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 It is definitively a terrible month! After Mai Ghousoub and
Joseph Samaha, who died suddenly while they still had so much to give us, we
receive the sad news today about the unexpected death of our friend and comrade
Tanya Reinhart.
I first met Tanya at the Hebrew
University campus in Givat Ram in Jerusalem, at the
beginning of 1968. She was distributing leaflets denouncing the recent
occupation of the West Bank and Gaza,
and trying to stop her husband, Yossi, from getting into too much trouble with
a group of fascist thugs who were attacking the small group of Left activists.
I decided to intervene in the fight, and after two minutes I found myself thrown
in the university pool; when Tanya helped me get out of the water, she said
only: “I don’t know you, we need to speak!,” and this was the starting point of
four rich decades of political partnership. We were both studying philosophy,
and the department’s library was the classroom where I got the first elements
of my political education by Tanya, Yossi and Reuven Kaminer, who was their
leader in the local branch of the Communist Party, until they all left the
party for a kind of “New Left” ideology.
Although they are now quite many activists who pretend to,
Tanya was one of the very few who could honestly claim to have opposed the
Israeli occupation from the beginning. Until she left Israel to continue her
studies in MIT, Tanya was strongly involved in the marginal but brave struggle
for the full rights of the Palestinian people.
Recently, she was quite hopeless concerning our chances to
provoke a change in the Israeli-US war of aggression in West Asia: a month ago
I contacted her to obtain her authorization to publish one of her articles and
she told me how much admiration she had for those activists who were still
continuing the struggle in Israeli—admiration but also skepticism.
We had our disagreements. Especially about what I used to
call her “Chomskyite” way of analysis, which considered every move made by the
Israeli leadership as following a clearly pre-established plan and scheme. As a
teacher and friend, she didn’t leave any room for incoherence, mess or inherent
contradictions. This is why she was always betting on the worse scenario, and sometimes
surprised when “the plan” deteriorated into a fiasco, like in the last Israeli
aggression in Lebanon.
Unfortunately for all of us, however, her bet was usually
the correct one: in West Asia, the worse is
often the right bet.
Today we lost one of the sharpest analysts of the
anti-colonial camp in Israel,
and a tireless fighter for human dignity and justice.
For an audio interview of Tanya Reinhart done by the Alternative Information Center (AIC) in April 2006, click here.
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