Liberate the camps! An open letter to the nation of Israel

German concentration camp, WWII
U. S. concentration camps- June 11, 2019, at Border Patrol’s Weslaco, TX, Station

Dear Citizens of Israel,

We did it for you during World War II. Now it’s your turn to help us.

The U.S. government-sponsored concentration camps on our southern border are racist, immoral and unconscionable. Over 50,000 refugees are being held indefinitely in unsanitary and overcrowded conditions—including infants and children, separated from their parents.

Trump continues to ignore criticism and refuses to take any action that would demonstrate even a shred of humanity toward those imprisoned. White supremacists cheer for an autocratic leader who keeps pushing to see how much he can get away with.

Does this seem familiar?

Israel, as one of the United States’ strongest allies, is in a position to influence and intervene. This madness must stop. The unthinkable cannot happen again. We need your help.

Liberate the camps! We did it for you; now you do it for us.

Respectfully,

Pat Daniel and Kathie Malley-Morrison

Outraged and ashamed citizens of the U.S.

SED Student Helps Bring Israeli, Palestinian Youth Together

by Joel Brown

Dana Dunwoody (SED’19) (above) spent part of her summer using disc games to bring Israeli and Palestinian youth together at the Ultimate Peace camp in southern Israel. Photos courtesy of Ultimate Peace.

By Joel Brown

Just about everyone has tossed around a Frisbee for fun. Dana Dunwoody is doing it for peace. At a summer camp in an Israeli desert, she is using the flying discs to bring together Israeli and Palestinian youth—and maybe change the world, one toss at time.“As youths, we get inundated with information about who we are and what our cultures are, and when there’s a lot of violence and hostility going on, there’s a lot of misinterpretation,” says Dunwoody (SED’19), a doctoral candidate in applied human development. “To be able to come together and realize, I can have a say in changing that narrative, is a very empowering experience.”This is Dunwoody’s second stint as a volunteer counselor at the Ultimate Peace camp. Using the grounds of an Israeli boarding school for a week each summer since 2007, the organization strives to build ties between Israeli and West Bank youths. It does that with Ultimate, a game that’s extremely competitive, but depends heavily on teamwork and sportsmanship. The 200 or so 10-to-16-year-old campers come for the hours of practice and games each day. They have some fun away from the burdens of daily life in that conflict-wracked corner of the world, and if things go the way they are supposed to go, they begin to see one another differently.“We encourage conversation and sharing of culture,” says Dunwoody, who has a bachelor’s in psychology from Temple University and a master’s in athletic counseling from Springfield College. “We have a lot of different activities the kids do together to create safe spaces to share their identities and explore other cultures.”

Dana Dunwoody speaking with camper

Dunwoody uses her skills as an educator and athletic coach to help campers find ways to get along.

Mostly, though, there is Ultimate.

Flying-disc sports are a lot more organized than they were in the peace-and-love days of the 1960s. Millions of people in the United States regularly play Ultimate, which is not officially called Ultimate Frisbee because Frisbee is a Wham-O trademark. Long Island native Dunwoody picked it up as an undergrad and quickly became an avid player.

“You hear about these opportunities to use Ultimate culture as a way to connect people,” she says. Ultimate Peace, created by Ultimate-loving Americans and one Israeli, also offers a year-round program that brings Israeli and Palestinian youth together to play the game.

In Ultimate, the disc is advanced only by passing—players cannot run with the disc—and a team scores a point when one of its players catches the disc in the other team’s end zone. Most important, as far as Ultimate Peace is concerned, there is no referee, so players must call their own fouls.

According to USA Ultimate’s “Ultimate in 10 Simple Rules,” “Ultimate stresses sportsmanship and fair play. Competitive play is encouraged, but never at the expense of respect between players, adherence to the rules, and the basic joy of play.”

“The spirit of the game infiltrates all parts of your being,” says Dunwoody. “For me it feels like it’s alive. Every person manifests it in the way they communicate with you on and off the field. At Ultimate Peace, it’s mutual respect, but it’s also integrity and collaboration and cooperation.”

“The Ultimate Peace project is an example of sport for good, or sport for development, which is kind of an emerging field,” says Dunwoody’s faculty advisor John McCarthy (SED’98, SED’04), a School of Education clinical associate professor and director of the Institute for Athletic Coach Education. “These projects hold so much promise in areas where a lot of people have struggled and there are some really deep societal problems.”

“Dana’s very committed to social justice,” McCarthy says. “This project brings together a lot of her passions: social justice and her energy for using sport and exercise as a vehicle for positive change and just her kind of caring for other people.”

None of which surprises McCarthy. Dunwoody is SED’s first Holmes Scholar, and was elected national president of the program for 2017 to 2019. The Holmes Scholar Program, which is overseen by the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education provides mentorship, peer support, and professional development to students from historically underrepresented backgrounds.

“She’s a bright light,” McCarthy says. “She can do a lot of good for a lot of people.”

Can generals sometimes be right?

Israel-Palestine handshake symbol. licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Author: Wickey-nl.

by Kathleen Malley-Morrison & Ed Agro

Monday’s engagingpeace post discussed the opposition of General Dwight D. Eisenhower to the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Although it is easy to stereotype military commanders as always believing that the only tools available in their fight against designated enemies are death and destruction, there are other recent examples of leaders who do not promote endless war.

In a recent (June 29, 2016) Associated Press article by Dan Perry and Joseph Federman, we learn thatAn extraordinary array of former top commanders are now criticizing Netanyahu in increasingly urgent terms, accusing him of mishandling the Palestinian issue and allying with extremists who are bent on dismantling Israel’s democracy.”

More specifically, and more dramatically, “a group representing more than 200 retired leaders in Israel’s military, police, Mossad spy service, and Shin Bet security agency presented a plan to help end the half-century occupation of the Palestinians through unilateral steps, including disavowing claims to over 90 percent of the West Bank and freezing Jewish settlement construction in such areas.

The movement, called Commanders for Israel’s Security, reflects an increasingly widespread assessment that Israel is drifting catastrophically toward permanent entanglement with the Palestinians and conflict with the world community.”

These courageous and long-overdue recommendations of the Commanders would move Israel in the direction of compliance with the UN General Assembly Resolution 181 (Partition Plan) of November 29, 1947,  and away from the violence that continues today.

We have one point of disagreement with the Perry and Federman article.  They state: “Complicating the picture is that the Gaza pullout ended badly from Israel’s perspective: Hamas militants took it over, leading to three wars between the sides.”

This assertion misses the fact that Hamas was elected in a process all observers considered to be fair; it was only after Israel, with American help, declared that election to be illegitimate that Hamas returned to armed resistance.  Another thing that’s not well known is that Hamas was formed years ago with the help of Israeli fifth-columnists as a way to weaken the Palestinian Authority and render rational discussion impossible.

Overall, the Perry and Federman article is excellent, very informative and heartening! It’s taken years to reach recognition that Israel cannot continue its current policies, even with the self-serving military and economic assistance of the U.S. government.   Let’s hope reason and humanity prevail. Let’s hope the wrong-headed Netanyahu government falls and Israel finally joins the Middle East. And not to forget, the Israeli/Palestinian anti-Apartheid (for want of a better word) activists have been working against insuperable odds for many many years.