The Path to Peace

The interview by George M. Anderson, S.J., with Claudette Habesch, Obstacles to Peace, A Palestinian-Christian Perspective (11/17), demonstrates how the Israeli security wall is really a weapon of war. When completed, this wall, referred to by some as the apartheid wall, will be 220 miles long, 25 feet highthree times as long and twice as high as the Berlin Wall. Instead of guns, tanks and planes, cement and steel are used as weapons of dispossession and human brutality.

In the words of Neve Gorday, a teacher of politics and human rights at Ben-Gurion University, It will stand as the largest open-air prison known in the world. It will separate villages from water supplies, children from schools, farmers from their lands. Families will not have access to some of their ancestral cemeteries. Other Palestinian parents will even be cut off from their adult children. The tens of thousands of trees that are being removed in the process will have disastrous effects on the watershed.

This wall does not separate Israel from Palestine; rather it divides Palestine from itself, and will imprison more than 210,00 Palestinians, 76 villages, towns and cities, according to the Israeli human right group B’tselem. Bulldozers are building barriers between the sick and their hospitals. More than 10 Palestinian women have already been prevented from getting to hospitals to deliver their children. A human rights group reports that Israeli soldiers would not let an ambulance, just 10 meters away, transport a woman giving birth to the hospital. This resulted in her delivering the child at the checkpoint.

Does anyone really believe that this will add to the security of Israel or promote the waning road map of peace plan? Former President Reagan shouted: Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall, referring to the Berlin Wall. President Bush and our elected officials raise little more than a whimper against this wall. Each day the media adeptly reports single acts of violence committed by the Israeli military or a Palestinian terrorist while failing to report the longer-term and far more severe human consequences of building this wall. Could it be that the blood and body count over so many years has rendered us too numb for any sensible reaction? Or worse, have we been conditioned to think that Palestinians are less than human and deserve such treatment? The silence of churches and citizens and governments is deafening.

This week the Red Cross announced that it will end its food program to the Palestinians, stating that it is now the responsibility of Israel. The United Nations declared that Israel has created an inhumane disaster. When will it stop?

Israel’s desire for security is understandable, but imprisoning the Palestinian people and degrading their human dignity will only prove a source of more violence. Only a just peace will provide security both for the Israeli and Palestinian peoples now, and for their children in the future. Only a sensible and sane plan that is based on a just solution will ensure a peace that will last.

(Rev.) Richard Broderick

The Housing Challenge

Your editorial Low-Income Housing Crisis (11/10), uncritically accepts the conclusions of a housing advocacy group, responding to a supposed crisis, that are based entirely on arbitrary standards. They state that minimum acceptable housing is a modest two-bedroom unit, and for that people should pay no more than 30 percent of their income. The authors say these standards require an income of $15.21 per hour. That would amount to more than $31,600 per year, not including benefits, even for entry-level workers.

While decent housing should be available at affordable prices, these are totally unrealistic standards. Why do you support them? Had I written such an article for my high school Jesuit teachers, they would have put my youthful idealism into realistic perspective. What would Jesus do? Surely he would help the truly needy. But might he not ask, for example, what is wrong with a one-bedroom apartment for a single occupant? Or for two or more roommates to share housing? Or for unmarried young adults to remain with their parents a while longer? What about living in a boarding house? (It would be useful for America to explore why boarding houses are virtually extinct, despite the apparent need.) Jesus might also ask married couples, what is wrong with both partners working and halving the housing percentage bite? Jesus might go further and ask whether high minimum wages help some people but result in fewer employed, and whether rent control laws help the needy or the savvy, while such laws play havoc with housing markets.

As a faithful subscriber for over 40 continuous years, I have become increasingly distressed over your leftward drift. While the church and faithful expect you to be an advocate for the poor, you have moved into the Looney Left, rarely tempering social concerns with those of individual responsibility. I just cannot bear any more of this addlepated thinking, so please cancel my subscription.

Larry Dacunto