Israeli radical, Tanya Reinhart remembered

mashriq / arabia / iraq | miscellaneous | news report Tuesday March 20, 2007 21:18 by Netta van Vliet and Ivy Sichel - awalls.org

We mourn the untimely passing of Prof. Tanya Reinhart, internationally renowned linguist and passionate, courageous peace activist. Prof. Reinhart died in New York on 3.17.07 at the age of 63.

Israeli radical, Tanya Reinhart remembered

We mourn the untimely passing of Prof. Tanya Reinhart, internationally renowned linguist and passionate, courageous peace activist. Prof. Reinhart died in New York on 3.17.07 at the age of 63. Tanya Reinhart had just arrived in New York in January to join the linguistics faculty at New York University. She accepted the position at NYU after Tel Aviv University refused to allow her to continue the dual position she held in Tel Aviv and in Utrecht, Holland.

As a linguist, Tanya Reinhart was an original and prolific scholar who made a significant and lasting contribution to the field of modern linguistics. Her prominence in the academic world didn't keep Tanya from standing at the forefront of the Israeli anti-occupation movement. She was a firm believer in the principles of nonviolent resistance and in the profound significance of creating a joint and symmetric Palestinian-Israeli movement to end the occupation. As a staunch supporter of nonviolent resistance she didn't hesitate to add her voice to the Palestinian call for an international boycott of Israeli academia. She was among the few Israelis who continued to stand with the Palestinians throughout the Oslo Years and at the beginning of the second Intifada. She understood early on the depth of the devastating effects of Oslo for the Palestinians, and also for Israelis, and wrote extensively in the local Israeli Yediot Aharonot and in two internationally acclaimed books, How to End the War of 1948 (Seven Stories Press, 2002), and The Road Map to Nowhere: Israel/Palestine since 2003 (Verso, 2006). In an unforgettable passage in the first book, Tanya tells of an Israeli soldier on reserve duty in Jenin during the siege of April 2002, who boasts about taking down homes for 75 hours straight high on whiskey.

But Tanya didn't only write about the politics of the conflict; she also spoke extensively about the conflict all over the globe, most recently in Australia, Malaysia, Ireland and France. She was part of the first group of Israelis to apply the principle of non-violent resistance to the situation on the ground in the beginning of the second Intifada in Palestine. Tanya was among a small group of Palestinian, Israeli, and international activists, often much younger (and more heavily tattooed) than her, who in March 2003 founded a campsite in the Palestinian village Masha and initiated a new form of joint Palestinian-Israeli struggle. A Palestinian village where the Separation Wall was to encroach deepest into the West Bank and annex the majority of the villagers' lands, Masha became a place where increasing numbers of Israelis and internationals bore witness to the construction of the wall and destruction of Palestinian life. As construction of the wall continued and the villages along its route began to actively resist, Tanya could be seen at demonstrations in Azzawiya, Biddu, and Bil'in. The army's increasing use of violence to repress the resistance did not deter her and she continued to insist that "we must do everything humanly possible to stop construction of this wall and to bring that struggle into Israeli society."

Netta van Vliet and Ivy Sichel

Note by an Anarchists Against the Wall member:
Years ago, before the beginning of the struggle against the separation fence started, I met Tanya again, at a Friday vigil of the "Women in Black" in Tel Aviv. After hearing lot of "rumors" about Tanya's political affiliations, I decided to ask her if she labelled herself anarchist. Without any hesitation she said: "Yes".
Ilan S.