ISRAEL, GAZA: Holocaust survivor explains why she became Palestinian rights activist

Hedy Epstein is what some might see as a contradiction in terms: a survivor of the Holocaust and also a staunch advocate for the Palestinian people. Born in 1924 in Freiburg, Germany, Epstein was 14 when she escaped from Nazi persecution via the Kinderstransport to England. Since her 1948 arrival in the U.S., Epstein has been an advocate for peace and human rights. 

In 2001 she founded the St. Louis chapter of the Women in Black anti-war group that originated in Israel, and has actively advocated for Palestinian rights since visiting the West Bank in 2003. As the last decade came to a close, Epstein continued her advocacy by traveling with the women’s peace advocacy group CodePink to the Gaza Freedom March. The Dec. 31 march was a planned nonviolent demonstration to protest Israel’s blockade of Gaza, with 1,000 advocates from abroad joining Palestinians in a march to the Gaza-Israel border checkpoint. 

Although Egyptian authorities refused to let the full contingent of protesters into Gaza, the 100 activists that were permitted to enter carried on the anti-blockade message. Prior to the planned Gaza march, Epstein spoke with Babylon and Beyond about her past experiences in Israel, dealing with the controversy of being a Holocaust survivor who criticizes Israel, and the Gaza Freedom March.

How did you get interested in the Israel/Palestine issue?
I was born in Germany, I'm Jewish -- after Hitler came to power, my parents realized very quickly that Germany was not a good place to raise a family. They were willing to go anywhere in the world, but one place they were not willing to go to was Palestine -- they were anti-Zionists. As a child I didn't quite understand this, but if my parents were anti-Zionist, I was anti-Zionist. I came to the U.S. in 1948, around the same time Israel became a state, about which I had mixed feelings. On the one hand it was a place for Holocaust survivors to go to, those who could not or did not want to return to their homes, but on the other, I considered my parents' ardent anti-Zionism. While I was new in the U.S., Israel and Palestine remained on the back burner of my interests. In 1982, I heard about the massacres in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon -- I wanted to know who was responsible for this, what had happened between 1948 and 1982. As I learned more, I became increasingly disturbed by the policies of Israel and its military. Fast forward to 2003 -- I was in the West Bank for the first time, and have been there five times since then.

This will be my third try to go to Gaza. The first try was with the Free Gaza Movement when they tried to take boats through Israel's naval blockade, but right before, in Cypress, I became ill -- it was 120 degrees, with matching humidity. The second try, the Free Gaza Movement members were worried what about might happen to me, so in deference I didn't go with them. I was to go again in June 2009, but the day before I was to go, I was assaulted. I don't know whether I was targeted or if it was a random act of violence -- I was coming back from the airport, but my suitcase and pocketbook, neither were touched -- it was not theft.

Why did you decide to go with CodePink and participate in the group's Gaza Freedom March?
I've known about CodePink for quite some time and when I found out they were planning a march to Gaza, I decided I would go. I tried twice and didn't succeed, and so maybe the third time is the charm. Egyptian organizers recently told the group they could not go through the Rafah border (more information). Other times groups were told they could not go, but then were permitted to go with restrictions. So we will go forward, and we'll take it one day, one minute at a time. And if we don't get in, that too will make a huge statement.
 
How have people reacted to your decision to be an advocate for Palestinians?
It depends whom you're talking to or whom you're talking about. The mainstream, organized Jewish community, both locally and in other places, have called me anti-Semitic, a self-hating Jew. I'm not anti-Israel, but you're not allowed to criticize Israel or else you're anti-Semitic, and if you're Jewish you're a self-hating Jew. I don't hate myself. You're allowed to criticize every other country, including the U.S., but not Israel, why is that?
 
How do you think Israel will respond to nonviolence/direct action?
I don't know. I hope they will be nonviolent. When I was in the West Bank, before I went, I was told that the Palestinians are going to hurt me, they are going to do awful things to me. But they were the ones that protected me. In one demonstration, in 2006, near Ramallah, I lost some of my hearing because an Israeli sound bomb went off very close to me. The Palestinians near me were very concerned. I was strip-searched, internally searched at Israel's David Ben Gurion airport, I was told that “I was a terrorist, I'm a security risk.” An 80-year-old woman is a terrorist? What, do I have a bomb in my vagina?
 
