Michael Ratner, Prominent Human Rights Lawyer,
Describes His Alienation From Zionism and Israel
Allan C. Brownfeld, Editor
Special Interest Report
August 2021
Michael Ratner, a prominent human rights lawyer who was president of the
Center for Constitutional Rights, died in 2016 at the age of 72. His
posthumous memoir, “Moving The Bar: My Life As A Radical Lawyer,” was
published in May 2021. In it, he details his one-time commitment to Zionism
and Israel and his growing alienation as he came to understand the manner in
which Palestinians were being treated, which he characterized as
“apartheid.”
In his legal career, he filed the first lawsuit in Rasul v. Bush,
challenging wartime detentions at Guantanamo Bay. He was co-counsel
representing the Guantanamo Bay detainees in the U.S. Supreme Court, which
ruled for the detainees’ right to test the legality of their detention in
U.S. courts.
Discussing his memoir, Philip Weiss writes: “It offers an intimate
narrative of his own transformation on the Palestinian question. His
difficult emotional path —from unbound love of Israel to the reluctant
understanding in his 60s that Israel was an apartheid state from its early
history of ethnic cleansings… and he ought to purse Israeli crimes in the
memory of his own relatives who had died in the Holocaust—is one that other
Americans, particularly Jews should endeavor to walk..”. (Mondoweiss, July
8, 2021).
Ratner was shaped by Jewish tradition. His family was committed to Zionism
and to Israel. His family was engaged in fund-raising for Israel and
invested in several Israeli projects. On his first trip to Israel in 1956,
he writes, he fell in love with ‘the intoxicating country…I thought of
Israel as the home of my people. I had my bedroom ceiling painted with the
seven wonders of the world and a huge map of Israel. I had no idea how my
view of Israel would change later in life.”
He visited Israel a second time as a young man and confessed that he had no
idea “that the land I was walking on had just a few years earlier been
populated by another people. I knew nothing about Palestinians.” He
recalled that no one in his world said a word about Palestinians. He
regarded Israel “as the last refuge of a besieged Jewish minority fighting
for its survival. I fund raised for Israel in the wake of the 1967 war
without a second thought.”
The Holocaust played an important part in this understanding: “Two months
after my birth, Nazi soldiers destroyed the ghetto in my father’s hometown
of Bialystok.” More than ten members of his family were killed. Slowly,
his view of Israel began to change. In 2009 when the U.N.’s Goldstone
report detailed Israel's onslaught in Gaza, Ratner was stunned by its
findings. He set about to commission a book on the landmark report and he
flew with his family to Egypt to join the Gaza Freedom March. When he was
prevented from entering Gaza, Ratner went on to Israel. He relates the
shock to his readers: “If there was one moment when I finally let go of the
connection I had with Israel since childhood, it came in 2010 on a visit to
the occupied territories in the West Bank.”
Ratner recalls that, “Deep down, like many American Jews, I still had a
powerful emotional tie to Israel. That changed forever when at 66 years
old, I finally saw the reality on the ground for myself.” On his return, he
spoke at Judson Memorial Church in New York and recounted his visit to
Ma’ale Adumim, the huge settlement several miles east of Jerusalem and
described the fountains, swimming pools and the transplanted ancient olive
trees taken from the Palestinians. He contrasted it with the ghettoized
neighborhoods of occupied East Jerusalem and the frightening military
checkpoints that led to a political understanding: “There was never going
to be a Palestinian state. Israel had made that determination.”
In his memoir, Ratner says he was shocked to see an apartheid state: “It
was all so intentional, so cruel…what I still don’t understand is how
anybody, whether Jewish or not, can defend these illegal, brutal policies.
To truly honor and remember and honor the lessons of the Holocaust would be
to end the apartheid system that is the Israel of today.” **
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