One state solution not abortive and dangerous illusions - Answer to Uri Avnery
By: Ilan Pappe [ ::: Zionism ::: ]
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Uri Avnery accuses the supporters of the One State solution of forcefully imposing the facts onto the "Bed of Sodom" (22 April, 2007). He seems to regard these people best as day dreamers that do not understand the political reality around them and are stuck in a perpetual state of wishful thinking. We are all veteran comrades in the Israeli Left and therefore it is quite possible that in our moments of despair we fall into the trap of hallucinating and even fantasizing while ignoring the unpleasant reality around us.
And therefore the metaphor of the Bed of Sodom may even be fitting for lashing out at those who are inspired by the South African model in their search for a solution in Palestine. But in this case it is a small cot of Sodom compared to the king-size bed onto which Gush Shalom and other similar members of the Zionist Left insist on squeezing their two states' solution. The South African model is young - in fact hardly a year has passed since it was seriously considered - the formula of two states is sixty years old: an abortive and dangerous illusion that enabled Israel to continue its occupation without facing any significant criticism from the international community.
The South African model is a good subject matter for a comparative study - not as an object for a hallow emulation. Certain chapters in the history of the colonization in South Africa and the Zionization of Palestine are indeed nearly identical. The ruling methodology of the white settlers in South Africa resembles very closely that applied by the Zionist movement and late Israel against the indigenous population of Palestine since the end of the 19th century. Ever since 1948, the official Israeli policy against some of the Palestinians is more lenient than that of the Apartheid regime; against other Palestinians it is much worse.
But above all, the South African model inspires those concerned with the Palestine cause in two crucial directions: it offers a new orientation for a future solution instead of the two states' formula that failed - by introducing the one democratic state - and it invigorates new thinking of how the Israeli occupation can be defeated - through Sanctions, Boycott and Divestment (the BDS option).
The facts on the ground are crystal clear: the two states' solution has dismally failed and we have no spare time to waste in a futile anticipation of another illusory round of diplomatic efforts that would lead to nowhere. As Avnery admits, the Israeli peace camp has failed, so far, to persuade the Israeli Jewish society to try the road of peace. A sober and critical assessment of this camp's size and force leads to the inevitable conclusion that it has no chance what so ever against the prevailing trends in the Israeli Jewish society. It is doubtful whether it will even keep its very minimal presence on the ground, and there is a great concern it will disappear all together.
Avnery ignores these facts and alleges that the One State Solution is a dangerous panacea to offer to the critically ill patient. All right, so let us prescribe it gradually, but for God's sake let us remove the patient from the very dangerous medicine we have been forcing down his throat for the last sixty years and which is about to kill him.
For the sake of peace, it is important to expand our research on the South African model and other historical case studies. Because of our failure, we should study carefully any other successful struggle against oppression. All these historical case studies show that the struggle from within and from without reinforced each other and were not mutually exclusive. Even when the sanctions were imposed on South Africa, the ANC continued its struggle and white South Africans did not cease from their attempt to convince their compatriots to give up the Apartheid regime. But there was not one single voice that echoes the article of Avnery who claimed that a strategy of pressure from the outside is wrong because it weakness the chances of change from within. Especially when the failure of the inside struggle is so conspicuous and obvious. Even when the De Klerk government negotiated with the ANC the sanctions regime still continued.
It is also very difficult to understand why Avnery underrates the importance of world public opinion. Without the support this world public opinion gave to the Zionist movement, the Nakbah would not have occurred. Had the international community rejected the idea of partition, a unitary state would have replaced Mandatory Palestine, as indeed was the wish of many members of the UN. However, these members succumbed to a violent pressure by the US and the Zionist lobby and retracted their earlier support for such a solution. And today, if the international community alters its position once more and revises its attitude towards Israel, the chances for ending the occupation would increase enormously and by that maybe also help to avert a colossal bloodshed that would engulf not only the Palestinians but also the Jews themselves.
The call for a One State Solution, and the demand for sanctions, boycott and divestment, has to be read as a reaction against the failure of the previous strategy. A strategy upheld by the political classes but never fully endorsed by the people themselves. And any one who rejects the new thinking out of hand and in such a categorical manner, may be less bothered by what is wrong with this new option and far more troubled by his own place in history. It is indeed difficult to admit personal as well as collective failure; but for the sake of peace it is sometimes necessary to put aside one's ego. I am inclined to think that way when I read the false narrative Avnery concocted about the Israeli peace movement's ‘achievements' so far. He announces that ‘the recognition of the existence of the Palestinian people has become general, and so has the readiness of most Israelis to accept the idea of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as the capital of both states'. This is a clear case of amputating both the leg and the hand of the patient to fit him to the Bed of Sodom. And even more far fetched is the declaration that ‘We have compelled our government to recognize the PLO, and we shall compel them to recognize Hamas' - now the rest of patient's limbs were dispensed with (sorry for the gruesome metaphor but I am forced into it by Avnery's choice). These assertions have very little in common with the position of the Jewish public in Israel towards peace from 1948 until today. But facts can sometime confuse the issue.
But in order to stifle any debate on the One State Solution or the BDS option, Avnery draws from his magic hat the winning card: ‘but beneath the surface, in the depths of national consciousness, we are succeeding'. Let us thus provide the Palestinians with metal detectors and X-ray equipment - they may discover not only the tunnel, but also the light at its end. The truth is that what lies in the deepest layers of the Israeli national consciousness is far worse from what appears on the surface. And let us hope that it remains their forever and does not bubble to the surface. These are deposits of dark and primitive racism that if allowed to flow over will drown us all in a sea of hatred and bigotry.
Avnery is right when he asserts that ‘there is no doubt that 99.99% of Jewish Israelis want the State of Israel to exist as a state with a robust Jewish majority, whatever its borders'. A successful boycott campaign will not change this position in a day, but will send a clear message to this public that these positions are racist and unacceptable in the 21st century. Without the cultural and economical oxygen lines the West provides to Israel, it would be difficult for the silent majority there to continue and believe that it is possible both to be a racist and a legitimate state in the eyes of the world. They would have to choose, and hopefully like De Klerk they will make the right decision.
Avnery is also convinced that Adam Keller debunked most successfully the argument for a boycott by pointing out that the Palestinians in the occupied territories did not give in to boycott. This is indeed a fine comparison: a political prisoner lies nailed to the ground and dares to resist; as a punishment he is denied even the meager food he received hitherto. His situation is compared to a person who occupied illegally this prisoner's house and who for the first time is facing the possibility of being brought to justice for his crimes. Who has more to loose? Where is the threat mere cruelty and where is it a justified mean to rectify a past evil?
The boycott will not happen, states Avnery. He should talk with the veterans of the anti-Apartheid movement in Europe. Twenty years passed before they convinced the international community to take action. And they were told, when they began their long journey: it will not work, too many strategic and economic interests are involved and invested in South Africa.
Moreover, adds Avnery, in places such as Germany the idea of boycotting the victims of the Nazis would be rejected out of hand. Quite to the contrary. The action that already has been taken in this direction in Europe has ended the long period of Zionist manipulation of the Holocaust memory. Israel can not justify anymore its crimes against the Palestinians in the name of the Holocaust. More and more people in Europe realize that that the criminal policies of Israel abuse the Holocaust memory and this is why so many Jews are members in the movement for boycott. This is also why the Israeli attempt to cast the accusation of anti-Semitism against the supporters of the boycott had met with contempt and resilience. The members of the new movement know that their motives are humanist and their impulses are democratic. For many of them their action are triggered not only by universal values but also by their respect for the Judeo-Christian heritage of history. It would have been best for Avnery to use his immense popularity in Germany to demand from the society there to recognize their share not only in the Holocaust but also in the Palestinian catastrophe and that in the name of that recognition to ask them to end their shameful silence in the face of the Israeli atrocities in the occupied territories.
Towards the end of his article, Avnery sketches the features of the one state solution out of the present reality: and thus because he does not include the return of the refugees or a change in the regime as components of the solution, he describes today's dismal reality as tomorrow's vision. This is indeed an unworthy reality to fight for and nobody I know is struggling for it. But the vision of a One State Solution has to be the exact opposite of the present Apartheid state of Israel as was the post-Apartheid state in South Africa; and this is why this historical case study is so illuminating for us.
We need to wake up. The day Ariel Sharon and George W. Bush declared their loyal support for the two states' solution, this formula became a cynical means by which Israel can maintain its discriminatory regime inside the 1967 borders, its occupation in the West Bank and the Ghettoization of the Gaza Strip. Anyone who blocks a debate in alternative political models allows the discourse of two states to shield the criminal Israeli policies in the Palestinian territories.
Moreover, not only there are no stones left in the occupied territories with which to build a state - after Israel ruined the infrastructure there in the last six years - a reasonable partition is not offering the Palestinian a mere 20 percent of their homeland. The basis should be at least half of their homeland, on the basis of the 181 map, or similar idea. Here is another useful avenue to explore, instead of embroiling for ever inside the Sodom and Gomorrah stew that the two states solution has produced so far on the ground.
And finally, there will be no solution to this conflict without a settlement of the Palestinian refugees problem. These refugees can not return to their homeland for the same reasons that their brothers and sisters are being expelled from Greater Jerusalem and alongside the wall and their relatives are discriminated against in Israel. They can not return for the same reason that every Palestinian is under the potential danger of been occupied and expelled as long as the Zionist project has not been completed in the eyes of its captains.
They are entitled to opt for the return because it is their full human and political right. They can return because the international community had already promised them that they could. We as the Jews should want them to return because otherwise we will continue to live in a state where the value of ethnic superiority and supremacy overrides any other human and civil value. And we can not promise ourselves and the refugees such a fair and just solution within the framework of the two states' formula.
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Monday, April 23, 2007
Ed Lasky on Barack Obama
April 23, 2007
If Ed Lasky of the American Thinker, a right-wing think tank doesn't like Obama because he is too 'even handed' about Israel, it makes me more open to Obama (a recommendation of sorts).
Dan Burnstein
March 22, 2007
Barack Obama and Israel
By Ed Lasky
Senator Barack Obama has become the rarest of politicians: a man who has seemingly come out of nowhere to ascend to the top rank of Democratic Presidential candidates. He has parlayed a unique life story, capitalizing on personal scandals that have destroyed his opponents, with an inspiring speaking style and heartwarming platitudes, to generate a great deal of support among Democratic partisans and independents.
His success is even more impressive when one considers that he has very little record to run on. He has been a United States Senator for only two years and much of that time has been spent promoting his books and his candidacy. However minimal, the fact is that he does have a record; not an easy one to uncover, yet a record nevertheless and one that should give pause to those who support the American-Israel alliance.
Obama's spiritual mentor
Obama has given a great deal of credit to the influence his church and his minister have had upon him. While his campaign has called his church the United Church of Christ and thus characterized it as just one of many mainstream churches within that denomination, it is in fact the Trinity United Church of Christ and follows a particularly Afro-centric view of Christianity, emphasizing a Black Work Ethic, commitment to a Black Value System, and an allegiance to all Black Leadership that follows the Black Value System. A brief review of its philosophy shows that this is not your everyday Christian parish and perhaps accounts for his campaign's dropping of the name "Trinity" when discussing his church membership.
This racialist belief system stands in stark contrast to Obama's rhetoric regarding the need and desirability of racial and religious inclusiveness. The church's principles seem to belie Obama's platitudes about the need for all people - of whatever race or religion - to come together as one. Recall this excerpt from his now legendary 2004 Democratic National Convention speech:
"There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America"
Given the anti-Semitism that is sadly so often associated with other leaders and groups that have emphasized black separatism and empowerment (think Louis Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson, and Al Sharpton) perhaps some qualms might be warranted, particularly given some of the actions and statements of the Church's minister.
Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Jr. is the long-time Pastor of Obama's church, and Obama has credited him as being an inspiration and guiding light for him. He is a spiritual mentor to Obama and coined the term the "audacity of hope" that Obama has essentially made a theme of his campaign as well as the title of a book. He also has, in the words of the Chicago Tribune, a militant past.
Moreover, Pastor Wright has beliefs that might disturb some of Obama's supporters. He is a believer in "liberation theology," which makes the liberation of the oppressed a paramount virtue. The language of liberation all too often veers off into anti-Jewish rants. For example, one of the founders of the movement, Gustavo Gutierrez, has stated that the infidelities of the Jewish people made the Old Covenant [between the Jews and God] invalid." Pastor Wright is also a supporter of Louis Farrakhan, and in 1984 traveled with him to visit Col. Muammar al-Gadaffi, an archenemy of Israel's and America and a firm supporter of terror groups.
Wright has also been a severe critic of Israel. In his own words,
The Israelis have illegally occupied Palestinian territories for almost 40 years now. It took a divestment campaign to wake the business community up concerning the South Africa issue. Divestment has now hit the table again as a strategy to wake the business community up and to wake Americans up concerning the injustice and the racism under which the Palestinians have lived because of Zionism.
The Divestment issue will hit the floor during this month's General Synod. Divesting dollars from businesses and banks that do business with Israel is the new strategy being proposed to wake the world up concerning the racism of Zionism. That Divestment issue won't make the press either, however.
Once this history came to light, Obama started publicly distancing himself from his spiritual mentor, disinviting Wright from various Obama campaign events. Wright rationalized his current persona non grata status by stating that otherwise
"a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball in hell"
Wonder why?
Pastor Wright is not the only person from whom Obama tactically distances himself during political campaigns.
Obama's anti-Israel friends
Ali Abunimah is a well-known Chicago-based activist for Palestinian causes. He has a harshly anti-Israel attitude. He has also written that he had met Obama about half a dozen times at various Palestinian and Arab-American events, including a May 1998 community fundraiser at which the late Edward Said was the keynote speaker (there is a photo of Said with Senator Obama and his wife).
Edward Said was a severe critic of Israel; he developed a school of study about the Middle East based on denunciation of so-called "Orientalism" that has influenced many Middle Eastern professors to take an anti-Israel view. The entire field of Middle Eastern studies has been so corrupted that Congress has raised an alarm about federal funding going to professors with an anti-American, anti-Israel agenda. These are the ideological heirs of Edward Said.
Abunimah recently wrote an article critical of Obama's very recent and somewhat lukewarm outreach to the Israel's supporters. He wrote that years ago Obama had been forthright in his criticism of American foreign policy and had called for an even-handed approach to the Palestinian-Israel conflict. But Abunimah detected a change as Obama began his Senate run. He met Obama at an event that occurred in the midst of the Senator's primary campaign for Senate. Abunimah writes,
Obama said, "Hey, I'm sorry I haven't said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race. I'm hoping when things calm down I can be more up front." He referred to my activism, including columns I was contributing to the Chicago Tribune critical of Israeli and US policy, "Keep up the good work!"
Could Obama's outreach to the pro-Israel community during his Presidential run just be a reprise of his actions during his Senate campaign? True, Abunimah may not be the most reliable source, but the picture of Obama together with one of Israel's harshest critics in America, Edward Said, gives scant reason for comfort regarding Obama's true beliefs.
Obama as Senator
Most candidates for the highest office in the land have a long legislative or executive record to run on. Since Barack Obama has been a U.S. Senator for only two years there is not much of a history that can be relied upon. He has very little experience on foreign policy. One of his supporters, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof (who strongly believes that America is too close to Israel and needs to reevaluate its relationship and who has been roundly criticized for manipulating information and) has absurdly written that in foreign policy, Mr. Obama
“would bring to the White House an important experience that most other candidates lack: he has actually lived abroad. He spent four years as a child in Indonesia and attended schools in the Indonesian language, which he still speaks”
He lived in Indonesia between the ages of 6 and 10. By his own admission, he was a “Jakarta street kid”. Does this unique qualify him over other contenders to run the foreign policy of America? How many great American Presidents have not lived overseas when they were children? All of them-however you may choose them. So one has to look at his brief record in the Senate and pronouncements he has made that may shed light on his views.
