EDITH KURZWEIL
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media, the Israelis reacted to our massacres in the way we do to theirs -
by superimposing their preoccupations on ours. They could not know
that our racism is primarily based on economic inequality rather than
nationhood, or that police brutality is part of a very different syndrome
than Palestinian terrorism.
After the conference, I managed to interview Teddy Kollek, the
legendary mayor ofJerusalem, to get his views on some of the issues dis–
cussed at the conference. To begin with, [ wondered about the number
of Arab-Israeli encounter groups.
TK:
There are many, more than people think. People don't fully know
about all we are doing for teachers' training, about the many Arab
teachers corning to our universities.
EK:
Do you consider Israeli hesitations about going to the West Bank
justified?
TK:
I'm very worried about going to Los Angeles or to New York.
But I do go there.
EK:
How valid do you think Arab claims are?
TK:
When we came back to Jerusalem we found many houses destroyed.
We didn 't destroy a single mosque or a single church or a single
monastery. This is the situation. The Arabs claim that because we were
persecuted by the Germans and suffered in Europe, they should not have
to pay the price for that. But there were hardly any Arabs in Palestine.
The vast majority came because they were attracted by the labor condi–
tions created by the influx of Jews. It is to no avail to go into all this
history. We have to accept that there are Arabs here, and they have to
accept that there is an Israeli state which will continue to exist and will
get stronger. They should accept that they live under better circumstances
than any other Arab group anywhere else. The fact is that there is more
freedom of worship, more freedom of access to holy places, more free–
dom of expression, of teaching. They have a free press, which they never
had. We're opening a large Arab library in Jerusalem, built out of money
we raised, not from Arabs. All the rich Arabs haven 't given us a penny.
It
will be the freest library in the Arab world. You couldn't have all these
books in Egypt or in Syria . Each one of these countries excludes a large
number of books published somewhere else. In Jerusalem, they can have
all the books. There are four daily papers; they can write daily that Israel
has no right to exist - as long as they don't incite anything.
