Human Rights that assisted Palestinian and African refugees traveling from Sudan and Iran to find refuge in Israel’s West Bank. Rothman-Zecher is a human rights activist, and a writer for several news outlets such as the Huffington Post and is an independent blogger at the Leftern Wall. He writes on topics of militarism, racism, occupation, violence, justice and peace and often speaks at several colleges and universities spreading awareness about the current occupation in Gaza.
Riad Bahhur, History of the Middle East professor, stated that Rothman-Zecher’s speech was very interesting as it discussed several topics about Israel’s occupation of Gaza that were not generally mentioned in most media outlets such as Fox and CNN.
“It’s up to students to figure out how to respond to what I think is one of the most pressing foreign policy affecting Americans,” said Bahhur. “For example, if students wanted to form a club for Palestinian rights, there would be some support for them from the faculty. I would support a Palestine rights club in the way that I would support any club calling for social justice or positive change in the world.”