Most Congressmen have a solid legislative record on bills considered important to the American-Israel relationship-after all, most Americans have a very favorable view towards Israel. Most legislative acts regarding the American-Israel relationship are uncontroversial-which is the reason one often sees such votes as being supportive of the alliance between the two nations. He has, to repeat, been a member of the Senate for all of two years and his record is thus very thin in this regard.
However, Obama has already compiled one of the most liberal voting records in the Senate (even more liberal than Ted Kennedy) and a great deal of his most fervent support has come from the left-wing of the party, who have turned against Hillary Clinton. As many have commented - including Democrats Martin Peretz and Lanny Davis - this is precisely the wing of the Party that has been increasingly corrupted by anti-Israel and anti-Semitic activists. Of course, Senator Obama is an individual and holds his own views and one should not impute the views of some of his supporters to him. Nevertheless, it is not improper to look at the base of his support, either.
But what are his views?
One disquieting aspect comes from his career as a state senator. He took a decidedly very soft approach on bills dealing with drug, gang and gun control issues and many feel this will become fodder for his critics. A man who takes a soft on crime approach towards criminals may give some qualms when trying to foresee how he will deal with those who commit terrorist acts-especially those who justify their criminal acts as acts of “liberation” (see above).
In an interview he gave prior to the U.S. Senate primary election with the Chicago Jewish News published in March 2004, when asked about the Israeli security fence, Obama replied: “the creation of a wall dividing the two nations is yet another example of the neglect of this Administration in brokering peace.”
The security fence has saved the lives of many innocent people: terror attacks against Israelis have plummeted. After suffering waves of suicide bombings, losing more than 900 people and after suffering thousands of casualties, Israel learned that indeed “fences can be good neighbors”. One wishes that Senator Obama could appreciate the toll that this endless wave of terror had on the men, women and children who had to bear it. Furthermore, it is not a wall (except for a small part, comprising less than 5% of the length) and there are not two nations involved in the dispute-there is no Palestinian nation, as of yet.
Ben Shapiro of The Conservative Voice noticed something rather distrurbing, indicating Obama's fundamental attitude toward the handling of terrorists.
In his new forward to "Dreams From My Father," Obama writes,
"I know, I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi -- how easily they slip into violence and despair. I know that the response of the powerful to this disorder -- alternating as it does between a dull complacency and, when the disorder spills out of its proscribed confines, a stead [sic] unthinking application of force, of more sophisticated military hardware -- is inadequate to the task."
This sounds like boilerplate rhetoric. It is not. It is the theory of appeasement, stated clearly and succinctly.
One other aspect of Obama's support that is cause for some discomfort is the fact that he has the seal of approval from Jimmy Carter and billionaire George Soros-both influential and powerful people who take an unseemly glee in trying to undermine the American-Israel alliance.Soros has been funding powerful 527 groups, donating to candidates and others-such as Wes Clark-who are severe critics of Israel, and has tried to organize a lobbying group designed to erode support for Israel in America. He recently wrote an essay harshly critical of the ties between America and Israel. Some Democratic politicians-since he is a major supporter of the Democratic Party-have recently distanced themselves from that particular essay. Some politicians denounced Soros’s views personally - Congressmen Wexler and Engle; Senator Obama campaign spokeswoman did so.
Are we also to be concerned that Congressman Neil Abercrombie-who has one of the worst anti-Israel records and refused to support Israel efforts to defend itself from Hezbollah, was close friends with Barack's father and has been a lifelong friend and supporter of Barack's? People are often judged by the company they keep and the quarters from which they receive support.
For all the lofty sentiments and inspiring rhetoric propelling his career, at times Obama has been compelled to actually address the issues that a President may face, and there are grounds to be concerned.
He recently gave a speech before a group of supporters of Israel, at an AIPAC meeting in Chicago, that left many nonplussed. This speech was, in part, prompted by his knowledge that a panel of experts in Israel considers him to be the candidate that would support the state of Israel the least. While his supporters naturally heaped praise, when a more careful analysis of the speech is made, there is very little of substance regarding his support for our ally, Israel.
He stated that efforts to achieve peace with its neighbors “begin with a clear and strong commitment to the security of Israel”. Is this a breakthrough for Senator Obama as it has been so hailed? Israel is the only true ally of America in the region, a fellow democracy and a Western nation. Shouldn’t Senator Obama believe that such a commitment to its security be important as opposed to security for Hezbollah, Hamas, or Iran, or any of the anti-American dictatorships that plague the region?
He criticized Holocaust deniers. That is certainly not such a radical position (unless you live in Iran) yet then advocated more talks with Iranian President Ahmadinejad-who not only denies the Holocaust but also promises a new one to come. He noted how Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon led to the rise of an enemy on its northern border. But then he seemed to be encouraging Israel to make even more such gestures. For instance, he praised past Israeli leaders for gestures of peace they have made towards the Palestinians-but refused to recognize that these previous moves have just led to more violence and death for the Israelis. For instance, the Oslo Accords led to the rise of a terror empire in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza has led, a la Lebanon, to another base of terror-this time on Israel’s southern flank. Yet Senator Obama seems to ignore this recent history while calling for a repeat of past mistakes. Does he not see that the Palestinians have just pocketed these gains and used them to empower terrorists? Not a good sign.
This was not a gaffe on his part but seems to reflect a view that the Israelis should bear the burden and take the risky steps for peace. Shortly after his Chicago speech he appeared before a group of Iowa Democrats, during which he showed a disturbing lack of familiarity regarding the basic principles that the international community has agreed must guide future diplomacy between the Israelis and Palestinians (the so-called Road Map).
Or perhaps it was that among Democratic partisans he felt a greater freedom to disclose his views. He stated that the
"Israel government must make difficult concessions for the peace process to restart".
This position contradicts the key principle of the Road Map that states that steps must be taken by both the Palestinians and the Israelis in parallel. Israel, contrary to Obama's views, is not responsible for taking the first steps to restart the peace process.
Furthermore, Obama stated that he supports a resumption of aid to the Palestinian government (there has been a non-stop flow of humanitarian aid) provided the government "renounces terrorism." This also ignored the few simple conditions that the international community has laid down for such resumption of aid to continue: not only must the Palestinians renounce terrorism, but they also must stop it (Arafat repeatedly denounced terrorism in English, while praising and planning for it in Arabic); Palestinians also must respect and abide by previous agreements made with Israel and they must accept the right of Israel to exist. These conditions Senator Obama would seemingly waive as long as Palestinians made noises about "renouncing terrorism" - which they certainly have experience doing!
If Obama professes ignorance of these conditions, that would come as a telling shock: not only have they been repeatedly announced in the media and on Capitol Hill, but Senator Obama serves on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations! Has he just been to busy promoting his books or his Presidential campaign to learn about these basic diplomatic principles involving one of the most heated issues of the day? When George W. Bush was asked during his first campaign in 1999 who the President of Chechnya was or the name of the new leader of Pakistan, he was widely ridiculed for not having the answer at his fingertips. Yet, when Senator Obama does not know the principles of the Road Map or the few simple words that are the conditions for aid to be resumed to the Palestinians, he gets a free pass. He is apparently the Teflon Candidate.
Senator Obama also stated during his Iowa trip, "Nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people" which not only ignores the Israelis who have been terrorized and killed for years but also ignores refugees from the genocide in Darfur or the daily terror the Iraqis are experience from Muslim on Muslim violence. Instead, by identifying the Palestinians as suffering, he implicitly seems to be blaming the Israelis for their plight (though he did mention their own government failures).
His moral compass seems a bit out of kilter: In another recent speech, he declared our enemies are not
"just terrorists, it's not just Hezbollah, it's not just Hamas, it's also cynicism"
How can one possibly equate that elastic term cynicism with terror groups that have killed thousands of innocent people and have guiding charters filled with hate and calls for violence? Similarly, his use of the now discredited term "cycle of violence" displays an approach that equates Palestinian terror attacks with Israeli defense actions. If Obama were true to his rhetoric of peace and the need to come together, why has he remained silent about Palestinian textbooks that teach children to hate and that celebrate martyrdom? (Even Hillary Clinton has done so)
Perhaps this reflects a worldview that Barack Obama has developed from his own history.
Obama began his career as a community activist, working to help poor residents of a public housing project to get asbestos removed from their buildings. He later labored on behalf of other disadvantaged people. This activity was a life-altering experience for him and he is clearly proud of it. Will this history predispose him to the view that Palestinians are the weaker party in their dispute with the Israelis (ignoring hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world who support them-let alone much of Europe)? The aphorism "if you are a hammer, everything seems like a nail" comes to mind. Will he absolve them of their own responsibility for their situation and place the blame mostly or solely on the Israelis? Will his views converge with those of many in Europe who place the blame for the Palestinians plight on the Israelis? Will he come naturally to favor the Palestinians over the Israelis? There are reasons to at least wonder.
Some may offer in support of Obama that he is a tad inexperienced and has yet to appreciate the complexities involved in the Middle East. This may very well be true. However, if this is the case, does he have the foreign policy credentials that qualify him to be President (regardless of Kristof’s assertion that he accumulated such credential between the ages of 6 and 10 in Indonesia)? He should be, prepared, especially after serving two years on the Senate Foreign Relation Committee, to explain current American and international policy regarding one of the most important foreign policy issues today. Furthermore, why does almost every off the cuff remark he makes-remarks that spring from his heart as much as from his brain-have an anti-Israel slant? Anyone see a pattern here? Anyone? Are these actually closer to the nature of the policies he would follow as President?
Barack Obama has enjoyed a wave of early popular support that seems to break with all the traditions of politics in America. Despite a meager record to run on, with virtually no executive experience, he may very well become President. His story is eerily similar in many ways to the story of Chance the Gardener, the main character in the book and movie, Being There. In that story by Jerzy Kosinski, a man literally comes from nowhere to become a Presidential candidate.
The key to his success: a freshness, a lack of record to run on, the constant repetition of simple feel-good platitudes that lull listeners into a sense of trust and induce in them a yearning to believe.
No wonder Barack Obama is so popular among denizens of Hollywood: they certainly have an eye for those who can create an image, can generate a buzz that compels others to suspend their disbelief, and who can induce a trance-like stargazing.
But the fact is that Barack Obama does have a record to run on and it is a record that should be of concern to those who support America's relationship with Israel.
Ed Lasky is news editor of American Thinker.
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If Ed Lasky of the American Thinker, a right-wing think tank doesn't like Obama because he is too 'even handed' about Israel, it makes me more open to Obama (a recommendation of sorts).
Dan Burnstein
March 22, 2007
Barack Obama and Israel
By Ed Lasky
Senator Barack Obama has become the rarest of politicians: a man who has seemingly come out of nowhere to ascend to the top rank of Democratic Presidential candidates. He has parlayed a unique life story, capitalizing on personal scandals that have destroyed his opponents, with an inspiring speaking style and heartwarming platitudes, to generate a great deal of support among Democratic partisans and independents.
His success is even more impressive when one considers that he has very little record to run on. He has been a United States Senator for only two years and much of that time has been spent promoting his books and his candidacy. However minimal, the fact is that he does have a record; not an easy one to uncover, yet a record nevertheless and one that should give pause to those who support the American-Israel alliance.
Obama's spiritual mentor
Obama has given a great deal of credit to the influence his church and his minister have had upon him. While his campaign has called his church the United Church of Christ and thus characterized it as just one of many mainstream churches within that denomination, it is in fact the Trinity United Church of Christ and follows a particularly Afro-centric view of Christianity, emphasizing a Black Work Ethic, commitment to a Black Value System, and an allegiance to all Black Leadership that follows the Black Value System. A brief review of its philosophy shows that this is not your everyday Christian parish and perhaps accounts for his campaign's dropping of the name "Trinity" when discussing his church membership.
This racialist belief system stands in stark contrast to Obama's rhetoric regarding the need and desirability of racial and religious inclusiveness. The church's principles seem to belie Obama's platitudes about the need for all people - of whatever race or religion - to come together as one. Recall this excerpt from his now legendary 2004 Democratic National Convention speech:
"There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America"
Given the anti-Semitism that is sadly so often associated with other leaders and groups that have emphasized black separatism and empowerment (think Louis Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson, and Al Sharpton) perhaps some qualms might be warranted, particularly given some of the actions and statements of the Church's minister.
Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Jr. is the long-time Pastor of Obama's church, and Obama has credited him as being an inspiration and guiding light for him. He is a spiritual mentor to Obama and coined the term the "audacity of hope" that Obama has essentially made a theme of his campaign as well as the title of a book. He also has, in the words of the Chicago Tribune, a militant past.
Moreover, Pastor Wright has beliefs that might disturb some of Obama's supporters. He is a believer in "liberation theology," which makes the liberation of the oppressed a paramount virtue. The language of liberation all too often veers off into anti-Jewish rants. For example, one of the founders of the movement, Gustavo Gutierrez, has stated that the infidelities of the Jewish people made the Old Covenant [between the Jews and God] invalid." Pastor Wright is also a supporter of Louis Farrakhan, and in 1984 traveled with him to visit Col. Muammar al-Gadaffi, an archenemy of Israel's and America and a firm supporter of terror groups.
Wright has also been a severe critic of Israel. In his own words,
The Israelis have illegally occupied Palestinian territories for almost 40 years now. It took a divestment campaign to wake the business community up concerning the South Africa issue. Divestment has now hit the table again as a strategy to wake the business community up and to wake Americans up concerning the injustice and the racism under which the Palestinians have lived because of Zionism.
The Divestment issue will hit the floor during this month's General Synod. Divesting dollars from businesses and banks that do business with Israel is the new strategy being proposed to wake the world up concerning the racism of Zionism. That Divestment issue won't make the press either, however.
Once this history came to light, Obama started publicly distancing himself from his spiritual mentor, disinviting Wright from various Obama campaign events. Wright rationalized his current persona non grata status by stating that otherwise
"a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball in hell"
Wonder why?
Pastor Wright is not the only person from whom Obama tactically distances himself during political campaigns.
Obama's anti-Israel friends
Ali Abunimah is a well-known Chicago-based activist for Palestinian causes. He has a harshly anti-Israel attitude. He has also written that he had met Obama about half a dozen times at various Palestinian and Arab-American events, including a May 1998 community fundraiser at which the late Edward Said was the keynote speaker (there is a photo of Said with Senator Obama and his wife).
Edward Said was a severe critic of Israel; he developed a school of study about the Middle East based on denunciation of so-called "Orientalism" that has influenced many Middle Eastern professors to take an anti-Israel view. The entire field of Middle Eastern studies has been so corrupted that Congress has raised an alarm about federal funding going to professors with an anti-American, anti-Israel agenda. These are the ideological heirs of Edward Said.
Abunimah recently wrote an article critical of Obama's very recent and somewhat lukewarm outreach to the Israel's supporters. He wrote that years ago Obama had been forthright in his criticism of American foreign policy and had called for an even-handed approach to the Palestinian-Israel conflict. But Abunimah detected a change as Obama began his Senate run. He met Obama at an event that occurred in the midst of the Senator's primary campaign for Senate. Abunimah writes,
Obama said, "Hey, I'm sorry I haven't said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race. I'm hoping when things calm down I can be more up front." He referred to my activism, including columns I was contributing to the Chicago Tribune critical of Israeli and US policy, "Keep up the good work!"
Could Obama's outreach to the pro-Israel community during his Presidential run just be a reprise of his actions during his Senate campaign? True, Abunimah may not be the most reliable source, but the picture of Obama together with one of Israel's harshest critics in America, Edward Said, gives scant reason for comfort regarding Obama's true beliefs.
