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Dear professor Norman,

I listened to your interview with Amy Goodman today. This is my first introduction to your work and activism; maybe because I am not American I haven’t heard about you before—which I regret. I regret it because you are a beautiful person, Norman. You are a very good Jewish man, one of our best, one of the wisest. We value wisdom very much, it’s in our DNA! (The high regard for wisdom, that is). It is so impossibly hard for us to be good people now. And weeping seems to be the only possible action. Maybe putting ashes on your head is another option— it’s an old Jewish tradition. They are turning Palestine into the Warsaw Ghetto! Maybe it is in our DNA too? But I have another explanation.

You said today to Amy that Israel’s moral character begin to change since the 70s. This was the time when hundreds of thousands of Jews from the Soviet Union arrived there. And along with some of them, a long arm of Stalin extended all the way from his grave across the continents and planted hatred, immense intolerance, racism, and supremacy. Some young intellectuals came from Moscow and planted the extreme right-wing politics (they had had the seeds), and the greed, of the people who had been denied so much. Because when we were growing up in Worker’s Paradise, this was what we were indoctrinated with, all of the above. We got it with our mother’s milk. We were being taught that Individual Life has no meaning. No value, apart from being sacrificed for a worthy cost. What do you think this does to children? Only the “happiness” of the “future generations” matter. A bit of Christianity here too.

I don’t think of Israelis as Jews; they are just a regular settled tribe. Jews are a People without a land and without a temple. We hate persecution. We have invented the concept of Justice. You know what shrinks say: traumatized people have a powerful drive to recreate their traumas. And so they do. They are orchestrating the Warsaw Ghetto carnage in Palestine. With the help of some other sociopaths, the ones with power and money.

Norm, you are wrong, young Palestinian and Jewish females WILL read your books. I will make sure my little granddaughters do when they grow up. What you must do is take care of yourself. Don’t let police throw you around “like a sack of potatoes”, don’t get hurt. Read Solzhenitsyn’s prescriptions on how to handle yourself during an arrest. And maybe try not to get arrested anymore. Take good care of your physical and mental health. We need you. Our grandchildren need you. People like you will help diminish the horrendous impact of our present day History on the Memory of our very old People. We need to erase the bloody stain of this horror somehow.

with much Love and respect,

Helen