Arab Audience Urged to Become Activists for Peace

In the largest gathering of its kind in Southern California since the end of the Persian Gulf War, the annual dinner of the Los Angeles chapter of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee had as its theme “Mending Fences in the Middle East.” One of the two keynote speakers adhered to the theme and the other did not.

Abuna Elias Chacour, a Palestinian Melchite priest from Israel’s Galilee, received repeated applause from the audience of several hundred Saturday night when he urged them to “get your hands dirty for peace” with demonstrations and other activism in the tradition of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi.

Saying that “a great hope nourishes hearts” of both Palestinians and Israelis for a peaceful settlement of the issues in the Holy Land, Chacour declared, “We know after seven wars that wars will not solve our problems.

“We must end this competitive mentality in the Middle East that says on each side that ‘our success must mean your destruction,’ ” he added.

Chacour said that in many respects the post-Gulf War period is dangerous, and he said he was praying for God to change the hearts of President Bush and Secretary of State James Baker “from stone to flesh” in their Middle Eastern policies.

The other keynote speaker, former Lebanese hostage Jeremy Levin, acknowledged at the outset of his talk that the event’s organizers had asked him to speak on mending fences. But he proceeded to castigate both the Israelis and the Bush Administration.

“A one-sided Pax Americana, that is what the Bush-Baker initiative (for an Arab-Israeli settlement) is about,” said Levin, a former CNN correspondent in Beirut who was kidnaped and held hostage by Islamic extremists for 11 months in 1984-85.

Referring to what he called America’s “arrogant material soul, still caught in a regrettable self-centered national jingoism,” Levin said he believes Americans are even more blinded about the Middle East than either the Arabs or Israelis. While Arabs and Israelis may have splinters in their eyes, there is “a beam in the eye of America the size of a giant redwood,” he said.

Saying no people in the world deserve their independence more than the Palestinians, Levin asserted that “Palestinians were making the deserts bloom in the Holy Land long before they taught the Israelis how.”

The audience listened quietly to Levin’s speech but did give him a standing ovation, less enthusiastic than Chacour’s, at the end.

Don Bustany, the Anti-Discrimination Committee’s Los Angeles chapter president, said the chief goals of the group are “justice for the Palestinians,” “a fair-handed U.S. policy throughout the Middle East” and “an end to racism in the United States no matter to whom it is directed.”