Obama as Senator
Most candidates for the highest office in the land have a long legislative or executive record to run on. Since Barack Obama has been a U.S. Senator for only two years there is not much of a history that can be relied upon. He has very little experience on foreign policy. One of his supporters, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof (who strongly believes that America is too close to Israel and needs to reevaluate its relationship and who has been roundly criticized for manipulating information and) has absurdly written that in foreign policy, Mr. Obama
“would bring to the White House an important experience that most other candidates lack: he has actually lived abroad. He spent four years as a child in Indonesia and attended schools in the Indonesian language, which he still speaks”
He lived in Indonesia between the ages of 6 and 10. By his own admission, he was a “Jakarta street kid”. Does this unique qualify him over other contenders to run the foreign policy of America? How many great American Presidents have not lived overseas when they were children? All of them-however you may choose them. So one has to look at his brief record in the Senate and pronouncements he has made that may shed light on his views.
Most Congressmen have a solid legislative record on bills considered important to the American-Israel relationship-after all, most Americans have a very favorable view towards Israel. Most legislative acts regarding the American-Israel relationship are uncontroversial-which is the reason one often sees such votes as being supportive of the alliance between the two nations. He has, to repeat, been a member of the Senate for all of two years and his record is thus very thin in this regard.
However, Obama has already compiled one of the most liberal voting records in the Senate (even more liberal than Ted Kennedy) and a great deal of his most fervent support has come from the left-wing of the party, who have turned against Hillary Clinton. As many have commented - including Democrats Martin Peretz and Lanny Davis - this is precisely the wing of the Party that has been increasingly corrupted by anti-Israel and anti-Semitic activists. Of course, Senator Obama is an individual and holds his own views and one should not impute the views of some of his supporters to him. Nevertheless, it is not improper to look at the base of his support, either.
But what are his views?
One disquieting aspect comes from his career as a state senator. He took a decidedly very soft approach on bills dealing with drug, gang and gun control issues and many feel this will become fodder for his critics. A man who takes a soft on crime approach towards criminals may give some qualms when trying to foresee how he will deal with those who commit terrorist acts-especially those who justify their criminal acts as acts of “liberation” (see above).
In an interview he gave prior to the U.S. Senate primary election with the Chicago Jewish News published in March 2004, when asked about the Israeli security fence, Obama replied: “the creation of a wall dividing the two nations is yet another example of the neglect of this Administration in brokering peace.”
The security fence has saved the lives of many innocent people: terror attacks against Israelis have plummeted. After suffering waves of suicide bombings, losing more than 900 people and after suffering thousands of casualties, Israel learned that indeed “fences can be good neighbors”. One wishes that Senator Obama could appreciate the toll that this endless wave of terror had on the men, women and children who had to bear it. Furthermore, it is not a wall (except for a small part, comprising less than 5% of the length) and there are not two nations involved in the dispute-there is no Palestinian nation, as of yet.
Ben Shapiro of The Conservative Voice noticed something rather distrurbing, indicating Obama's fundamental attitude toward the handling of terrorists.
In his new forward to "Dreams From My Father," Obama writes,
"I know, I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi -- how easily they slip into violence and despair. I know that the response of the powerful to this disorder -- alternating as it does between a dull complacency and, when the disorder spills out of its proscribed confines, a stead [sic] unthinking application of force, of more sophisticated military hardware -- is inadequate to the task."
This sounds like boilerplate rhetoric. It is not. It is the theory of appeasement, stated clearly and succinctly.
One other aspect of Obama's support that is cause for some discomfort is the fact that he has the seal of approval from Jimmy Carter and billionaire George Soros-both influential and powerful people who take an unseemly glee in trying to undermine the American-Israel alliance.Soros has been funding powerful 527 groups, donating to candidates and others-such as Wes Clark-who are severe critics of Israel, and has tried to organize a lobbying group designed to erode support for Israel in America. He recently wrote an essay harshly critical of the ties between America and Israel. Some Democratic politicians-since he is a major supporter of the Democratic Party-have recently distanced themselves from that particular essay. Some politicians denounced Soros’s views personally - Congressmen Wexler and Engle; Senator Obama campaign spokeswoman did so.
Are we also to be concerned that Congressman Neil Abercrombie-who has one of the worst anti-Israel records and refused to support Israel efforts to defend itself from Hezbollah, was close friends with Barack's father and has been a lifelong friend and supporter of Barack's? People are often judged by the company they keep and the quarters from which they receive support.
For all the lofty sentiments and inspiring rhetoric propelling his career, at times Obama has been compelled to actually address the issues that a President may face, and there are grounds to be concerned.
He recently gave a speech before a group of supporters of Israel, at an AIPAC meeting in Chicago, that left many nonplussed. This speech was, in part, prompted by his knowledge that a panel of experts in Israel considers him to be the candidate that would support the state of Israel the least. While his supporters naturally heaped praise, when a more careful analysis of the speech is made, there is very little of substance regarding his support for our ally, Israel.
He stated that efforts to achieve peace with its neighbors “begin with a clear and strong commitment to the security of Israel”. Is this a breakthrough for Senator Obama as it has been so hailed? Israel is the only true ally of America in the region, a fellow democracy and a Western nation. Shouldn’t Senator Obama believe that such a commitment to its security be important as opposed to security for Hezbollah, Hamas, or Iran, or any of the anti-American dictatorships that plague the region?
He criticized Holocaust deniers. That is certainly not such a radical position (unless you live in Iran) yet then advocated more talks with Iranian President Ahmadinejad-who not only denies the Holocaust but also promises a new one to come. He noted how Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon led to the rise of an enemy on its northern border. But then he seemed to be encouraging Israel to make even more such gestures. For instance, he praised past Israeli leaders for gestures of peace they have made towards the Palestinians-but refused to recognize that these previous moves have just led to more violence and death for the Israelis. For instance, the Oslo Accords led to the rise of a terror empire in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza has led, a la Lebanon, to another base of terror-this time on Israel’s southern flank. Yet Senator Obama seems to ignore this recent history while calling for a repeat of past mistakes. Does he not see that the Palestinians have just pocketed these gains and used them to empower terrorists? Not a good sign.
This was not a gaffe on his part but seems to reflect a view that the Israelis should bear the burden and take the risky steps for peace. Shortly after his Chicago speech he appeared before a group of Iowa Democrats, during which he showed a disturbing lack of familiarity regarding the basic principles that the international community has agreed must guide future diplomacy between the Israelis and Palestinians (the so-called Road Map).
Or perhaps it was that among Democratic partisans he felt a greater freedom to disclose his views. He stated that the
"Israel government must make difficult concessions for the peace process to restart".
This position contradicts the key principle of the Road Map that states that steps must be taken by both the Palestinians and the Israelis in parallel. Israel, contrary to Obama's views, is not responsible for taking the first steps to restart the peace process.
Furthermore, Obama stated that he supports a resumption of aid to the Palestinian government (there has been a non-stop flow of humanitarian aid) provided the government "renounces terrorism." This also ignored the few simple conditions that the international community has laid down for such resumption of aid to continue: not only must the Palestinians renounce terrorism, but they also must stop it (Arafat repeatedly denounced terrorism in English, while praising and planning for it in Arabic); Palestinians also must respect and abide by previous agreements made with Israel and they must accept the right of Israel to exist. These conditions Senator Obama would seemingly waive as long as Palestinians made noises about "renouncing terrorism" - which they certainly have experience doing!
If Obama professes ignorance of these conditions, that would come as a telling shock: not only have they been repeatedly announced in the media and on Capitol Hill, but Senator Obama serves on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations! Has he just been to busy promoting his books or his Presidential campaign to learn about these basic diplomatic principles involving one of the most heated issues of the day? When George W. Bush was asked during his first campaign in 1999 who the President of Chechnya was or the name of the new leader of Pakistan, he was widely ridiculed for not having the answer at his fingertips. Yet, when Senator Obama does not know the principles of the Road Map or the few simple words that are the conditions for aid to be resumed to the Palestinians, he gets a free pass. He is apparently the Teflon Candidate.
Senator Obama also stated during his Iowa trip, "Nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people" which not only ignores the Israelis who have been terrorized and killed for years but also ignores refugees from the genocide in Darfur or the daily terror the Iraqis are experience from Muslim on Muslim violence. Instead, by identifying the Palestinians as suffering, he implicitly seems to be blaming the Israelis for their plight (though he did mention their own government failures).
His moral compass seems a bit out of kilter: In another recent speech, he declared our enemies are not
"just terrorists, it's not just Hezbollah, it's not just Hamas, it's also cynicism"
How can one possibly equate that elastic term cynicism with terror groups that have killed thousands of innocent people and have guiding charters filled with hate and calls for violence? Similarly, his use of the now discredited term "cycle of violence" displays an approach that equates Palestinian terror attacks with Israeli defense actions. If Obama were true to his rhetoric of peace and the need to come together, why has he remained silent about Palestinian textbooks that teach children to hate and that celebrate martyrdom? (Even Hillary Clinton has done so)
Perhaps this reflects a worldview that Barack Obama has developed from his own history.
Obama began his career as a community activist, working to help poor residents of a public housing project to get asbestos removed from their buildings. He later labored on behalf of other disadvantaged people. This activity was a life-altering experience for him and he is clearly proud of it. Will this history predispose him to the view that Palestinians are the weaker party in their dispute with the Israelis (ignoring hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world who support them-let alone much of Europe)? The aphorism "if you are a hammer, everything seems like a nail" comes to mind. Will he absolve them of their own responsibility for their situation and place the blame mostly or solely on the Israelis? Will his views converge with those of many in Europe who place the blame for the Palestinians plight on the Israelis? Will he come naturally to favor the Palestinians over the Israelis? There are reasons to at least wonder.
Some may offer in support of Obama that he is a tad inexperienced and has yet to appreciate the complexities involved in the Middle East. This may very well be true. However, if this is the case, does he have the foreign policy credentials that qualify him to be President (regardless of Kristof’s assertion that he accumulated such credential between the ages of 6 and 10 in Indonesia)? He should be, prepared, especially after serving two years on the Senate Foreign Relation Committee, to explain current American and international policy regarding one of the most important foreign policy issues today. Furthermore, why does almost every off the cuff remark he makes-remarks that spring from his heart as much as from his brain-have an anti-Israel slant? Anyone see a pattern here? Anyone? Are these actually closer to the nature of the policies he would follow as President?
Barack Obama has enjoyed a wave of early popular support that seems to break with all the traditions of politics in America. Despite a meager record to run on, with virtually no executive experience, he may very well become President. His story is eerily similar in many ways to the story of Chance the Gardener, the main character in the book and movie, Being There. In that story by Jerzy Kosinski, a man literally comes from nowhere to become a Presidential candidate.
The key to his success: a freshness, a lack of record to run on, the constant repetition of simple feel-good platitudes that lull listeners into a sense of trust and induce in them a yearning to believe.
No wonder Barack Obama is so popular among denizens of Hollywood: they certainly have an eye for those who can create an image, can generate a buzz that compels others to suspend their disbelief, and who can induce a trance-like stargazing.
But the fact is that Barack Obama does have a record to run on and it is a record that should be of concern to those who support America's relationship with Israel.
Ed Lasky is news editor of American Thinker.
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Sunday, April 22, 2007
John Spritzer replies to Avnery
Dear friends,
Uri Avneri, in his The Bed of Sodom, attacks the idea of a One-State Solution to the Palestine/Israel conflict, i.e. the solution that says make all of historic Palestine from the Jordan river to the Sea be a single democratic state with equal rights for all regardless of ethnicity or religion. Avneri also attacks the idea of a general boycott of Israel. He doesn't mind a boycott of specific Israeli companies, or settlers, to force Israel to end its occupation of Palestinian land outside its 1967 borders, but he does oppose a general boycott of Israel aimed at causing the state of Israel to collapse (like the apartheid state of South Africa did after it was boycotted by the world) and be replaced by One-Democratic State.
Avneri is wrong. But to see why, one must get out of the reformist box that so much of the discourse on this topic resides in, and think about these questions from a revolutionary point of view. This is the perspective from which I will refute Avneri's arguments. First, what exactly are his arguments?
Here are Avneri's reasons for opposing the One-State Solution:
1. It "diverts the effort from a solution that has now, after many years, a broad public basis [the 'Two-State Solution'--JS], in favor of a solution that has no chance at all."
2. It has no chance at all because "There is no doubt that 99.99% of Jewish Israelis want the State of Israel to exist as a state with a robust Jewish majority, whatever its borders."
3. And even if it did come to pass, it would be bad because: "it is a dangerous idea, especially for the Palestinians. Statistically, the Israeli Jews constitute, as of now, the absolute majority between the sea and the river. To that, one must add an even more important fact: the average annual income of an Arab Palestinian is about 800 dollars, that of a Jewish Israeli is about 20,000 dollars - 25 times (!) higher. The Israeli economy is growing every year. The Palestinians would be 'hewers of wood and drawers of water'. That means that if the imaginary joint state did indeed come into being, the Jews there would wield in it absolute power. They would, of course, use this power to consolidate their dominance and prevent the return of refugees."
And here are his reasons for opposing a general boycott of Israel:
1. The general boycott of Israel idea is based on a false premise, says Avneri, and the false premise goes like this: "The problem is the very essence of Israel as a Zionist state. This essence is unchangeable as long as the state exists. No change from the inside is possible, because in Israel there is no essential difference between Right and Left. Both are accomplices in a policy whose real aim is ethnic cleansing, the expulsion of the Palestinians not only from the occupied territories, but also from Israel proper."
On the contrary, says Avneri, "it is possible to change the historical direction of Israel" from within. His evidence for this is the fact that the Israeli peace movement has already "attained impressive achievements: the recognition of the existence of the Palestinian people has become general, and so has the readiness of most Israelis to accept the idea of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as the capital of both states. We have compelled our government to recognize the PLO, and we shall compel them to recognize Hamas."
2. Furthermore, argues Avneri, a general boycott will never work: "The entire world has imposed a blockade on the Palestinian people. But in spite of the terrible misery of the Palestinians, they have not been brought to their knees. Why do you think that a boycott would break the Israeli public, which is far stronger economically, so that they would give up the Jewish character of the state?"
3. And besides, Avneri says, even if it would work, a general boycott is impossible to pull off in the first place: "In any case, such a boycott is quite impossible. Here and there, an organization can declare a boycott, small circles of justice-lovers can keep it, but there is no chance that in the coming decades a world-wide boycott movement, like the one that broke the racist regime in South Africa, will come about. That regime was headed by declared asmirers of the Nazis. A boycott of the "Jewish State", which is identified with the victims of the Nazis, just will not happen. It will be enough to remind people that the long road to the gas chambers started with the 1933 Nazi slogan 'Kauft nicht bei Juden' ('Don't buy from Jews')."
WHAT'S WRONG WITH AVNERI'S ARGUMENTS?
The key flaw in Avneri's case is that he completely ignores the fact of class conflict. He ignores the class conflict that rages within Israel among the mainly Jewish population (described below) as well as the class conflict that rages in all of the rest of the Middle East among the mainly non-Jewish population (for example Iran and Saudi Arabia, whose governments oppress their own workers with assistance from the Israeli regime.) Assessing the possibilities for solving the conflict in Palestine/Israel while ignoring this key aspect of reality--class conflict--is as bound to lead to wrong and fundamentally pessimistic conclusions as a doctor, who is ignorant of the fact that a patient has an immune system that fights invading organisms, assessing the possibility of saving the patient's life.
