The Holocaust provided Jewish isolationism with a retroactive, if paranoid, vindication -- and is therefore never absent from Zionist propaganda and apologetics. (I say "paranoid", because there is no reason to regard the Nazi extermination policy as an ongoing threat, any more than African-Americans are threatened with a return to slavery.) And, as stated before, today there is little point in arguing whether or not Jewish separateness itself provoked anti-Semitism. Even if it did, then -- as in cases of rape -- the victim is not to be blamed. [Yael Lotan: 'Zionism -- The Continuation of Judaism by Other Means', March 2007]
The moral justification of Zionism was that Jews, being a persecuted, homeless minority, needed a safe haven. It was the misfortune of the Palestinian Arabs that the place chosen for the purpose -- for reasons of religious tradition combined with international circumstances -- was their homeland. Conscientious Zionists understood this and hoped to minimize the harm to the local population. Some expressed it with the phrase, "How to keep the wolf satisfied and the sheep whole." [Yael Lotan 'The Law of Return & the Jewish Gold Standard', April 2001]
These are two quotes out of the many essays written by Yael Lotan. The sad reason of including them here is that she has passed away, rather suddenly. For us, like for most, the news of her death at the beginning of November came totally unexpected. For twenty-six years her name was on the front page of this newsletter. We thought we knew her, but preparing to write about her, we find that we didn't know her well enough.
Born in 1935 into a veteran Israeli family, Yael Lotan grew up in Jerusalem under the British Mandate. Her father, Benyamin Eliav who had been a well-known right-wing politician and journalist, shifted his political line in the 1940s and became a diplomat for the new state, which send him to Argentina. From there, in 1954, Yael Lotan went to study in London.
With her British engineer husband Maurice Stoppi she went to live in Jamaica, then still a British colony. Seven years later she went to New York with her young son. There she met her second husband, Loyle Hairston, an Afro-American writer and trade unionist, and a daughter was born.
As the mother of two children, one white and one of color, she witnessed racism first hand. In the New York City school system her white son Jonathan was treated very differently from her daughter Ilana. In the 1970s she returned to Israel where she hoped they would meet less racism.
Her first job in Israel was to edit the Foreign Ministry's glossy magazine Ariel. It did not last long. In her innocence she included some translated poems of the Israeli poet Sameeh el-Qasem, written in Arabic, his mother tongue...
Soon she found herself among Israeli dissidents opposing the occupation (then a relatively young phenomenon which nobody expected would last more than 42 years). She was involved in numerous struggles, demonstrations and protests, being a leading member of the Shelly Party (Peace and Equality for Israel) and of various extra-parliamentary movements, ad-hoc coalitions and action committees, Among other things, when The Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace decided in 1983 to set up an English-language newsletter named "The Other Israel", Yael Lotan was among the founding Editorial Board.
In 1986, after the Knesset enacted a law making it a criminal offence for Israelis to meet a member of the PLO, Lotan was among the organizers of a 21-member delegation that set out to demonstratively meet PLO representatives in Rumania.
As a member of the delegation's Steering Committee she was put on trial, while also receiving numerous death threats at her home and at the editorial offices of Al Hamishmar paper, where she for many years worked at the literary department. She and three other activists -- Latif Dori, Reuven Kaminer and the late Eliezer Feiler -- were found guilty and sentenced to half a year's imprisonment.
They appealed to the District Court, were found guilty again (there was no doubt of the facts) and appealed again. Before the Supreme Court could render a final verdict, the law was abolished and soon afterwards Prime Minister Rabin himself committed the same "crime" on the White House lawn...
Through the years one met her again and again at demonstrations, in the bus to a "hot spot" where Palestinians were in dire need of solidarity. In later years she devoted much of her energy to public solidarity with the nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu, who spent so many years in solitary confinement. She also took up wholeheartedly the principled issue of advocating a Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction, and confronting the fallacy, common among Israelis, that their country could maintain forever a nuclear monopoly in the Middle East.
She leaves an abundance of writing, fiction, poetry, essays and translations -- part of it accessible on the Internet. Just recently came out her translation into English of 'The Invention Of The Jewish People' by Shlomo Sand.
We hope to get hold of her own novel "Avishag." It seems interesting to read about the world of King David through the eyes of a woman, of the servant Avishag the Shunamite, who according to the Bible story warmed King David's bed in his old age.
Yael Lotan used all her capacities for a better, a more equal and peaceful world. As somebody whispered during her funeral: again, one less.
