Little Victories

This evening a comment was left on my post, Three Cheers for Adalah and the Israeli Supreme Court by an Israeli woman, who wants to be known as "sister of child of Abraham". I reproduce the comment (very slightly edited) because of its importance:

Jerry,

We recently had a similar "problem" in our community, a new yishuv for secular and orthodox jews (within the green line) I might have been naive thinking a place like this would be more tolerant, seeing as many people moved here to get away from homogeneous societies they had previously lived in. After what happened in Misgav, the question was raised: what would we do if an arab famiy wanted to join our community?

In the discussion that followed I used the word "racism" much to the dismay of my neighbours, adding that Jews wanting to live only with other Jews was racist as much as say, Germans wanting to live with only Germans. These double standards always amaze me!

In the end, it was decided that although no one would want a situation where Arabs would join the community, we wouldn't be able to not accept people on acount of there ethnicity.

So for now, my husband and I can keep living here....

sister of child of Abraham

Well, sister of child of Abraham, all decent human beings can be proud of your stance. I hope that your community will follow your family's lead. It has to start somewhere -- I assure you and them, that were an Israel Palestinian family welcomed in your committee, it would not only be a kiddush ha-Shem (a sanctification of God's name), but it would point the way for other communities like you. Look, let's face it: you can't force people to live with people they don't want to live with. But you can educate people to see why excluding people on the basis of the ethnicity, or religiosity, etc., is wrong. -- especially when the majority has no "separate but equal" facilities for the minority.