Avneri's world view resides in a reformist box, inside of which one takes capitalist class inequality as a permanent, uncontroversial, given fact of nature. His world view is therefore blind to the ways in which working class Jewish Israelis, despite the undeniable fact that many of them fear Palestinians more than their own rulers, are nonetheless already engaged in a fight against their Zionist rulers over issues that separate people according to their basic values: equality versus inequality, competition versus solidarity, democracy versus rule by an elite--in other words working class values versus capitalist values. It is blind to the implicitly revolutionary conflict between what ordinary Jews actually want versus what their Zionist leaders actually want. It is blind to the fact that when people are forced to fight against their leaders they may start to question the lies their leaders tell them to control them, like the Big Lie about Palestinians wanting to "drive the Jews into the sea." And it is blind to the potential for revolutionary change that can take place when people start to see through the racist lies that they formerly believed. Some people, of course, like to stay in the reformist box, and they like to be blind (or keep others blind) because they don't want the capitalist system of class inequality to be abolished. They don't want others to see the possibilities for optimism and hope that lie outside the box, where one can see the implicitly revolutionary aspirations for a better world that are shared by millions of working class people regardless of their race or religion or nationality.
Some may ask, "What class conflict inside Israel?" Well, follow these links to read about it if you are skeptical.
Read about how Israel is not really a "Jewish state" but rather a "rich Jews' state."
Read how the upper class is driving down the rest of the people.
Read in The Jewish Daily Forward how
"Israel’s growing population of retirees has been reduced to a state of profound economic insecurity in recent years, as self-styled economic reformers have hollowed out the Jewish state’s time-honored system of care for the elderly. Pensions have been frozen. Social security payments, known in Israel as national insurance, have been relentlessly whittled away — cut by 35% in a single decade. Health care and prescription drug coverage have been slashed, along with funds for senior housing and assisted living. It’s part of a deliberate move by Jerusalem policy-makers to modernize Israel’s economy, by which they mean to remodel it along American lines. Determined to bury the socialist ethos of Israel’s founders, successive governments since the mid-1980s have slashed income supports and welfare payments even as they’ve privatized and deregulated industries, opened capital markets to international competition and reduced workers’ job security (they call it “liberalizing labor laws”). Over the past three years, under the economic leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, the reforms have been ramped up to a revolution."
The Forward explains the "meteoric rise of the Pensioners' Party" in the April, 2006 election this way: "And then there was the simple, glaring fact of poverty. Too many Israelis had reached the point where their own personal security seemed more precarious than their country’s."
Read in the Jewish News Weekly of Northern California about: "Poverty in Israel — Hunger and homelessness surge in the Jewish state"
Read how "Recent measures taken by Israel’s government to undermine the welfare state have harmed women first of all, both Arab and Jewish. Of the Jewish, many who in the past had gained a foothold in the middle class find themselves shunted to the margins of society. The income supplements they depended on have been whisked out from under them. The same cuts have worsened the plight of Arab women. Despite the fact that both groups, indeed the lower classes in general on both the Arab and Jewish sides, suffer from an erosion in living-standards – and often for identical reasons – there is an utter lack of dialogue between them."
But Israelis are resisting this capitalist attack on their lives, in many different ways:
Read Jenny Cohen-Khallas's description of "Penury and Hunger in Israel" and how "vociferous segments of the public are demanding that governmental resources be channeled to welfare and other domestic resources, rather than to strengthening settlements beyond the green line."
Read about single mothers, the homeless and the unemployed camping out in front of Israel's Finance Ministry and in Tel Aviv: "The choice of place is no accident," says Israel Twito, 38, a divorcee who is bringing up three daughters alone. "The contrast between our miserable campsite and the neighbourhood’s luxury shops and apartment blocks symbolises the ever-widening abyss between rich and poor."
Is it any wonder, then, that one can read how more people are leaving Israel than entering it, and how " Almost half of the country's young people were thinking of leaving the country" because of "dissatisfaction with the government, the education system, a lack of confidence in the political ruling class and concern over the security situation"?
Read about the way working class Israelis have been forced to engage in large strikes to protect themselves, not from "the Arabs" but from their Jewish ruling class:
On September 21, [2004] the Israeli General Federation of Labour (Histadrut) held a general strike in protest against the ongoing failure of the government to pay wages to local authorities’ employees. Some 400,000 public sector workers across 265 municipalities came out, bringing the state to a halt. Flights, seaports, railways, post offices, banks and the stock exchange were all shut down, whilst hospitals and the fire service operated on an emergency footing. Schools, day-care centres, kindergartens, and universities were also affected.
The strike also included the Israeli Electrical Corporation, Mekorot National Water Company, oil refineries, public works departments, and the Eilat-Ashkelon Pipeline Company. Border crossings were closed, and all government offices including civilian employees in the Israeli Defence Force and at the Negev Nuclear Research Plant were on strike.
Calling the strike was forced upon Histadrut by the depth of opposition and anger amongst workers. Histadrut’s chief and Member of the Knesset Amir Peretz said, “I used to believe in the prime minister, the Knesset, and the courts, yet when I realised there are Israelis hungry for bread, I decided to act.”
“No one, not even the Prime Minister, has the right to set any conditions whatsoever for payment of many months of salaries owed to the workers,” Peretz noted. “The government is turning wages into charity. Wages are not a favour, they are a legal obligation. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Minister of Finance Benjamin Netanyahu, and Minister of Internal Affairs Avraham Poraz are not enforcing the law. They’re turning Israel into a third world country.”
WHY AVNERI IS WRONG ABOUT THE ONE-STATE SOLUTION BEING IMPOSSIBLE
Where, we might ask Avneri, is it written in stone that Arabs and Jews in Palestine, who suffer at the hands of the same Israeli ruling class, will never start talking to each other about their shared problem--the Israeli ruling class--and their shared aspirations for a decent life for themselves and their children--a life in a society with peace and security, one where half the youth aren't thinking about leaving and where people don't have to camp out in protest or wage general strikes to defend themselves against a rapacious government serving billionaires and generals while it does everything it can to foment a war of Orwellian social control between Jews and non-Jews in Palestine/Israel? Where is it written that working class Jews will never understand that their Zionist leaders tell them lies about Palestinians--especially the Big Lie that Palestinians want to "drive the Jews into the sea"--purely for the purpose of making Israeli Jews easier to control and exploit?
What about Avneri's first two arguments against the One-State Solution--that it diverts from the Two-State Solution, which is the only practical one because 99.99% of Jewish Israelis want a Jewish state with a robust Jewish majority? From inside the reformist box, where there is no conflict in people's minds, or in society, between working class and capitalist values like equality versus inequality, this statement seems reasonable. But let's look outside the box. The same kind of statement that Avrneri makes about "99.99% of Jewish Israelis" could have been made about white South Africans overwhelmingly wanting apartheid before South Africa's President deKlerk, as a result of the world wide boycott against apartheid South Africa, decided to give white South Africans, for the very first time, a green light to express their true feelings about apartheid. Prior to this, any white person who expressed a criticism of apartheid was accused of being "anti-Christian" and therefore many just kept their mouths shut. But when they were allowed to speak more freely this is what happened. In 1992, the BBC reported on how whites voted on the referendum, supported by the de Klerk government, to abolish apartheid:
White South Africans have backed an overwhelming mandate for political reforms to end apartheid and create a power-sharing multi-racial government.
In a landslide victory for change, the government swept the polls in all four provinces, and all but one of 15 referendum regions.
It won 68.6% of the vote in a record turn-out, which, in some districts exceeded 96%.
What about Avneri's third argument against the One-State Solution--that, since Jews are currently a majority in all of Palestine, and since the income of Jews is much greater than non-Jews, then if all of Palestine were one democratic state the "Palestinians would be 'hewers of wood and drawers of water'. That means that if the imaginary joint state did indeed come into being, the Jews there would wield in it absolute power. They would, of course, use this power to consolidate their dominance and prevent the return of refugees."
Inside Averneri's reformist box, where class conflict does not exist, sure, of course, "Jews would consolidate their dominance." But outside the box one can see that working class Jews (as opposed to their rulers) are NOT dominant even today, never mind the notion of their "consolidating" their dominance in the future democratic state.
It is indeed curious that Avneri doesn't talk about class inequality in this context EXCEPT to use his supposed worry about some people being "hewers of wood and drawers of water" as an argument against our movement aiming for a single democratic state where all have equal rights. Acording to Avneri, in order to prevent some people from being dominated by others we need to aim for--what else can one call it other than apartheid?--two separate states, one with a guaranteed robust Jewish majority, and one for the non-Jews.
From outside the reformist box, the answer to the problem of some people being other people's "hewers of wood and drawers of water"--in other words the problem of some people being the wage slaves of a capitalist class--is social revolution against the capitalist system of wage slavery. The answer to the problem of inequality in society is to build a movement that is explicitly for equality, and for overthrowing the power of the ruling class that defends inequality and uses it to pit people against each other in order to more easily control them.
From inside the box, this kind of social revolution is so impossible and out of the question that it is foolish to even think about it. From outside the box, however, one can see that it is the commonsense solution to what most ordinary people, be they Jewish or not, really want. Orwellian wars of social control, like the Jews versus non-Jews war in Palestine that is ruining the lives of Jews and Palestinians, are what ruling elites foment in order to control ordinary people who, in a genuine democracy, would create a more equal society in which people helped each other instead of being pitted against each other as today. Those who wish to maintain a social system based on class inequality, who treat class inequality as a permanent fact of life and who want everybody else to see it the same way, meaning to not see it at all, the way fish don't see the water, tell us that it is foolish to aim for a non-capitalist society based on equality and solidarity. Why should we believe them? Building such a society is perfectly possible, and one glimpse of how it might be done is offered in After the Revolution, What?
But let us place on hold the question of whether a sweeping social revolution is possible. There is a huge here-and-now reason why our movement should advocate the One-State Solution. Quite simply, advocating the One-State Solution is a winner when it comes to persuading the public in countries like the United States that their government should stop supporting Israel, and advocating the Two-State Solution is a loser. And we all can agree that if countries like the U.S. stopped supporting Israel then the forces of justice and decency in Palestine/Israel would gain strength relative to their foes.
Why is it so much more effective to advocate the One- versus the Two-State Solution? This is why. The One-State Solution appeals to the basic universal value of equality that working class people around the world believe in very strongly. When we say to people: "The problem in Palestine/Israel is that Israel is based on ethnic cleansing and the obvious solution is for Israel to stop it, and to allow the refugees to return to their homes inside of Israel, and yes, this would be the end of a robust Jewish majority inside Israel but so what?, it is racist to insist that any particular religion or ethnic group must be the majority inside a state--its KKK thinking!--, and besides, the Israeli rulers only push this "We need a Jewish state of our own" idea as a way to destroy solidarity between working class Jews and working class non-Jews" then it resonates with people; they nod their heads in agreement; it makes sense to them; it seems right; they see exactly why their government should not support Israel.
I know this from much personal experience talking to people going door to door in Somerville, Massachusetts. On one occasion I rang the doorbell and an elderly (white) woman answered, and she told me she knew nothing about what was going on in Israel, but she'd like to talk with me about it; fifteen minutes later her husband came by and asked her what we were talking about and she proceeded to explain to him the root of the conflict in Israel/Palestine with confidence, based, by the way, on her experience of class conflict in her own life, and her knowledge of how employers control working people with lies and manipulation. These kinds of conversations can only happen if we get outside the reformist box and talk to people about the class conflict over values that they understand very well from their own personal experience.
If, on the other hand, we stay inside the box and talk about a Two-State Solution, then we're talking about separating the Jews from the non-Jews, we're ignoring the fact that working class Jews and working class non-Jews have more in common with each other than with their ruling elites, we're avoiding even mentioning the basic fact of life--class conflict--and we're turning the question into a dispute over where the border between two hostile peoples should be drawn in a far-away part of the world that it is impossible to really know much about, and since the Jews and the non-Jews are so inherently hostile to each other that they cannot even live in the same state with each other it must follow that they need protection from each other, and since the Jews are the perpetual victims of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, well then, why SHOULDN'T our government provide support to Israel? If this isn't a loser of an argument I don't know what is!
WHY AVNERI IS WRONG IN OPPOSING A GENERAL BOYCOTT OF ISRAEL
The first reason Avneri gives for opposing a general boycott of Israel is that it is based on a false premise, namely the premise that only pressure external to Israel can make things improve because there is no positive force inside Israel itself. Avneri says that there is, indeed, a positive force internal to Israel (by which he means his Peace movement), as evidenced by its "impressive achievements:" getting Israelis to recognize the existence of the Palestinian people and making them ready to accept a Palestinian state and, he predicts, a willing soon to recognize Hamas.
What a muddle Avneri has created on this question!
First, the issue isn't whether or not there is a positive force inside Israel; the issue is a disagreement over what that positive force is. Avneri says it is the force that is willing to accept a Palestinian state alongside Israel so that Israel can maintain its robust Jewish majority. But the positive force inside Israel is, on the contrary, the Israeli working class that opposes class inequality and that fights the Israeli ruling class over this issue, even while being weakened greatly by the influence of Zionist racist propaganda telling them that the Palestinians are their real enemy. Avneri says that the thing to do is to strengthen the forces who want a separate Jewish and Palestinian state. On the contrary, the thing to do is to strengthen the political clarity and understanding of the Israeli working class so they will be able to win the fight that they are in against the Zionist ruling class by rejecting the Zionist ideology and seeing who their real allies (non-Jewish working class people) are in the struggle that they are, in fact, presently fighting.
Second, a general boycott of Israel does not, as Avneri claims, rest on the premise that there is no positive force inside Israel. It rests on the premise (at least when one gets outside of the reformist box) that a general boycott of Israel will strengthen the positive force inside of Israel. (This is what happened in the case of South Africa, so the burden of proof would seem to fall on those who deny it, not those who affirm it.)
Which leads us to Avneri's second argument for opposing a general boycott of Israel.
Avneri says, "The entire world has imposed a blockade on the Palestinian people. But in spite of the terrible misery of the Palestinians, they have not been brought to their knees. Why do you think that a boycott would break the Israeli public, which is far stronger economically, so that they would give up the Jewish character of the state?"
The difference between the blockade on the Palestinian people and a boycott of Israel is not obvious to Avneri because he is inside the reformist box, where class conflict does not exist and people think of themselves as being "a Palestinian" or "a Jew." But outside the reformist box, in the real world in other words, people think about what is right and what is wrong, about what conforms to their working class values of equality and democracy and what conforms to the elitist values of inequality and anti-democracy of their capitalist rulers.
When people come under attack they care about why. The Palestinians know that the blockade against them is part of an effort to deny them their right of return and their right to be equals with Jews in Palestine. This is the obvious reason why they do not fall to their knees in response to the blockade. But when people are attacked because they, or their government, are committing something morally wrong, they don't automatically increase their resolve to remain strong and unbowed.
Consider, as a sharp illustration of this fact, the American GIs in Vietnam who came under violent attack by the Viet Cong. They started to wonder, "Why are we being attacked when, as we have been told, we are in Vietnam to help the Vietnamese have freedom and democracy?" They figured out that they had been lied to, and that the reason they were being attacked was because they were actually being used to suppress a peasant revolt against a repressive U.S.-backed regime. GIs then started to refuse to fight, in many different ways, from going out and only pretending to engage the "enemy," to fragging "gung-ho" officers who ordered them to fight, to getting stoned on drugs; and their refusal grew so widespread that it was one of the main reasons why Nixon withdrew from Vietnam--the generals knew that they could no longer rely on American soldiers to fight the war.
This shows that what is key in determining how people respond to an attack on themselves or their government--be the attack in the form of a bullet or a boycott--is how they view the moral rightness or wrongness of what their attacker is trying to accomplish. So even if a general boycott caused problems for working class Jews in Israel, as it might, it would not be as sharp an attack on them as the bullets the Viet Cong fired at GIs, and so it seems reasonable to expect that Israeli working class Jews would respond by asking, Why are they boycotting Israel?, and that they would, like the American GIs, figure out that the boycott was to make the world more equal and democratic, and that it was therefore a good thing.
Finally, what about Avneri's third and last argument against a general boycott of Israel. He writes: "A boycott of the 'Jewish State', which is identified with the victims of the Nazis, just will not happen. It will be enough to remind people that the long road to the gas chambers started with the 1933 Nazi slogan 'Kauft nicht bei Juden' ('Don't buy from Jews')."
