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Michael Ratner's inspiring activist life culminated with dramatic change on Israel

Weiss, Philip
http://mondoweiss.net/2021/07/michael-ratners-inspiring-activist-life-culminated-with-dramatic-change-on-israel/

Publisher:  Mondoweiss
Date Written:  08/07/2021
Year Published:  2021  
Resource Type:  Article

Michael Ratner personally changed human rights law, and in doing so he let go childhood views of Israel. "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."

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

The privileged upbringing gave Michael Ratner, who was born in 1943, an understanding of how the world worked. Police officers came to his father’s building supply yard and got free or heavily discounted supplies. “To the extent that my brother and I ever had trouble with the cops, it would always disappear very quickly,” he writes. And none of the six Ratner boys in the extended family went into the army during the Vietnam era. All received deferments. “The lesson was obvious: young men of privilege would not have to fight this war.”

That moral awareness guided Ratner’s choices as a relentless advocate for victims of state violence. For instance, he threw himself into the Attica prison uprising and killings in 1971, but could not compel the state to do an investigation and prosecution, and the reason was obvious: “The prisoners killed were African-American and Latino. The killers were white.”

Or when his colleague Judy Berkan trespassed on Vieques Island in Puerto Rico to document the American military base and bombing range there, she won her case on a technicality and wasn’t jailed. “[T]he court was reluctant to jail a respected white attorney,” Ratner observes.

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