|
|
Monday, March 06, 2006
Woman speaks to foster peace in the Middle East
|
By Katy Brandenburg
News-Post Staff
FREDERICK — Anna Baltzer, 26-year-old Jewish-American granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, never thought she would sympathize with Palestinians in the Middle East.
It's not that she was ever anti-Palestinian, she said during a talk Sunday at the Unity Church on West Ninth Street. But growing up, she felt like she only heard one side of the story.
"I didn't know who (the Palestinians) were," she said. "All they were (to me) were suicide bombers."
Even after visiting Israel for 10 days as a teenager, she said she saw nothing to make her think Israel was anything other than a peace-keeping democracy.
When she had a chance to travel around the Middle East — to Lebanon, Syria and Iran while teaching English in Turkey — her opinions began to change.
Arabic and Muslim people welcomed Ms. Baltzer into their homes — though she had been told they would not — and shared stories of persecution from the side she had never heard.
"I was surprised, shocked, and sometimes angry that I hadn't been told the whole truth," she said. "Four times as many Palestinian civilians are killed as Israeli civilians. You don't really hear about that."
Ms. Baltzer saw the real situation firsthand while volunteering in the West Bank for five months with the International Women's Peace Service. She and other volunteers took pictures and wrote stories to document human rights violations against Palestinians, including the invasion, occupation and destruction of their land, military checkpoints in their towns and random assaults and killings.
"As soon as I went there, it was clear to me that the media and society had not given me the whole picture," she said.
Now, Ms. Baltzer travels around the U.S. sharing her experiences and photos with audiences. She said she believed it was her responsibility to tell others what hasn't been documented.
Approximately $10 million in U.S. tax dollars each day goes to the Israeli government to fund the West Bank occupation and pay for weapons that aid in what is essentially a violation of international law, Ms. Baltzer
said.
According to U.N. agreements -- such as Resolution 242 in 1967, which stated that the Israeli armed forces should withdraw from territories occupied in the recent conflict — the settlers who are building colonies in the Palestinian state have no legal right to be there, she said.
Suicide bombings, which receive major media attention, do not happen every day, she said. But random imprisonment, roadblocks, state-sanctioned civilian violence and other civil rights violations do — and often go unpunished and unnoticed.
"We as Americans have the responsibility to be aware of where our money is going and be outraged that it is being used to carry out human rights violations and violations of international law," she said.
Ms. Baltzer works with local peace and community groups, such as the Peace Resource Center and Women in Black in Frederick, who co-sponsored her talk at Unity Church on Sunday. The talk was the first event in the church's monthlong Season of Nonviolence.
Ms. Baltzer recently published a book about her experiences called "Witness in Palestine: Journal of a Jewish American Woman in the Occupied Territories."
http://www.fredericknewspost.com/sections/news/display.htm?storyid=47136
posted by Somebody @ 11:49 PM Permanent Link
 
0 Comments:
<< Home
|
| |
