Posted on 12/29/2005 4:43:33 PM PST by StuLongIsland
(12/30/2005) Paying The Price For Idealism Sari Bashi’s legal work on behalf of Palestinians is putting a strain on the ex-New Jerseyan. Michele Chabin - Israel Correspondent
Jerusalem
Sari Bashi often takes the road less traveled, even though the ride can be bumpy and the path puts her on a collision course with her own family.
When she was graduated from the Yale Law School in 2003, Bashi could have landed a job at a major American law firm at a starting salary of $125,000. Instead, the New Jersey native accepted an $800-a-month clerkship/internship with Israel’s Supreme Court, where she drafted court decisions.
After passing the Israeli bar a year later, the newly minted lawyer co-founded Gisha: the Center for the Legal Protection of Freedom of Movement, an Israeli NGO that fights for the right of Palestinians to travel between the West Bank and Gaza, and beyond.
And next week — just 2½ years after starting her legal career in Israel — Bashi, now 30, will stand before the Supreme Court for the first time and argue against an Israeli policy that prevents Gaza residents from studying at West Bank universities.
Gisha and two Gaza community groups filed the petition, which will be heard Jan. 4, on behalf of 10 occupational therapy students from Gaza seeking to study at Bethlehem University.
“I think the violations of Palestinian rights are incredibly compelling and apparent,” Bashi said during an interview in her small Tel Aviv office, where the room’s sole window faces a wall. “I care about Israel because I’m part of it. I want it to live up to its ideals. I also think it is in Israel’s best interest to create the conditions for peace and good neighborly relations. As it stands now, the limitations on freedom of movement cause resentment and hatred.”
Though her efforts are being lauded by Palestinians and the nongovernmental organizations that labor on their behalf, they are a great deal less popular among those Israelis who believe a total separation between Israel and the Palestinians is in the country’s best interest.
“I’m aware I’m on the far left of the Israeli political spectrum,” Bashi said, “and it’s a little bit difficult sometimes because I’m not radical in my personality. I don’t particularly get a thrill being different from everybody else. It just so happens that my views are very different from those of most Israelis.”
Bashi admits that her pro-Palestinian activism has upset some of her colleagues, family members and even total strangers.
“Sometimes people yell at me when I tell them what I do, so I avoid telling people what I do,” she said. “Some people respect it, some people get very angry. It’s a very sensitive issue.”
When she launched Gisha, some of her Israeli relatives “would yell at me or lecture me,” Bashi recalls. “It got to the point where they wrote me off on this issue. We’ve stopped talking about politics, but I’m still invited to family dinners and now they’re much more pleasant.”
“Some family members,” she’s quick to add, “are very supportive.”
Though she is now deeply concerned with the way Israel treats both Israelis and Palestinians, Bashi admits that “when I was growing up in East Brunswick and later Teaneck, I wasn’t particularly interested in Israel. I came here after college to check it out and very quickly felt part of the culture. I didn’t realize I knew Hebrew, but when I went to ulpan it was like remembering a language, not learning.”
Even though her father was raised in Israel, as a child Bashi didn’t hear much Hebrew at home and visited the country very infrequently. Still she felt drawn enough to the country to spend 1997 here researching the ethnic identity of Ethiopian immigrants, courtesy of a Fulbright scholarship.
When her research was complete, she landed a reporting internship at the Jerusalem bureau of the Associated Press, which soon hired her as a local correspondent.
It was during Bashi’s two-year stint at AP that she became aware of the complexities of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
“In my work as a journalist I saw things firsthand that were different from the way they’d been explained to me as a child going to a religious school,” she said. “I graduated from religious elementary school about the time the first intifada was starting. We learned about the intifada through the lens of the persecution of the Jewish people and the Holocaust.
“But once I arrived in Israel I saw that the conflict is more complicated, and that there is a very different system of rights for Israelis and Palestinians. It wasn’t good for the Palestinians and in my view, it wasn’t really good for Israelis, either.”
While she might have remained a journalist, “I felt I wanted to be involved not just as a bystander, but as someone taking a position. I saw law as a good tool for that.”
Bashi, an Israeli citizen by virtue of her father’s citizenship, returned to Israel during her summer “breaks” from Yale Law and clerked with a Supreme Court judge. It was during this time that she heard about Kenneth Mann, a Tel Aviv University law professor who shared her desire to launch an NGO devoted to freedom-of-movement issues.
Although Gisha was launched just four months ago, it already has received hundreds of queries from Palestinians desperate to move between Gaza and the West Bank. Earlier this month the organization scored a victory when the Supreme Court issued a restraining order preventing the army and police from forcing Ahmed Najjar, a Gaza medical student studying in the West Bank town of Abu Dis, to move back to Gaza against his will.
Due to its extremely small budget (based on Bashi’s one-year fellowship from Yale Law School and a modest grant from the Foundation for Middle East Peace, plus free rent and equipment from Mann’s law firm), “we’re forced to turn down a lot of cases,” Bashi said.
“There are tens of thousands of people who need help. We choose the cases that will help not only an individual but will also change a policy or create a law that will affect others.”
While the organization is eager to set far-reaching precedents, “there are cases you can’t possibly refuse,” she said. “We’re tying to help a mother who was arrested in Israel in July without a permit and was deported to Gaza, while her baby son was staying with her ex-husband’s relatives in the West Bank. Since then, she has been trying to get to the West Bank to reach her son, who she hasn’t seen in six months.”
Compelling though individual cases may be, Michael Matar, the administrator of the right-wing Israeli organization Women in Green, objects to Gisha’s actions in principle.
“We don’t think Arabs have a right to move freely in this land because they have repeatedly done harm to the Jewish people,” Matar said. “They have a record of violence and we do not support their freedom of movement.”
In contrast, the Palestinians that Gisha assists are full of praise for the organization and the woman who directs it.
“It’s quite normal for Jews to defend Jewish human rights, but it always comes as a bit of a surprise when a Jew fights for Palestinian rights,” said Hussam el Nuno, whose organization, the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, has testified to the need for trained occupational therapists in Gaza.
“It makes me feel happy,” el Nuno said, “to know that there are people eager to help my people improve their lives.” n
It's good to have idiots on both the extreme right and left cuz it helps most of the rest of us find a reasonable position in between.
I like what Stalin called people like her......usefull idiots.
Working towards her own destruction.
She should be foreced to go to every missile strike and bus bombing in Israel.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.