Do you think there can be peace in Israel in the near future?
In the near future, no. I'm an inveterate optimist, so someday there will be peace, but a lot of things have to change before that happens. If the occupation were to stop overnight, it would make all the difference in the world. Israel is the fourth-largest military entity in the world. They have the newest equipment, and it's used on the Palestinians. Also, if the U.S. stopped funding Israel, that would be another way of bringing about peace. We have humongous problems in this country, people are unemployed, losing their homes, we could use that money instead of overseas in a destructive way. Let's use it constructively. I think we should let the people decide what they want instead of telling them what they should do.

-- Daniel Siegal

Photo: Holocaust survivor Hedy Epstein, center, and Gaza Freedom Marchers activists shout slogans during a Dec. 29 protest in Cairo to mark the one-year anniversary of the Israeli invasion of Gaza. Credit: Amr Nabil / Associated Press

Comments

[lieassa]

http://arabism-islamism.webs.com/index.htm
The twin fascisms that causes most massacres, wars, "conflicts" today:

Arabism is racism (Arab racism)
Millions upon Millions are/became victims of [pan-] Arabism which is the worst current form of racism in its gigantic proportions, like: Kurds, Jews (not just in Israel), Berbers (the real natives of North Africa), Africans (not just in the genocide in the Sudan or the slavery in Mauritania or persecution in Egypt on native Nubians by Arab invaders – till today), Persians, Copts, Phoenicians
, Assyrians, etc.

Islamism is bigotry (Islamofascism)!
The Islamic supremacy that “works” towards its vision of “final Islamic domination on the entire planet”, from Middle east to Africa from Asia to Eurabia, from forced conversions, terrorism, & massacres in multiple countries (like: Thailand, Phillipines, China, Indonesia, Tunisia, Morocco, Kenya, Tanzania, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon India, USA, France, Israel, Russia, UK, etc.) to propaganda, the war includes on Muslims who are not radical enough...,

Let’s face it! that entire war on Israel & the Jews since the 1920’s by infamous facsist Mufti Haj Amin Al-Husseini who started the “genocide campaign” [and continues by the children, grand children of Arab immigrants into Israel - Palestine - now convenienently called "palestinians"] in a clear outlined declaration to 'kill all Jews', is nothing but out of pure Arab Muslim bigotry.

---

Why does biased media blame Israel defenders from vicious Arab Muslims who use civilians when they attack Israeli civilians... so that their civilians (they prefer kids to) die, then parade with their INTENDED/ORCHESTRATED casualties as "innocent victims"??? then parade with the casualties as "innocent victims"???

BTW
While the Islamo Arab dictatorship (& real Apartheid upon the non-Arabs, non-Muslims) goes on...
Israeli [ungrateful] Arabs won't mention FAVORITISM by democratic pluralistic multi-racial Israel in: land, courts & universities, by the same token, the totalitarian & mullahcracy dictators of Iran with its Hezbollah thugs & militant "Palestine" anti-freedom forces cast their genocide plan under "freedom fighting."

[Mike Razim]

I agree that I don't see this relationship improving in the near future. Tension seem to keep growing as more and more issues are raised. Another interesting issue affecting the trade embargo is the use of underground tunnels between Egypt and Gaza and whether Egypt should build a border wall to stop illegal smuggling: http://www.newsy.com/videos/egypt-border-wall-seen-to-starve-gaza. However, I think in time this issue can be resolved.

[Muhammad]

Hedy's not a jew.

[Andrew J. Chorny]

The power to forgive, without expecting anything in return. Amazing example!

[Robert Lee]

A brave woman, we should listen more to people who have seen the ravages of history. Check out this interesting piece about Jimmy Carter and his problems when he supported the Palestinians http://www.thecactusland.com/2010/01/jimmy-carters-sins.html

[Sealinewuman]

Actually, I wouldn't call her a contradiction in terms. It would take an Israeli citizen who is a holocaust survivor to plainly see genocide for what it is, without a veil of nationalism/patriotism or whatever other kinda of ism obscuring it.

[Dean Blake]

Stockholm syndrome victim is what she and a lot of Israelis and Jews have become. NOt self-hating, but under constant seige religiouisly, culturually and emotionally - held hostage by hostile parties of various ilks and religions. What one Jew thinks is not going to make right and wrong, Torah law is governing, not some assilimated individual. The misinformation in the other comments about Arabs in Israel is disheartening, but I'm repeatedly reminded that only 1/2 the population has an IQ above 100. The rest post bloggs of fantasy and wishful thinking agrandizing their anti-semitic prejudices.

[lindy]

Why didn't she become a Yeman jew activist?
The muslims are wiping them out without a word from
the world..this women is a self-hating hypocrite!