Again, Avneri's logic only seems right inside the reformist box, where Jews are indistinguishable by class, and where gentiles around the world cannot see class distinctions either. Only in this box do the Zionist leaders of Israel, and their "Jews versus gentiles" ideology, seem to be alligned with the admirable sympathy that people have for the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Outside the box, in the real world, is the fact that the Zionist leaders who became Israel's leaders betrayed the European Jews during the Holocaust by opposing all rescue efforts that did not focus on bringing Jews to Palestine. Outside the box is the fact that Zionist leaders in 1948 were essentially fascists in attacking Jewish as well as non-Jewish working class people. Outside the box is the fact that Israel's ruling class betrayed Russian Jews in the 1980's by working to get other countries to restrict immigration of Russian Jews so they would be forced to go to Israel when they fled anti-Semitism in Russia. We can easily show the public in places like the United States that supporting the Israeli ruling class and its ethnic cleansing is actually supporting the very people who betrayed European victims of the Holocaust, and who have nothing but contempt for the survivors of the Holocaust, one third of whom live in poverty in Israel.
LET'S LEARN SOMETHING IMPORTANT FROM URI AVNERI
We can learn something very important from Uri Avneri. In order to move forward and overcome the arguments people like him will hurl against us, we will need to get outside the reformist box and adopt a frankly revolutionary outlook, one that clearly sees the class conflict that rages all around us, that speaks to people about it directly, that asks people to evaluate ideas and events in light of their own insights into the world based on their personal experience of the class war, and that aims not merely to act as a cheerleader for this or that "lesser evil" scheme of our capitalist rulers but to win the class war so that ordinary people can shape society by their positive values. The One-State Solution and a general boycott of Israel are excellent ideas, but they will only be successful if we use them and advocate them in an openly revolutionary manner. Otherwise, the Uri Avneri's will befuddle us and millions of others with wrong-headed thinking that only makes sense in the fantasy world inside the reformist box.
Uri Avneri, in his The Bed of Sodom, attacks the idea of a One-State Solution to the Palestine/Israel conflict, i.e. the solution that says make all of historic Palestine from the Jordan river to the Sea be a single democratic state with equal rights for all regardless of ethnicity or religion. Avneri also attacks the idea of a general boycott of Israel. He doesn't mind a boycott of specific Israeli companies, or settlers, to force Israel to end its occupation of Palestinian land outside its 1967 borders, but he does oppose a general boycott of Israel aimed at causing the state of Israel to collapse (like the apartheid state of South Africa did after it was boycotted by the world) and be replaced by One-Democratic State.
Avneri is wrong. But to see why, one must get out of the reformist box that so much of the discourse on this topic resides in, and think about these questions from a revolutionary point of view. This is the perspective from which I will refute Avneri's arguments. First, what exactly are his arguments?
Here are Avneri's reasons for opposing the One-State Solution:
1. It "diverts the effort from a solution that has now, after many years, a broad public basis [the 'Two-State Solution'--JS], in favor of a solution that has no chance at all."
2. It has no chance at all because "There is no doubt that 99.99% of Jewish Israelis want the State of Israel to exist as a state with a robust Jewish majority, whatever its borders."
3. And even if it did come to pass, it would be bad because: "it is a dangerous idea, especially for the Palestinians. Statistically, the Israeli Jews constitute, as of now, the absolute majority between the sea and the river. To that, one must add an even more important fact: the average annual income of an Arab Palestinian is about 800 dollars, that of a Jewish Israeli is about 20,000 dollars - 25 times (!) higher. The Israeli economy is growing every year. The Palestinians would be 'hewers of wood and drawers of water'. That means that if the imaginary joint state did indeed come into being, the Jews there would wield in it absolute power. They would, of course, use this power to consolidate their dominance and prevent the return of refugees."
And here are his reasons for opposing a general boycott of Israel:
1. The general boycott of Israel idea is based on a false premise, says Avneri, and the false premise goes like this: "The problem is the very essence of Israel as a Zionist state. This essence is unchangeable as long as the state exists. No change from the inside is possible, because in Israel there is no essential difference between Right and Left. Both are accomplices in a policy whose real aim is ethnic cleansing, the expulsion of the Palestinians not only from the occupied territories, but also from Israel proper."
On the contrary, says Avneri, "it is possible to change the historical direction of Israel" from within. His evidence for this is the fact that the Israeli peace movement has already "attained impressive achievements: the recognition of the existence of the Palestinian people has become general, and so has the readiness of most Israelis to accept the idea of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as the capital of both states. We have compelled our government to recognize the PLO, and we shall compel them to recognize Hamas."
2. Furthermore, argues Avneri, a general boycott will never work: "The entire world has imposed a blockade on the Palestinian people. But in spite of the terrible misery of the Palestinians, they have not been brought to their knees. Why do you think that a boycott would break the Israeli public, which is far stronger economically, so that they would give up the Jewish character of the state?"
3. And besides, Avneri says, even if it would work, a general boycott is impossible to pull off in the first place: "In any case, such a boycott is quite impossible. Here and there, an organization can declare a boycott, small circles of justice-lovers can keep it, but there is no chance that in the coming decades a world-wide boycott movement, like the one that broke the racist regime in South Africa, will come about. That regime was headed by declared asmirers of the Nazis. A boycott of the "Jewish State", which is identified with the victims of the Nazis, just will not happen. It will be enough to remind people that the long road to the gas chambers started with the 1933 Nazi slogan 'Kauft nicht bei Juden' ('Don't buy from Jews')."
WHAT'S WRONG WITH AVNERI'S ARGUMENTS?
The key flaw in Avneri's case is that he completely ignores the fact of class conflict. He ignores the class conflict that rages within Israel among the mainly Jewish population (described below) as well as the class conflict that rages in all of the rest of the Middle East among the mainly non-Jewish population (for example Iran and Saudi Arabia, whose governments oppress their own workers with assistance from the Israeli regime.) Assessing the possibilities for solving the conflict in Palestine/Israel while ignoring this key aspect of reality--class conflict--is as bound to lead to wrong and fundamentally pessimistic conclusions as a doctor, who is ignorant of the fact that a patient has an immune system that fights invading organisms, assessing the possibility of saving the patient's life.
Avneri's world view resides in a reformist box, inside of which one takes capitalist class inequality as a permanent, uncontroversial, given fact of nature. His world view is therefore blind to the ways in which working class Jewish Israelis, despite the undeniable fact that many of them fear Palestinians more than their own rulers, are nonetheless already engaged in a fight against their Zionist rulers over issues that separate people according to their basic values: equality versus inequality, competition versus solidarity, democracy versus rule by an elite--in other words working class values versus capitalist values. It is blind to the implicitly revolutionary conflict between what ordinary Jews actually want versus what their Zionist leaders actually want. It is blind to the fact that when people are forced to fight against their leaders they may start to question the lies their leaders tell them to control them, like the Big Lie about Palestinians wanting to "drive the Jews into the sea." And it is blind to the potential for revolutionary change that can take place when people start to see through the racist lies that they formerly believed. Some people, of course, like to stay in the reformist box, and they like to be blind (or keep others blind) because they don't want the capitalist system of class inequality to be abolished. They don't want others to see the possibilities for optimism and hope that lie outside the box, where one can see the implicitly revolutionary aspirations for a better world that are shared by millions of working class people regardless of their race or religion or nationality.
Some may ask, "What class conflict inside Israel?" Well, follow these links to read about it if you are skeptical.
Read about how Israel is not really a "Jewish state" but rather a "rich Jews' state."
Read how the upper class is driving down the rest of the people.
Read in The Jewish Daily Forward how
"Israel’s growing population of retirees has been reduced to a state of profound economic insecurity in recent years, as self-styled economic reformers have hollowed out the Jewish state’s time-honored system of care for the elderly. Pensions have been frozen. Social security payments, known in Israel as national insurance, have been relentlessly whittled away — cut by 35% in a single decade. Health care and prescription drug coverage have been slashed, along with funds for senior housing and assisted living. It’s part of a deliberate move by Jerusalem policy-makers to modernize Israel’s economy, by which they mean to remodel it along American lines. Determined to bury the socialist ethos of Israel’s founders, successive governments since the mid-1980s have slashed income supports and welfare payments even as they’ve privatized and deregulated industries, opened capital markets to international competition and reduced workers’ job security (they call it “liberalizing labor laws”). Over the past three years, under the economic leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, the reforms have been ramped up to a revolution."
The Forward explains the "meteoric rise of the Pensioners' Party" in the April, 2006 election this way: "And then there was the simple, glaring fact of poverty. Too many Israelis had reached the point where their own personal security seemed more precarious than their country’s."
Read in the Jewish News Weekly of Northern California about: "Poverty in Israel — Hunger and homelessness surge in the Jewish state"
Read how "Recent measures taken by Israel’s government to undermine the welfare state have harmed women first of all, both Arab and Jewish. Of the Jewish, many who in the past had gained a foothold in the middle class find themselves shunted to the margins of society. The income supplements they depended on have been whisked out from under them. The same cuts have worsened the plight of Arab women. Despite the fact that both groups, indeed the lower classes in general on both the Arab and Jewish sides, suffer from an erosion in living-standards – and often for identical reasons – there is an utter lack of dialogue between them."
But Israelis are resisting this capitalist attack on their lives, in many different ways:
Read Jenny Cohen-Khallas's description of "Penury and Hunger in Israel" and how "vociferous segments of the public are demanding that governmental resources be channeled to welfare and other domestic resources, rather than to strengthening settlements beyond the green line."
Read about single mothers, the homeless and the unemployed camping out in front of Israel's Finance Ministry and in Tel Aviv: "The choice of place is no accident," says Israel Twito, 38, a divorcee who is bringing up three daughters alone. "The contrast between our miserable campsite and the neighbourhood’s luxury shops and apartment blocks symbolises the ever-widening abyss between rich and poor."
Is it any wonder, then, that one can read how more people are leaving Israel than entering it, and how " Almost half of the country's young people were thinking of leaving the country" because of "dissatisfaction with the government, the education system, a lack of confidence in the political ruling class and concern over the security situation"?
Read about the way working class Israelis have been forced to engage in large strikes to protect themselves, not from "the Arabs" but from their Jewish ruling class:
On September 21, [2004] the Israeli General Federation of Labour (Histadrut) held a general strike in protest against the ongoing failure of the government to pay wages to local authorities’ employees. Some 400,000 public sector workers across 265 municipalities came out, bringing the state to a halt. Flights, seaports, railways, post offices, banks and the stock exchange were all shut down, whilst hospitals and the fire service operated on an emergency footing. Schools, day-care centres, kindergartens, and universities were also affected.
The strike also included the Israeli Electrical Corporation, Mekorot National Water Company, oil refineries, public works departments, and the Eilat-Ashkelon Pipeline Company. Border crossings were closed, and all government offices including civilian employees in the Israeli Defence Force and at the Negev Nuclear Research Plant were on strike.
Calling the strike was forced upon Histadrut by the depth of opposition and anger amongst workers. Histadrut’s chief and Member of the Knesset Amir Peretz said, “I used to believe in the prime minister, the Knesset, and the courts, yet when I realised there are Israelis hungry for bread, I decided to act.”
“No one, not even the Prime Minister, has the right to set any conditions whatsoever for payment of many months of salaries owed to the workers,” Peretz noted. “The government is turning wages into charity. Wages are not a favour, they are a legal obligation. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Minister of Finance Benjamin Netanyahu, and Minister of Internal Affairs Avraham Poraz are not enforcing the law. They’re turning Israel into a third world country.”
WHY AVNERI IS WRONG ABOUT THE ONE-STATE SOLUTION BEING IMPOSSIBLE
Where, we might ask Avneri, is it written in stone that Arabs and Jews in Palestine, who suffer at the hands of the same Israeli ruling class, will never start talking to each other about their shared problem--the Israeli ruling class--and their shared aspirations for a decent life for themselves and their children--a life in a society with peace and security, one where half the youth aren't thinking about leaving and where people don't have to camp out in protest or wage general strikes to defend themselves against a rapacious government serving billionaires and generals while it does everything it can to foment a war of Orwellian social control between Jews and non-Jews in Palestine/Israel? Where is it written that working class Jews will never understand that their Zionist leaders tell them lies about Palestinians--especially the Big Lie that Palestinians want to "drive the Jews into the sea"--purely for the purpose of making Israeli Jews easier to control and exploit?
What about Avneri's first two arguments against the One-State Solution--that it diverts from the Two-State Solution, which is the only practical one because 99.99% of Jewish Israelis want a Jewish state with a robust Jewish majority? From inside the reformist box, where there is no conflict in people's minds, or in society, between working class and capitalist values like equality versus inequality, this statement seems reasonable. But let's look outside the box. The same kind of statement that Avrneri makes about "99.99% of Jewish Israelis" could have been made about white South Africans overwhelmingly wanting apartheid before South Africa's President deKlerk, as a result of the world wide boycott against apartheid South Africa, decided to give white South Africans, for the very first time, a green light to express their true feelings about apartheid. Prior to this, any white person who expressed a criticism of apartheid was accused of being "anti-Christian" and therefore many just kept their mouths shut. But when they were allowed to speak more freely this is what happened. In 1992, the BBC reported on how whites voted on the referendum, supported by the de Klerk government, to abolish apartheid:
White South Africans have backed an overwhelming mandate for political reforms to end apartheid and create a power-sharing multi-racial government.
In a landslide victory for change, the government swept the polls in all four provinces, and all but one of 15 referendum regions.
It won 68.6% of the vote in a record turn-out, which, in some districts exceeded 96%.
What about Avneri's third argument against the One-State Solution--that, since Jews are currently a majority in all of Palestine, and since the income of Jews is much greater than non-Jews, then if all of Palestine were one democratic state the "Palestinians would be 'hewers of wood and drawers of water'. That means that if the imaginary joint state did indeed come into being, the Jews there would wield in it absolute power. They would, of course, use this power to consolidate their dominance and prevent the return of refugees."
Inside Averneri's reformist box, where class conflict does not exist, sure, of course, "Jews would consolidate their dominance." But outside the box one can see that working class Jews (as opposed to their rulers) are NOT dominant even today, never mind the notion of their "consolidating" their dominance in the future democratic state.
It is indeed curious that Avneri doesn't talk about class inequality in this context EXCEPT to use his supposed worry about some people being "hewers of wood and drawers of water" as an argument against our movement aiming for a single democratic state where all have equal rights. Acording to Avneri, in order to prevent some people from being dominated by others we need to aim for--what else can one call it other than apartheid?--two separate states, one with a guaranteed robust Jewish majority, and one for the non-Jews.
From outside the reformist box, the answer to the problem of some people being other people's "hewers of wood and drawers of water"--in other words the problem of some people being the wage slaves of a capitalist class--is social revolution against the capitalist system of wage slavery. The answer to the problem of inequality in society is to build a movement that is explicitly for equality, and for overthrowing the power of the ruling class that defends inequality and uses it to pit people against each other in order to more easily control them.
From inside the box, this kind of social revolution is so impossible and out of the question that it is foolish to even think about it. From outside the box, however, one can see that it is the commonsense solution to what most ordinary people, be they Jewish or not, really want. Orwellian wars of social control, like the Jews versus non-Jews war in Palestine that is ruining the lives of Jews and Palestinians, are what ruling elites foment in order to control ordinary people who, in a genuine democracy, would create a more equal society in which people helped each other instead of being pitted against each other as today. Those who wish to maintain a social system based on class inequality, who treat class inequality as a permanent fact of life and who want everybody else to see it the same way, meaning to not see it at all, the way fish don't see the water, tell us that it is foolish to aim for a non-capitalist society based on equality and solidarity. Why should we believe them? Building such a society is perfectly possible, and one glimpse of how it might be done is offered in After the Revolution, What?
