'And they were silent, and answered him not a word' (Isaiah 36:21)

From the www.monabaker.com archive (legacy material)

Nurit Elhanan-Peled, Translated from English by Mark Marshall | The Occupation Magazine | 28 April 2005

`The looting will start immediately after the evacuation. One will take a window. Another will take a door.`
This racist and wicked statement, that was published a few days ago from the mouth of the one who stands at the head of the State of Israel, was intended purely as incitement and was meant to foment hatred and contempt towards those with whom the State of Israel is supposed to make real peace. To represent the Palestinians, the blood of whose children is splashed on every window and door in the criminal and redundant settlements that were set up on their stolen lands, to represent those victims as savages from the desert who will come to dismantle houses and loot windows and doors, just to make them into firewood, for they do not know the proper use of windows and doors – although they were the builders of all the Jewish settlements – is an expression of pure, benighted, dangerous racism, which the enlightened world cannot and must not tolerate any longer. In England a Member of Parliament who dared to say that the health system was collapsing under the burden of immigrants was dismissed, and the leader of the Tory party is being severely criticized because of racist statements against immigrants. However, not one of them dared to rise to the level of the racism and incitement of the Prime Minister of Israel. But this man, who has already floated the idea of a civil war that he evidently longs for, the man who has been stealing lands, looting property, ruining vineyards, uprooting orchards, who has killed and devastated and destroyed more than any other leader in the world today, has not been denounced for his words and obviously will not be brought to justice and will not be punished for his inflammatory words and many crimes.
In the wake of the boycott that is hanging over the head of Israeli academia, a boycott that will certainly harm seekers of peace, but which expresses the revulsion of the enlightened academic world at what is happening here, and especially at the fact that the Israeli academia is not rising up and crying out in the face of the despicable racism of their leaders; maybe the time has come to understand, that if people of letters and science in a State that is sunk up to its neck in racist discourse, in the blood of innocents, in injustice the likes of which have not been seen in years, do not condemn and do not call for the leader who incites and instigates to be brought to justice, if people of letters and science do not demand that he withdraw his racist words, and accept these words as a matter of course, and maybe as truth, then these people of letters and science deserve every condemnation and every boycott that the enlightened world can impose on them.
Dr. Nurit Elhanan-Peled, Jerusalem, is Lecturer in Language Education at the Hebrew University, Tel-Aviv University and the David Yellin Teachers College
Laureate of the Sakharov prize (2001) for Human Rights and the Freedon of Speech, awarded by the European Parliament.
Member of the Parents-Circle, the Israeli-Palestinians forum of Bereaved Parents for peace.