[Deaf Indian Muslim Anarchist]

Hedy Epstein is a very phenomenal, remarkable woman-- we can all learn something from her.

[Steve]

People should really actually review credible History before making ignorant comments. These boards become meaningless with rants founded on half truths and lies.

[RB]

This woman is not a holocaust survivor. She left Germany before the Holocaust began. The LA Times should do a little bit of research before they report something as fact.

[Ann]

from another Gaza marcher, Starhawk's blog page about Hedy
Shame on those who say Hedy was not a holocaust survivor.

.."For me the highlight of the day was a long conversation with Hedy Epstein, an eighty-eight year old Jewish survivor of the holocaust who is here with us in support of justice for the Palestinians. Hedy is small, with curling white hair and bright eyes and a ready smile, and tough in the fiber, as they say about hobbits. She went on a hunger strike when she arrived, and went off it only when her doctor ordered her to eat. She was in the melee with the Egyptian police in Tahrir Square, and managed to come through the pushing, shoving frenzy undaunted and unharmed.

Someone like Hedy makes it impossible for us lesser mortals to say, “I’m too old for this shit.” Over dinner, I heard some of her story, which she tells in vivid detail—the terror of a child on Krystallnacht, when Nazi thugs broke windows of Jewish businesses and homes all over Germany, of being attacked and vilified by teachers and the principal of her school, coming home and finding her father and uncle gone, her mother in hiding. She survived because her family was able to get her onto a kindertransport: the ships and trains that brought 10,000 Jewish children to Britain just before the onset of war. Her parents were sent to the camps in France and ultimately to Auschwitz.

She grew up to work with the U.S. Government in Germany, among other things, as a research analyst during the Nuremburg Trials, investigating the doctors who performed cruel medical ‘experiments’ on inmates. And out of her own pain and loss, she became an activist, fighting for civil rights and human rights.

We’re always on dangerous ground when we start talking about the Holocaust and Palestine in the same breath. As Hedy herself says, “Each experience is unique. You can’t compare them.” Yet there are resonances that are hard to ignore. I’m remembering being in the Balata refugee camp in the West Bank when all the men were rounded up and marched off, how I felt sitting behind closed doors with the women left behind. We were taken in by one family who wanted us as witnesses to protect the son they’d managed to hide, a young student of psychology in his twenties who was still so traumatized by a former arrest and incarceration that he couldn’t leave the house on his own, work or study. I’m thinking of the night I spent locked in a room with a family, singing funny songs to the children to distract them from the sounds of the Israeli soldiers methodically destroying their home, ripping the stuffing out of the chairs and prying the paneling off the walls, in the name of a ‘search.’

True, Israel has not set up gas chambers for Palestinians, nor ovens. As Dov Weinglas, an adviser to the Israeli prime minister, said, “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”

But when you have to start arguing over the nuances of oppression, about whether the number of dead constitutes a massacre or just a slaughter, whether your policies are really genocide or just sorta like genocide, you have left the path of righteousness."

[Janice]

So often the comment is made that the Palestinians could have had their own state when the UN General Assembly voted to partition Palestine, in a resolution that was non-binding as are all General Assembly resolutions. No one asked the Arabs of Palestine if they wanted to give up their lands and homes to another people, most of them who had never set foot in Palestine.

Had the Palestinians accepted the partition it is likely that a Palestinian state would not have lasted long. When in 1938 the discussion of partition arose, Zionist leader and first Israeli prime minister said that while he did not like the idea of partition the Jews would accept it but when they became strong as the result of becoming a state they would expand to all the area. I have no doubt that they would have done exactly that.

And now as Israel seeks to expand its territory and push the Palestinians into less and less territory one has to ask the question whether or not Israel would have been satisfied with the amount of land allotted to them in the partition resolution. I think not.

And for those who call Hedy Epstein a self-hating Jew you validate this wonderful woman's statement that those Jews, including people like myself, who criticize Israel are self-haters. I don't know about Hedy but as for myself if I did not criticize Israel I would hate myself for standing by and allowing the oppression of another people by my people.

Hats off to Hedy Epstein! She is much to be admired.

[L. King]

The letter writer Greta Berlin is one of the organizers of the Free Gaza group. Like "Jean Brody" who supported the fascist Franco, Ms Berlin and Hedy Epstein support the fascist regime of Hamas which imprisons its opponents, replaced some 6000 striking unionized Gazan teachers and medical workers a year ago with their political sympathizers, declared war on neighbouring Israeli civilians, instigated a fratricidal war against Fatah and threw several of its members off the tops of buildings, supresses women and condones violence against them when carried out by a male relative, and commandeers donated food, water and medical supplies first for its own members.