But let us place on hold the question of whether a sweeping social revolution is possible. There is a huge here-and-now reason why our movement should advocate the One-State Solution. Quite simply, advocating the One-State Solution is a winner when it comes to persuading the public in countries like the United States that their government should stop supporting Israel, and advocating the Two-State Solution is a loser. And we all can agree that if countries like the U.S. stopped supporting Israel then the forces of justice and decency in Palestine/Israel would gain strength relative to their foes.
Why is it so much more effective to advocate the One- versus the Two-State Solution? This is why. The One-State Solution appeals to the basic universal value of equality that working class people around the world believe in very strongly. When we say to people: "The problem in Palestine/Israel is that Israel is based on ethnic cleansing and the obvious solution is for Israel to stop it, and to allow the refugees to return to their homes inside of Israel, and yes, this would be the end of a robust Jewish majority inside Israel but so what?, it is racist to insist that any particular religion or ethnic group must be the majority inside a state--its KKK thinking!--, and besides, the Israeli rulers only push this "We need a Jewish state of our own" idea as a way to destroy solidarity between working class Jews and working class non-Jews" then it resonates with people; they nod their heads in agreement; it makes sense to them; it seems right; they see exactly why their government should not support Israel.
I know this from much personal experience talking to people going door to door in Somerville, Massachusetts. On one occasion I rang the doorbell and an elderly (white) woman answered, and she told me she knew nothing about what was going on in Israel, but she'd like to talk with me about it; fifteen minutes later her husband came by and asked her what we were talking about and she proceeded to explain to him the root of the conflict in Israel/Palestine with confidence, based, by the way, on her experience of class conflict in her own life, and her knowledge of how employers control working people with lies and manipulation. These kinds of conversations can only happen if we get outside the reformist box and talk to people about the class conflict over values that they understand very well from their own personal experience.
If, on the other hand, we stay inside the box and talk about a Two-State Solution, then we're talking about separating the Jews from the non-Jews, we're ignoring the fact that working class Jews and working class non-Jews have more in common with each other than with their ruling elites, we're avoiding even mentioning the basic fact of life--class conflict--and we're turning the question into a dispute over where the border between two hostile peoples should be drawn in a far-away part of the world that it is impossible to really know much about, and since the Jews and the non-Jews are so inherently hostile to each other that they cannot even live in the same state with each other it must follow that they need protection from each other, and since the Jews are the perpetual victims of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, well then, why SHOULDN'T our government provide support to Israel? If this isn't a loser of an argument I don't know what is!
WHY AVNERI IS WRONG IN OPPOSING A GENERAL BOYCOTT OF ISRAEL
The first reason Avneri gives for opposing a general boycott of Israel is that it is based on a false premise, namely the premise that only pressure external to Israel can make things improve because there is no positive force inside Israel itself. Avneri says that there is, indeed, a positive force internal to Israel (by which he means his Peace movement), as evidenced by its "impressive achievements:" getting Israelis to recognize the existence of the Palestinian people and making them ready to accept a Palestinian state and, he predicts, a willing soon to recognize Hamas.
What a muddle Avneri has created on this question!
First, the issue isn't whether or not there is a positive force inside Israel; the issue is a disagreement over what that positive force is. Avneri says it is the force that is willing to accept a Palestinian state alongside Israel so that Israel can maintain its robust Jewish majority. But the positive force inside Israel is, on the contrary, the Israeli working class that opposes class inequality and that fights the Israeli ruling class over this issue, even while being weakened greatly by the influence of Zionist racist propaganda telling them that the Palestinians are their real enemy. Avneri says that the thing to do is to strengthen the forces who want a separate Jewish and Palestinian state. On the contrary, the thing to do is to strengthen the political clarity and understanding of the Israeli working class so they will be able to win the fight that they are in against the Zionist ruling class by rejecting the Zionist ideology and seeing who their real allies (non-Jewish working class people) are in the struggle that they are, in fact, presently fighting.
Second, a general boycott of Israel does not, as Avneri claims, rest on the premise that there is no positive force inside Israel. It rests on the premise (at least when one gets outside of the reformist box) that a general boycott of Israel will strengthen the positive force inside of Israel. (This is what happened in the case of South Africa, so the burden of proof would seem to fall on those who deny it, not those who affirm it.)
Which leads us to Avneri's second argument for opposing a general boycott of Israel.
Avneri says, "The entire world has imposed a blockade on the Palestinian people. But in spite of the terrible misery of the Palestinians, they have not been brought to their knees. Why do you think that a boycott would break the Israeli public, which is far stronger economically, so that they would give up the Jewish character of the state?"
The difference between the blockade on the Palestinian people and a boycott of Israel is not obvious to Avneri because he is inside the reformist box, where class conflict does not exist and people think of themselves as being "a Palestinian" or "a Jew." But outside the reformist box, in the real world in other words, people think about what is right and what is wrong, about what conforms to their working class values of equality and democracy and what conforms to the elitist values of inequality and anti-democracy of their capitalist rulers.
When people come under attack they care about why. The Palestinians know that the blockade against them is part of an effort to deny them their right of return and their right to be equals with Jews in Palestine. This is the obvious reason why they do not fall to their knees in response to the blockade. But when people are attacked because they, or their government, are committing something morally wrong, they don't automatically increase their resolve to remain strong and unbowed.
Consider, as a sharp illustration of this fact, the American GIs in Vietnam who came under violent attack by the Viet Cong. They started to wonder, "Why are we being attacked when, as we have been told, we are in Vietnam to help the Vietnamese have freedom and democracy?" They figured out that they had been lied to, and that the reason they were being attacked was because they were actually being used to suppress a peasant revolt against a repressive U.S.-backed regime. GIs then started to refuse to fight, in many different ways, from going out and only pretending to engage the "enemy," to fragging "gung-ho" officers who ordered them to fight, to getting stoned on drugs; and their refusal grew so widespread that it was one of the main reasons why Nixon withdrew from Vietnam--the generals knew that they could no longer rely on American soldiers to fight the war.
This shows that what is key in determining how people respond to an attack on themselves or their government--be the attack in the form of a bullet or a boycott--is how they view the moral rightness or wrongness of what their attacker is trying to accomplish. So even if a general boycott caused problems for working class Jews in Israel, as it might, it would not be as sharp an attack on them as the bullets the Viet Cong fired at GIs, and so it seems reasonable to expect that Israeli working class Jews would respond by asking, Why are they boycotting Israel?, and that they would, like the American GIs, figure out that the boycott was to make the world more equal and democratic, and that it was therefore a good thing.
Finally, what about Avneri's third and last argument against a general boycott of Israel. He writes: "A boycott of the 'Jewish State', which is identified with the victims of the Nazis, just will not happen. It will be enough to remind people that the long road to the gas chambers started with the 1933 Nazi slogan 'Kauft nicht bei Juden' ('Don't buy from Jews')."
Again, Avneri's logic only seems right inside the reformist box, where Jews are indistinguishable by class, and where gentiles around the world cannot see class distinctions either. Only in this box do the Zionist leaders of Israel, and their "Jews versus gentiles" ideology, seem to be alligned with the admirable sympathy that people have for the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Outside the box, in the real world, is the fact that the Zionist leaders who became Israel's leaders betrayed the European Jews during the Holocaust by opposing all rescue efforts that did not focus on bringing Jews to Palestine. Outside the box is the fact that Zionist leaders in 1948 were essentially fascists in attacking Jewish as well as non-Jewish working class people. Outside the box is the fact that Israel's ruling class betrayed Russian Jews in the 1980's by working to get other countries to restrict immigration of Russian Jews so they would be forced to go to Israel when they fled anti-Semitism in Russia. We can easily show the public in places like the United States that supporting the Israeli ruling class and its ethnic cleansing is actually supporting the very people who betrayed European victims of the Holocaust, and who have nothing but contempt for the survivors of the Holocaust, one third of whom live in poverty in Israel.
LET'S LEARN SOMETHING IMPORTANT FROM URI AVNERI
We can learn something very important from Uri Avneri. In order to move forward and overcome the arguments people like him will hurl against us, we will need to get outside the reformist box and adopt a frankly revolutionary outlook, one that clearly sees the class conflict that rages all around us, that speaks to people about it directly, that asks people to evaluate ideas and events in light of their own insights into the world based on their personal experience of the class war, and that aims not merely to act as a cheerleader for this or that "lesser evil" scheme of our capitalist rulers but to win the class war so that ordinary people can shape society by their positive values. The One-State Solution and a general boycott of Israel are excellent ideas, but they will only be successful if we use them and advocate them in an openly revolutionary manner. Otherwise, the Uri Avneri's will befuddle us and millions of others with wrong-headed thinking that only makes sense in the fantasy world inside the reformist box.
Lerner and Avnery on One-State Solution
[I disagree with the reasoning of Lerner and Avnery, and will answer their arguments in the near future]
Uri Avnery argues agaisnt some of the anti-Israel ideas like "one state solution" that are growing in popularity among the international Left. With an introductory note from Rabbi Lerner.
How an anti-Israel Left helps perpetuate the Occupation
We at Tikkun have recently been discussing how to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Occupation of the West Bank. Like most other liberals and progressives, we see the Occupation as a terrible blight on the history of the Jewish people and an important source for growing anger at those Jews who give blind support to Israeli policies. While the
distortions in consciousness that have permitted the Occupation were already present in the right-wing of the Zionist movement, the willingness of the American Jewish community and sections of the Labor Party in Israel to justify and implement the Occupation has transformed Jewish life, often turning major segments of the Jewish world and Judaism into a cheering squad for the policies (including torture and assassination of “suspected militants”) of a particular nation state rather than as a witness to the God of the universe and the possibility of a world based on justice, love, generosity and peace.
Unfortunately, the Left that criticizes Israel has often itself manifested dramatic distortions. For one thing, it seems as if every group of Jews who come to an understanding that Israeli policy is immoral and self-destructive simultaneously develop their own rationale for why they can’t work with other Jewish and non-Jewish groups that have these same ideas. The result is a cacophony of voices that could, if united, work in a powerful way.
But united around what? It can’t be around the dissolution of the State of Israel envisioned by many who are currently planning a set of demonstrations against Israel June 10-12 coordinated by the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation and the United for Peace and Justice, two organizations to which Tikkun belongs and which oft en do valuable work. The reason we can’t join them is the same reason the Tikkun Community couldn’t join the Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP): the willingness of all these organizations to keep alive as an option the notion that the solution to Israel/Palestine peace lies in the dissolution of a Jewish state, using the language of “one state solution” as the way to signal to many who never thought the Jewish people never deserved a state at all. Now, don’t get us wrong. We are not pro-states at all, and at Tikkun we are working for a 21st century in which nation states are supplanted by regional and global arrangements and nationalism and nationalist wars disappear. But as long as the world does have states, we think the Jewish people have one of the better cases in the history of the modern world for having the protections that a state entails. That’s one reason why we are strongly critical of Israeli policy, but not in favor of destroying or politely eliminating a Jewish state. But our other reasons for opposing a one-state solution have to do with the well-being of the Palestinian people. And these are articulated below by the leader of the most progressive and yet rational peace movement in Israel, Uri Avnery of Gush Shalom. 1. Ask Palestinians to bet on a one state solution and you ask them to continue the occupation for the next twenty years at least, because almost no one in Israel feels safe enough in the world to eliminate the security that they feel from having a Jewish state. 2. Most Israelis and Palestinians would oppose it. 3. If implemented, it would lead to a real apartheid state.
We want to protest Israeli policy and build an alternative to AIPAC, but it cannot be done unless it is based on unequivocal acceptance of the right of both Israelis and Palestinians to have their own economically, politically and culturally viable states. As Avnery points out below, anything less than that actually plays into the hands of those who seek to perpetuate the occupation.
These arguments are made in very summary form here, but if you disagree with them, I urge you to read my two books that explore these issues in greater detail: Healing Israel Palestine (North Atlantic Books, 2003) and The Geneva Accord and Other Strategies for Middle East Peace (North Atlantic Books, 2004).
And please read Uri Avnery’s powerful article, below.
--Rabbi Michael Lerner
Editor, Tikkun (www.tikkun.org)
P.S. Have you signed the ad about how to end the War in Iraq? It’s not too late to sign it and donate to it (though you can sign without donating). www.tikkun.org/iraqpeace.
Uri Avnery
21.4.07
The Bed of Sodom
IN HEBREW legend, the bed of Sodom is a symbol of evil.
The Bible tells how God decided to obliterate Sodom because of the wickedness of its people (Genesis, 18). The legend gives us an example of this wickedness: the special bed for visitors. When a stranger came to Sodom, he was put in this bed. If he was too tall, his legs were shortened. If he was too short, his limbs were stretched to fit.
In political life, there is more than one bed like this. On the Right and on the Left, there are people who put every problem in such a bed, cut off limbs and stretch limbs, until reality matches theory.
From the sixties on, doctrinaire leftists tended to put every situation into the bed of Vietnam. Everything - be it the murderous tyranny in Chile or the American threats against Cuba - had to fit the Vietnam example. Applying this model, it was easy to decide who were the good guys and who the bad, what to do and how to solve the problem.
That was convenient. It is much easier to draw conclusions when there is no need to consider the complexities of a particular conflict, its historical background and its local circumstances.
LATELY, A NEW bed of Sodom has gained currency: South Africa. In some circles of the radical Left there is a tendency to force every conflict into this bed. Every new case of evil and oppression in the world is seen as a new version of the apartheid regime, and it is decided accordingly how to solve the problem and what to do to achieve the desired end.
True, the South African situation arose in particular historical circumstances that took centuries to mature. It was not identical with the problem of the aborigines in Australia or the settlement of the Whites in North America, nor to Northern Ireland or the situation in Iraq. But it is certainly convenient to give one and the same answer to all problems.
Of course, there is always a superficial similarity between different regimes of oppression. But if one is not ready to see the differences between the diseases, one is liable to prescribe false medicines - and risk killing the patient in the process.
NOW THIS is happening here.
It is easy to put the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the South African bed, since the similarities between the symptoms are obvious. The Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories has been going on for 40 years now, and almost 60 years have passed since the Naqba - the armed conflict of 1948 in which the State of Israel came into being and in which more than half the Palestinians lost their homes and land. Relations between the settlers and the Palestinians are in many ways reminiscent of apartheid; and even in Israel proper, the Arab citizens are far from real equality.
What to do? One has to learn from South Africa that there is nothing to be gained from appealing to the conscience of the ruling people. Among the white minority in South Africa, there was no real difference between Left and Right, between open racists and liberals, who were but better disguised racists, with the exception of a few white heroes who joined the fight for freedom.
Therefore, redemption could only come from the outside. And indeed, world public opinion saw the injustice of apartheid and imposed a world-wide boycott on South Africa, till in the end the white minority capitulated. Power in the united South African state passed into the hands of the black majority, Nelson Mandela was released from prison and became president, and all this took place - wonder of wonders - without bloodshed.
If this happened in South Africa, the proponents of this view say, it must happen here, too. The idea of establishing a Palestinian state next to the State of Israel (the "Two-State Solution") must be discarded, and the single state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River (the "One-State Solution") must become the aim. This must be achieved by the ultimate weapon which proved itself in South Africa: boycott.
This is how it is going to happen: justice-lovers throughout the world will convince world public opinion to impose a general boycott on the State of Israel. The state will collapse and disintegrate. Between the sea and the river there will come into being one single state, in which Israelis and Palestinians will live peacefully together, as equal citizens. The settlers can stay where they are, there will be no problem of borders, and all that remains is to decide who will be the Palestinian Mandela.
