American writer Alice Walker, who has long made clear her
antipathy toward the state of Israel, “has taken her extreme and hostile views
to a shocking new level” in her latest book of meditations on life and her
personal activism, according to a review of the book by the Anti-Defamation
League (ADL).
Walker’s “The Cushion in the Road” devotes 80 pages to
fervently anti-Jewish ideas, explicit comparisons between Israel and Nazi
Germany.
The 12 essays of the section, titled “On Palestine,” which
make up a quarter of the book, are rife with comparisons of Israelis to Nazis,
denigrations of Judaism and Jews, and statements suggesting that Israel should
cease to exist as a Jewish state.
Walker’s book also attempts to justify terrorism against Israeli
civilians, claiming that the “oppressed” Palestinians should not be blamed for
carrying out suicide bombings.
“Alice Walker has sunk to new lows with essays that remove
the gloss of her anti-Israel activism to reveal someone who is unabashedly
infected with anti-Semitism,” said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director.
“She has taken her extreme and hostile views to a shocking
new level, revealing the depth of her hatred of Jews and Israel to a degree
that we have not witnessed before. Her
descriptions of the conflict are so grossly inaccurate and biased that it seems
Walker wants the uninformed reader to come away sharing her hate-filled conclusions
that Israel is committing the greatest atrocity in the history of the world.”
Walker, a Pulitzer Prize-winning African-American writer,
essayist and poet, has a long history of biased statements against the Jewish
state. In June 2012 she refused to allow an Israeli company to publish a Hebrew
edition of her classic novel, “The Color Purple,” in protest of what she
described as Israel’s “apartheid” policies and “persecution of the Palestinian
people.” Most recently, Walker wrote a letter calling on the singer-songwriter
Alicia Keys to cancel her upcoming July 4th concert appearance in Tel Aviv in
protest of Israel’s policies.
The ADL highlights that in “The Cushion in the Road,” Walker
describes Israel’s actions vis-à-vis the Arab population as “genocide,” “ethnic
cleansing,” “crimes against humanity,” and “cruelty and diabolical torture”.
Speaking of Black churches whose leaders recount Biblical
stories regarding Jewish triumphs, Walker writes, “It amazes me, in these
churches, that there is no discussion of the fact that the other behavior we
learned about in the Bible stories: the rapes, the murders, the pillaging, the
enslavement of the conquered, the confiscation of land, the brutal domination
and colonization of all ‘others’ is still front and center in Israel’s behavior
today.”
Walker analogizes the Palestinians’ situation with the civil
rights era and discrimination against Blacks in the American South. “It is because I recognize the brutality with
which my own multibranched ancestors have been treated that I can identify the
despicable, lawless, cruel, and sadistic behavior that has characterized
Israel’s attempts to erase a people, the Palestinians, from their own land,”
she writes.
On several occasions Walker seems to indicate that the
purported evils of modern-day Israel are a direct result of Jewish values,
alleging that Jews behave the way they do because they believe in their
“supremacy.” She suggests that Israeli
settlements are motivated by the concept that “possession is nine-tenths of the
law,” which she claims is a lesson she “learned from my Jewish lawyer former
husband. This belief might even be
enshrined in the Torah.”
The ADL notes that when discussing Israel’s alleged “theft”
of Arab land, Walker writes, “Can people who hunger so desperately for what
other people have ever have enough? One thinks of Hitler, of course, and
Napoleon….” She writes of the inclusion
of Israeli films in the 2009 Toronto Film Festival that it was comparable to
“festivals in the past, festivals leading up to World War II,” which were designed
to “make the bully look more respectable.”
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