One simply has to look beyond the rhetoric of the knee jerk Israel bashers to realize that Ms. Epstein is on the wrong side. There are far worse off people in Somalia, Yemen, even the slums of Egypt than there are in Gaza. One notes the active role of Iran is supplying Hamas with training and arms, and that it too is a similar regime that imprisons and kills those that that oppose them, and that Hamas uses Sudan as a training ground for its own forces.

To help Gaza, stop supporting fascist groups like Hamas. The Palestinian people need to stop being treated as political playthings by Arab leaders and Western poseurs. They need to make peace and become friends with all of their neighbors, including Israel, Egypt and Jordan.

[ordony]

DR MARC
1.the majority of the Arabs want peace,they offered Israel peace in exchange for the land Israel occupied in 1967
(THE ARAB PEACE INITIATIVE)was signed on by all members of the Arab league,Israel refused the offer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Peace_Initiative
2.the Arab Israeli conflict is not the ONLY conflict in the ME,but it is the KEY conflict,the fact that Israel is occupying Arab and Muslim land is a rallying point for Muslim extremist (Al Qaeda,Khomeini,Hezbollah and Hams)through the 80's and 90's, the same it was the cause for Arab nationalist extremist(Nasser ,Junblat and Al-Assad)in the 60's and 70's.
the notion that since Saddam attacked Iran and invaded kuwait,then Israel should continue occupying the west bank is ridiculous.

[mike honcho]

It's funny these zionist post comments like "The Arabs of Palestine could have had their own nation sixty years ago. They have chosen violence instead of living peacefully next to Israel".What would Israeli's do if Tomorrow the UN put a mandate that said Israel has to give up half of Israel to the Chinese people and millions of chinese started to show up but they never lived there but Confucius said Jerusalem belong to them because some chinese live there 2000 years ago,do you think Israel will make peace or go to war,Oh and the chinese would be supported by US financially and militarly and US stop support for Israel and the people that killed invaders would be called terrorist and the chinese killed millions of jews and kicked the jews from there homes and put them in ghettos but it's ok its for security. It's funny Jews from the West push for seperation of church and state but when it comes to Israel it's different,because a book of jewish fairytales that said there ancestors lived there 2000 yrs ago,Well Muslims used to have Spain 700 yrs ago does that mean Spain belongs to the Muslims.

[ordony]

I don't see the contradiction in being a holocaust survivor and a Palestinian rights activist.on the contrary it is logical,a lot of people wonder how could the Jews exert such suffering on the Arabs after them being at the receiving end of so much suffering.
on the other hand i wish the Arabs will be more understanding and accommodating for the Jews concerns over security and safety

[Dr. Marc]

1. Hedy Epstein may have been born in Germany, and she did lose both her parents in the Holocaust. But she watched the Holocaust from England. I would not describe her as a "Holocaust survivor". She has also been an anti-Zionist since before the establishment of the state of Israel.
2. The majority of the leaders of the Palestinians, if not the majority of the population, do not want peace. They want Palestine, "from the River to the Sea". It is a tragedy that the Palestinians could not negotiate a peaceful co-existence with the Israelis in 1948. I can also understand their frustration that they did not stay and fight for the land, or form the institutions of governance to establish their own state.
3. If there is anything to learn from the wars and conflicts between Iran and Iraq, between Iraq and Kuwait, between the Christians and the Muslims, Hamas and Fatah, and between the Shia and the Sunni, it is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not the key to peace in the Middle East.

[cecile]

many thanks for this article. hopefully more and more people are soon going to understand what israel is. am optimistic concerning the middle east peace. the end of the apartheid regime and of the illegal occupation, as well as the return of the palestinian refugees and the creation of one state in palestine is possible and will happen sooner or later, God willing. even according to a cia report from last year, israel will break down within up to 20 years, due to its policies.

[Kathleen O'Connor Wang]

I was with Hedy and 41 others in Cyprus as we waited to go to Gaza in August of 2008.We were all so sad she could not join us the day we left for our successful voyage to break the cruel Israeli siege on the suffering Palestinians in Gaza.I am so happy she made it this year.We are Palestinians since our trip and Hedy is a wonderful role model for all who hope that peace and justice will be realized by our beloved family in Palestine.