THIS WEEK I listened to a lecture by Professor Ilan Pappe of Haifa University, one of the leading spokesmen for this idea. The audience consisted of Palestinian, Israeli and international activists in Bil'in, the village that has become a symbol of resistance to the occupation. He presented a well-structured set of ideas, expressed with eloquence and enthusiasm. These were the principles:
There is no sense in opposing just the occupation, nor any other particular policy of the Israeli government. The problem is the very essence of Israel as a Zionist state. This essence is unchangeable as long as the state exists. No change from the inside is possible, because in Israel there is no essential difference between Right and Left. Both are accomplices in a policy whose real aim is ethnic cleansing, the expulsion of the Palestinians not only from the occupied territories, but also from Israel proper.
Therefore, everyone who strives for a just solution must aim at the establishment of a single state, to which the refugees of 1948 and 1967 will be invited to return. This will be a joint and egalitarian state, like today's South Africa.
There is no sense in trying to change Israel from the inside. Salvation will come from the outside: a world-wide boycott of Israel, which will cause the state to collapse and convince the Israeli public that there is no escape from the One-State Solution.
It sounded logical and convincing, and the speaker did indeed gain applause.
THIS THEORETICAL structure contains several assumptions with which I have no quarrel. The Zionist Left has indeed collapsed in the last few years, and its absence from the field of struggle is a painful and dangerous fact. In today's Knesset, there is no effective Zionist party that is seriously fighting for real equality for the Arab citizens. Nobody is able today to call out into the street hundreds of thousands, or even tens of thousands, in order to pressure the government to accept the peace proposal of the whole Arab world.
There is no doubt that the real disease is not the 40-year long occupation. The occupation is a symptom of a more profound disease, which is connected with the official ideology of the state. The aim of ethnic cleansing and the establishment of a Jewish State from the sea to the river is dear to the hearts of many Israelis, and perhaps Rabbi Meir Kahane was right when he asserted that this is everybody's unspoken desire.
But unlike professor Pappe, I am convinced that it is possible to change the historical direction of Israel. I am convinced that this is the real battlefield for the Israeli peace forces, and I myself have been engaged in it for decades.
Moreover, I believe that we have already attained impressive achievements: the recognition of the existence of the Palestinian people has become general, and so has the readiness of most Israelis to accept the idea of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as the capital of both states. We have compelled our government to recognize the PLO, and we shall compel them to recognize Hamas. True, all this would not have happened without the steadfastness of the Palestinian people and (sometimes) favorable international circumstances, but the contribution of the Israeli peace forces, which pioneered these ideas, was significant.
Also, the notion has lately gained acceptance in Israel and other countries, that peace will be achieved only if we succeed in overcoming the gap between the Israeli and the Palestinian narratives and in integrating them into one single historical account, which will recognize the injustices which have been committed and which are still going on. Nothing is more important. (Our path-breaking booklet "Truth Against Truth" was the beginning of this process.)
On the surface, it appears that we have failed. We have not succeeded in compelling our government to stop the building of the wall or the enlargement of the settlements, nor to restore to the Palestinians their freedom of movement. In short, we have not succeeded in putting an end to the occupation. The Arab citizens of Israel have not attained real equality. But beneath the surface, in the depths of national consciousness, we are succeeding. The question is how to turn the hidden success into an open political fact. In other words: how to change the policy of the Israeli government.
THE IDEA of the "One-State Solution" will harm this effort very much.
It diverts the effort from a solution that has now, after many years, a broad public basis, in favor of a solution that has no chance at all.
There is no doubt that 99.99% of Jewish Israelis want the State of Israel to exist as a state with a robust Jewish majority, whatever its borders.
The belief that a world-wide boycott could change this is a complete illusion. Immediately after his lecture, my colleague Adam Keller asked the professor a simple question: "The entire world has imposed a blockade on the Palestinian people. But in spite of the terrible misery of the Palestinians, they have not been brought to their knees. Why do you think that a boycott would break the Israeli public, which is far stronger economically, so that they would give up the Jewish character of the state?" (There was no answer.)
In any case, such a boycott is quite impossible. Here and there, an organization can declare a boycott, small circles of justice-lovers can keep it, but there is no chance that in the coming decades a world-wide boycott movement, like the one that broke the racist regime in South Africa, will come about. That regime was headed by declared asmirers of the Nazis. A boycott of the "Jewish State", which is identified with the victims of the Nazis, just will not happen. It will be enough to remind people that the long road to the gas chambers started with the 1933 Nazi slogan "Kauft nicht bei Juden" ("Don't buy from Jews").
(The obnoxious fact that the government of the "State of the Holocaust Survivors" had close relations with the Apartheid State does not change this situation.)
That is the problem with the bed of Sodom: one size does not fit all. When the circumstances are different, the remedies must be different, too.
THE IDEA of the "One-State Solution" can attract people who despair of the struggle for the soul of Israel. I do understand them. But it is a dangerous idea, especially for the Palestinians.
Statistically, the Israeli Jews constitute, as of now, the absolute majority between the sea and the river. To that, one must add an even more important fact: the average annual income of an Arab Palestinian is about 800 dollars, that of a Jewish Israeli is about 20,000 dollars - 25 times (!) higher. The Israeli economy is growing every year. The Palestinians would be "hewers of wood and drawers of water". That means that if the imaginary joint state did indeed come into being, the Jews there would wield in it absolute power. They would, of course, use this power to consolidate their dominance and prevent the return of refugees.
Thus the South African example could come true retroactively: in the Single State, an apartheid-like regime would indeed come into being. Not only would the Israeli-Palestinian conflict not be solved, but on the contrary, it would move into an even more dangerous phase.
Pappe put forward an argument that looked a bit strange to me: that a Single State already exists in practice, since Israel rules from the sea to the river. But that is not so. There is no single state, neither formally nor in practice, but one state occupying another. Such a state, in which a dominant nation controls the others, will eventually disintegrate - as did the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.
The One State will not come into being. Not only the Israelis, but most of the Palestinians, too, will not give up their right to a national state of their own. They can applaud an Israeli professor who advocates the dismantling of the State of Israel, but they have no time to wait for utopian solutions that could be realized in a hundred years. They need an end to the occupation and to achieve a solution to the conflict here and now, in the near future.
ALL WHO wholeheartedly want to help the occupied Palestinian people would be well advised to keep well away from the idea of a general boycott of Israel. It would push all Israelis into the arms of the extreme Right, because it would reinforce the right-wing belief that "All the world is against us" - a belief that took root in the years of the Holocaust, when "all the world looked on and kept silent". Every Israeli child learns this in school.
A focused boycott against specific organizations and corporations that actively contribute to the occupation can indeed help in convincing the Israeli public that the occupation is not worthwhile. Such a boycott can achieve a specific aim - if it is not aimed at the collapse of the State of Israel. Gush Shalom, to which I belong, has for 10 years been organizing a boycott of the products of the settlements. The aim is to isolate the settlers and their accomplices. But a general boycott on the State of Israel would achieve the very opposite - to isolate the Israeli peace activists.
THE "TWO-STATE SOLUTION" was and still is the only solution. When we put it forward immediately after the 1948 war, we could be counted on the fingers of two hands not only in Israel but in the entire world. Now there exists a world-wide consensus about it. The path to this solution is not smooth, many dangers lurk on the way, but it is a realistic solution that can be achieved.
One can say: OK, we will accept the Two-State Solution because it is realistic, but after its realization we shall endeavor to abolish the two states and establish one joint state. That is alright with me. As for myself, I hope that in the course of time a federation of the two states will come into being, and relations between the two will become close. I also hope that a regional union, like the EU, will be established, consisting of all the Arab states and Israel, and perhaps also Turkey and Iran.
But first of all we must treat the wound from which we are all suffering: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Not by patent medicines, certainly not by a bed of Sodom, but with the medicines that are on the shelf.
THE 18th CHAPTER of Genesis tells of Abraham trying to convince the Almighty not to obliterate Sodom. "Peradventure there be fifty righteous within the city; wilt thou also destroy and not spare the place for the fifty righteous that are therein?"
God promised him not to destroy the town if there were 50 righteous in it. Abraham haggled and brought the Almighty down to 45, then 40, 30 and 20, finally settling for 10. But in Sodom there were no 10 righteous to be found, and so its fate was sealed.
I believe that in Israel there are many, many more than ten righteous people. All public opinion polls show that the great majority of Israelis not only want peace, but are ready to pay its price. But they are afraid. They lack trust. They are shackled by the beliefs they acquired in early childhood. They must be freed from them - and I believe that it can be done.
Uri Avnery argues agaisnt some of the anti-Israel ideas like "one state solution" that are growing in popularity among the international Left. With an introductory note from Rabbi Lerner.
How an anti-Israel Left helps perpetuate the Occupation
We at Tikkun have recently been discussing how to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Occupation of the West Bank. Like most other liberals and progressives, we see the Occupation as a terrible blight on the history of the Jewish people and an important source for growing anger at those Jews who give blind support to Israeli policies. While the
distortions in consciousness that have permitted the Occupation were already present in the right-wing of the Zionist movement, the willingness of the American Jewish community and sections of the Labor Party in Israel to justify and implement the Occupation has transformed Jewish life, often turning major segments of the Jewish world and Judaism into a cheering squad for the policies (including torture and assassination of “suspected militants”) of a particular nation state rather than as a witness to the God of the universe and the possibility of a world based on justice, love, generosity and peace.
Unfortunately, the Left that criticizes Israel has often itself manifested dramatic distortions. For one thing, it seems as if every group of Jews who come to an understanding that Israeli policy is immoral and self-destructive simultaneously develop their own rationale for why they can’t work with other Jewish and non-Jewish groups that have these same ideas. The result is a cacophony of voices that could, if united, work in a powerful way.
But united around what? It can’t be around the dissolution of the State of Israel envisioned by many who are currently planning a set of demonstrations against Israel June 10-12 coordinated by the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation and the United for Peace and Justice, two organizations to which Tikkun belongs and which oft en do valuable work. The reason we can’t join them is the same reason the Tikkun Community couldn’t join the Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP): the willingness of all these organizations to keep alive as an option the notion that the solution to Israel/Palestine peace lies in the dissolution of a Jewish state, using the language of “one state solution” as the way to signal to many who never thought the Jewish people never deserved a state at all. Now, don’t get us wrong. We are not pro-states at all, and at Tikkun we are working for a 21st century in which nation states are supplanted by regional and global arrangements and nationalism and nationalist wars disappear. But as long as the world does have states, we think the Jewish people have one of the better cases in the history of the modern world for having the protections that a state entails. That’s one reason why we are strongly critical of Israeli policy, but not in favor of destroying or politely eliminating a Jewish state. But our other reasons for opposing a one-state solution have to do with the well-being of the Palestinian people. And these are articulated below by the leader of the most progressive and yet rational peace movement in Israel, Uri Avnery of Gush Shalom. 1. Ask Palestinians to bet on a one state solution and you ask them to continue the occupation for the next twenty years at least, because almost no one in Israel feels safe enough in the world to eliminate the security that they feel from having a Jewish state. 2. Most Israelis and Palestinians would oppose it. 3. If implemented, it would lead to a real apartheid state.
We want to protest Israeli policy and build an alternative to AIPAC, but it cannot be done unless it is based on unequivocal acceptance of the right of both Israelis and Palestinians to have their own economically, politically and culturally viable states. As Avnery points out below, anything less than that actually plays into the hands of those who seek to perpetuate the occupation.
These arguments are made in very summary form here, but if you disagree with them, I urge you to read my two books that explore these issues in greater detail: Healing Israel Palestine (North Atlantic Books, 2003) and The Geneva Accord and Other Strategies for Middle East Peace (North Atlantic Books, 2004).
And please read Uri Avnery’s powerful article, below.
--Rabbi Michael Lerner
Editor, Tikkun (www.tikkun.org)
P.S. Have you signed the ad about how to end the War in Iraq? It’s not too late to sign it and donate to it (though you can sign without donating). www.tikkun.org/iraqpeace.
Uri Avnery
21.4.07
The Bed of Sodom
IN HEBREW legend, the bed of Sodom is a symbol of evil.
The Bible tells how God decided to obliterate Sodom because of the wickedness of its people (Genesis, 18). The legend gives us an example of this wickedness: the special bed for visitors. When a stranger came to Sodom, he was put in this bed. If he was too tall, his legs were shortened. If he was too short, his limbs were stretched to fit.
In political life, there is more than one bed like this. On the Right and on the Left, there are people who put every problem in such a bed, cut off limbs and stretch limbs, until reality matches theory.
From the sixties on, doctrinaire leftists tended to put every situation into the bed of Vietnam. Everything - be it the murderous tyranny in Chile or the American threats against Cuba - had to fit the Vietnam example. Applying this model, it was easy to decide who were the good guys and who the bad, what to do and how to solve the problem.
That was convenient. It is much easier to draw conclusions when there is no need to consider the complexities of a particular conflict, its historical background and its local circumstances.
LATELY, A NEW bed of Sodom has gained currency: South Africa. In some circles of the radical Left there is a tendency to force every conflict into this bed. Every new case of evil and oppression in the world is seen as a new version of the apartheid regime, and it is decided accordingly how to solve the problem and what to do to achieve the desired end.
True, the South African situation arose in particular historical circumstances that took centuries to mature. It was not identical with the problem of the aborigines in Australia or the settlement of the Whites in North America, nor to Northern Ireland or the situation in Iraq. But it is certainly convenient to give one and the same answer to all problems.
Of course, there is always a superficial similarity between different regimes of oppression. But if one is not ready to see the differences between the diseases, one is liable to prescribe false medicines - and risk killing the patient in the process.
NOW THIS is happening here.
It is easy to put the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the South African bed, since the similarities between the symptoms are obvious. The Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories has been going on for 40 years now, and almost 60 years have passed since the Naqba - the armed conflict of 1948 in which the State of Israel came into being and in which more than half the Palestinians lost their homes and land. Relations between the settlers and the Palestinians are in many ways reminiscent of apartheid; and even in Israel proper, the Arab citizens are far from real equality.
What to do? One has to learn from South Africa that there is nothing to be gained from appealing to the conscience of the ruling people. Among the white minority in South Africa, there was no real difference between Left and Right, between open racists and liberals, who were but better disguised racists, with the exception of a few white heroes who joined the fight for freedom.
Therefore, redemption could only come from the outside. And indeed, world public opinion saw the injustice of apartheid and imposed a world-wide boycott on South Africa, till in the end the white minority capitulated. Power in the united South African state passed into the hands of the black majority, Nelson Mandela was released from prison and became president, and all this took place - wonder of wonders - without bloodshed.
If this happened in South Africa, the proponents of this view say, it must happen here, too. The idea of establishing a Palestinian state next to the State of Israel (the "Two-State Solution") must be discarded, and the single state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River (the "One-State Solution") must become the aim. This must be achieved by the ultimate weapon which proved itself in South Africa: boycott.
This is how it is going to happen: justice-lovers throughout the world will convince world public opinion to impose a general boycott on the State of Israel. The state will collapse and disintegrate. Between the sea and the river there will come into being one single state, in which Israelis and Palestinians will live peacefully together, as equal citizens. The settlers can stay where they are, there will be no problem of borders, and all that remains is to decide who will be the Palestinian Mandela.
THIS WEEK I listened to a lecture by Professor Ilan Pappe of Haifa University, one of the leading spokesmen for this idea. The audience consisted of Palestinian, Israeli and international activists in Bil'in, the village that has become a symbol of resistance to the occupation. He presented a well-structured set of ideas, expressed with eloquence and enthusiasm. These were the principles:
There is no sense in opposing just the occupation, nor any other particular policy of the Israeli government. The problem is the very essence of Israel as a Zionist state. This essence is unchangeable as long as the state exists. No change from the inside is possible, because in Israel there is no essential difference between Right and Left. Both are accomplices in a policy whose real aim is ethnic cleansing, the expulsion of the Palestinians not only from the occupied territories, but also from Israel proper.
Therefore, everyone who strives for a just solution must aim at the establishment of a single state, to which the refugees of 1948 and 1967 will be invited to return. This will be a joint and egalitarian state, like today's South Africa.
There is no sense in trying to change Israel from the inside. Salvation will come from the outside: a world-wide boycott of Israel, which will cause the state to collapse and convince the Israeli public that there is no escape from the One-State Solution.
It sounded logical and convincing, and the speaker did indeed gain applause.
THIS THEORETICAL structure contains several assumptions with which I have no quarrel. The Zionist Left has indeed collapsed in the last few years, and its absence from the field of struggle is a painful and dangerous fact. In today's Knesset, there is no effective Zionist party that is seriously fighting for real equality for the Arab citizens. Nobody is able today to call out into the street hundreds of thousands, or even tens of thousands, in order to pressure the government to accept the peace proposal of the whole Arab world.
There is no doubt that the real disease is not the 40-year long occupation. The occupation is a symptom of a more profound disease, which is connected with the official ideology of the state. The aim of ethnic cleansing and the establishment of a Jewish State from the sea to the river is dear to the hearts of many Israelis, and perhaps Rabbi Meir Kahane was right when he asserted that this is everybody's unspoken desire.
But unlike professor Pappe, I am convinced that it is possible to change the historical direction of Israel. I am convinced that this is the real battlefield for the Israeli peace forces, and I myself have been engaged in it for decades.
Moreover, I believe that we have already attained impressive achievements: the recognition of the existence of the Palestinian people has become general, and so has the readiness of most Israelis to accept the idea of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as the capital of both states. We have compelled our government to recognize the PLO, and we shall compel them to recognize Hamas. True, all this would not have happened without the steadfastness of the Palestinian people and (sometimes) favorable international circumstances, but the contribution of the Israeli peace forces, which pioneered these ideas, was significant.
Also, the notion has lately gained acceptance in Israel and other countries, that peace will be achieved only if we succeed in overcoming the gap between the Israeli and the Palestinian narratives and in integrating them into one single historical account, which will recognize the injustices which have been committed and which are still going on. Nothing is more important. (Our path-breaking booklet "Truth Against Truth" was the beginning of this process.)
On the surface, it appears that we have failed. We have not succeeded in compelling our government to stop the building of the wall or the enlargement of the settlements, nor to restore to the Palestinians their freedom of movement. In short, we have not succeeded in putting an end to the occupation. The Arab citizens of Israel have not attained real equality. But beneath the surface, in the depths of national consciousness, we are succeeding. The question is how to turn the hidden success into an open political fact. In other words: how to change the policy of the Israeli government.
THE IDEA of the "One-State Solution" will harm this effort very much.
It diverts the effort from a solution that has now, after many years, a broad public basis, in favor of a solution that has no chance at all.
There is no doubt that 99.99% of Jewish Israelis want the State of Israel to exist as a state with a robust Jewish majority, whatever its borders.
The belief that a world-wide boycott could change this is a complete illusion. Immediately after his lecture, my colleague Adam Keller asked the professor a simple question: "The entire world has imposed a blockade on the Palestinian people. But in spite of the terrible misery of the Palestinians, they have not been brought to their knees. Why do you think that a boycott would break the Israeli public, which is far stronger economically, so that they would give up the Jewish character of the state?" (There was no answer.)
In any case, such a boycott is quite impossible. Here and there, an organization can declare a boycott, small circles of justice-lovers can keep it, but there is no chance that in the coming decades a world-wide boycott movement, like the one that broke the racist regime in South Africa, will come about. That regime was headed by declared asmirers of the Nazis. A boycott of the "Jewish State", which is identified with the victims of the Nazis, just will not happen. It will be enough to remind people that the long road to the gas chambers started with the 1933 Nazi slogan "Kauft nicht bei Juden" ("Don't buy from Jews").
(The obnoxious fact that the government of the "State of the Holocaust Survivors" had close relations with the Apartheid State does not change this situation.)
That is the problem with the bed of Sodom: one size does not fit all. When the circumstances are different, the remedies must be different, too.
THE IDEA of the "One-State Solution" can attract people who despair of the struggle for the soul of Israel. I do understand them. But it is a dangerous idea, especially for the Palestinians.
Statistically, the Israeli Jews constitute, as of now, the absolute majority between the sea and the river. To that, one must add an even more important fact: the average annual income of an Arab Palestinian is about 800 dollars, that of a Jewish Israeli is about 20,000 dollars - 25 times (!) higher. The Israeli economy is growing every year. The Palestinians would be "hewers of wood and drawers of water". That means that if the imaginary joint state did indeed come into being, the Jews there would wield in it absolute power. They would, of course, use this power to consolidate their dominance and prevent the return of refugees.
Thus the South African example could come true retroactively: in the Single State, an apartheid-like regime would indeed come into being. Not only would the Israeli-Palestinian conflict not be solved, but on the contrary, it would move into an even more dangerous phase.
Pappe put forward an argument that looked a bit strange to me: that a Single State already exists in practice, since Israel rules from the sea to the river. But that is not so. There is no single state, neither formally nor in practice, but one state occupying another. Such a state, in which a dominant nation controls the others, will eventually disintegrate - as did the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.
The One State will not come into being. Not only the Israelis, but most of the Palestinians, too, will not give up their right to a national state of their own. They can applaud an Israeli professor who advocates the dismantling of the State of Israel, but they have no time to wait for utopian solutions that could be realized in a hundred years. They need an end to the occupation and to achieve a solution to the conflict here and now, in the near future.
ALL WHO wholeheartedly want to help the occupied Palestinian people would be well advised to keep well away from the idea of a general boycott of Israel. It would push all Israelis into the arms of the extreme Right, because it would reinforce the right-wing belief that "All the world is against us" - a belief that took root in the years of the Holocaust, when "all the world looked on and kept silent". Every Israeli child learns this in school.
A focused boycott against specific organizations and corporations that actively contribute to the occupation can indeed help in convincing the Israeli public that the occupation is not worthwhile. Such a boycott can achieve a specific aim - if it is not aimed at the collapse of the State of Israel. Gush Shalom, to which I belong, has for 10 years been organizing a boycott of the products of the settlements. The aim is to isolate the settlers and their accomplices. But a general boycott on the State of Israel would achieve the very opposite - to isolate the Israeli peace activists.
THE "TWO-STATE SOLUTION" was and still is the only solution. When we put it forward immediately after the 1948 war, we could be counted on the fingers of two hands not only in Israel but in the entire world. Now there exists a world-wide consensus about it. The path to this solution is not smooth, many dangers lurk on the way, but it is a realistic solution that can be achieved.
One can say: OK, we will accept the Two-State Solution because it is realistic, but after its realization we shall endeavor to abolish the two states and establish one joint state. That is alright with me. As for myself, I hope that in the course of time a federation of the two states will come into being, and relations between the two will become close. I also hope that a regional union, like the EU, will be established, consisting of all the Arab states and Israel, and perhaps also Turkey and Iran.
But first of all we must treat the wound from which we are all suffering: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Not by patent medicines, certainly not by a bed of Sodom, but with the medicines that are on the shelf.
THE 18th CHAPTER of Genesis tells of Abraham trying to convince the Almighty not to obliterate Sodom. "Peradventure there be fifty righteous within the city; wilt thou also destroy and not spare the place for the fifty righteous that are therein?"
God promised him not to destroy the town if there were 50 righteous in it. Abraham haggled and brought the Almighty down to 45, then 40, 30 and 20, finally settling for 10. But in Sodom there were no 10 righteous to be found, and so its fate was sealed.
I believe that in Israel there are many, many more than ten righteous people. All public opinion polls show that the great majority of Israelis not only want peace, but are ready to pay its price. But they are afraid. They lack trust. They are shackled by the beliefs they acquired in early childhood. They must be freed from them - and I believe that it can be done.
Thursday, April 19, 2007
A Jewish Plea
> CounterPunch, Weekend Edition
> April 7 / 8, 2007
> http://www.counterpunch.org/roy04072007.html
>
> A Jewish Plea
>
> By SARA ROY
>
> We have nothing to lose except everything. - Albert Camus
>
>
> During the summer my husband and I had a conversion ceremony for our
> adopted daughter, Jess. We took her to the mikvah, a Jewish ritual bath
> where she was totally submerged in a pool of living water -- living
> because it is fed in part by heavenly rain -- and momentarily suspended
> as we are in the womb, emerging the same yet transformed. This ritual
> of purification, transformation and rebirth is central to Judaism and
> it signifies renewal and possibility.
>
> The day of Jess's conversion was also the day that Israel began its
> pitiless bombing of Lebanon and nearly three weeks into Israel's
> violent assault on Gaza, a place that has been my second home for the
> last two decades. This painful juxtaposition of rebirth and destruction
> remains with me, weighing heavily, without respite. Yet, the link
> deeply forged in our construction of self as Jews, between my
> daughter's acceptance into Judaism and Israel's actions-between Judaism
> and Zionism -- a link that I never accepted uncritically but understood
> as historically inevitable and understandable, is one that for me, at
> least, has now been broken.
>
> For unlike past conflicts involving Israel and the Palestinian and Arab
> peoples this one feels qualitatively different -- a turning point --
> not only with regard to the nature of Israel's horrific response -- its
> willingness to destroy and to do so utterly -- but also with regard to
> the virtually unqualified support of organized American Jewry for
> Israel's brutal actions, something that is not new but now no longer
> tolerable to me.
>
> I grew up in a home where Judaism was defined and practiced not so much
> as a religion but as a system of ethics and culture. God was present
> but not central. Israel and the notion of a Jewish homeland were very
> important to my parents, who survived Auschwitz, Chelmno and
> Buchenwald. But unlike many of their friends, my parents were not
> uncritical of Israel. Obedience to a state was not a primary Jewish
> value, especially after the Holocaust. Judaism provided the context for
> Jewish life, for values and beliefs that were not dependent upon
> national or territorial boundaries, but transcended them to include the
> other, always the other. For my mother and father Judaism meant bearing
> witness, raging against injustice and refusing silence. It meant
> compassion, tolerance, and rescue. In the absence of these imperatives,
> they taught me, we cease to be Jews.
>
> Many of the people, both Jewish and others, who write about
> Palestinians and Arabs fail to accept the fundamental humanity of the
> people they are writing about, a failing born of ignorance, fear and
> racism. Within the organized Jewish community especially, it has always
> been unacceptable to claim that Arabs, Palestinians especially, are
> like us, that they, too, possess an essential humanity and must be
> included within our moral boundaries, ceasing to be "a kind of
> solution," a useful, hostile "other" to borrow from Edward Said. That
> any attempt at separation is artificial, an abstraction.
>
> By refusing to seek proximity over distance, we calmly, even gratefully
> refuse to see what is right before our eyes. We are no longer
> compelled, if we ever were, to understand our behavior from positions
> outside our own, to enter, as Jacqueline Rose has written, into each
> other's predicaments and make what is one of the hardest journeys of
> the mind. Hence, there is no need to maintain a living connection with
> the people we are oppressing, to humanize them, taking into account the
> experience of subordination itself, as Said would say. We are not
> preoccupied by our cruelty nor are we haunted by it. The task,
> ultimately, is to tribalize pain, narrowing the scope of human
> suffering to ourselves alone. Such willful blindness leads to the
> destruction of principle and the destruction of people, eliminating all
> possibility of embrace, but it gives us solace.
>
> Why is it so difficult, even impossible to incorporate Palestinians and
> other Arab peoples into the Jewish understanding of history? Why is
> there so little perceived need to question our own narrative (for want
> of a better word) and the one we have given others, preferring instead
> to cherish beliefs and sentiments that remain impenetrable? Why is it
> virtually mandatory among Jewish intellectuals to oppose racism,
> repression and injustice almost anywhere in the world and unacceptable
> -- indeed, for some, an act of heresy -- to oppose it when Israel is
> the oppressor, choosing concealment over exposure? For many among us
> history and memory adhere to preclude reflection and tolerance, where,
> in the words of Northrop Frye, "the enemy become, not people to be
> defeated, but embodiments of an idea to be exterminated."
>
> What happens to the other as we, a broken and weary people, continually
> abuse him, turning him into the enemy we now want and need, secure in a
> prophecy that is thankfully self-fulfilling?
>
> What happens to a people when renewal and injustice are rapturously
> joined?
>
> A new discourse of the unconscious
>
> We speak without mercy, numb to the pain of others, incapable of being
> reached-unconscious. Our words are these:
>
> * " . . . [W]e must not forget,' wrote Ze'ev Schiff, the senior
> political and military analyst for the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, "the
> most important aspect of this war: Hezbollah and what this terrorist
> organization symbolizes must be destroyed at any price. . . .What
> matters is not the future of the Shiite town of Bint Jbail or the
> Hezbollah positions in Maroun Ras, but the future and safety of the
> State of Israel." "If Israel doesn't improve its military cards in the
> fighting, we will feel the results in the political solution."
>
> * "We must reduce to dust the villages of the south . . ." stated
> Haim Ramon, long known as a political dove and Israel's Minister of
> Justice. "I don't understand why there is still electricity there."
> "Everyone in southern Lebanon is a terrorist and is connected to
> Hizbollah. . . What we should do in southern Lebanon is employ huge
> firepower before a ground force goes in." Israel's largest selling
> newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth put it this way: "A village from which
> rockets are fired at Israel will simply be destroyed by fire. This
> decision should have been made and executed after the first Katyusha.
> But better late than never."
>
> * "[F]or every katyusha barrage on Haifa, 10 Dahiya buildings will
> be bombed," said the IDF Chief of Staff, Dan Halutz. Eli Yishai,
> Israel's Deputy Prime Minister, proposed turning south Lebanon into a
> "sandbox", while Knesset member Moshe Sharoni called for the
> obliteration of Gaza, and Yoav Limor, a Channel 1 military
> correspondent, suggested an exhibition of Hezbollah corpses followed by
> a parade of prisoners in their underwear in order "to strengthen the
> home front's morale."
>
> * "Remember: distorted philosophical sensitivity [sic] to human
> lives will make us pay the real price of the lives of many, and the
> blood of our sons," read an advertisement in Ha'aretz.
>
> * "[A]ccording to Jewish law," announced the Yesha Rabbinical
> Council, "during a time of battle and war, there is no such term as
> 'innocents of the enemy'."
>
> * "But speaking from our own Judaic faith and legal legacy," argued
> the Rabbinical Council of America, "we believe that Judaism would
> neither require nor permit a Jewish soldier to sacrifice himself in
> order to save deliberately endangered enemy civilians. This is
> especially true when confronting a barbaric enemy who would by such
> illicit, consistent, and systematic means seek to destroy not only the
> Jewish soldier, but defeat and destroy the Jewish homeland. New
> realities do indeed require new responses."
>
> * The Israeli author, Naomi Ragan, after learning that many of the
> war dead in Lebanon were children, wrote "Save your sympathy for the
> mothers and sisters and girlfriends of our young soldiers who would
> rather be sitting in study halls learning Torah, but have no choice but
> to risk their precious lives full of hope, goodness and endless
> potential, to wipe out the cancerous terrorist cells that threaten
> their people and all mankind. Make your choice, and save your tears."
>
> Many of us, perhaps most, have declared that all Palestinians and
> Lebanese are the enemy, threatening our -- Israel and the Jewish
> people's -- existence. Everyone we kill and every house we demolish is
> therefore a military target, legitimate and deserving. Terrorism is
> part of their culture and we must strengthen our ability to deter.
> Negotiation, to paraphrase the Israeli scholar, Yehoshua Porat, writing
> during the 1982 Lebanon war, is a "veritable catastrophe for Israel."
> The battlefield will preserve us.
>
> The French critic and historian, Hippolyte Taine, observed:
>
> "Imagine a man who sets out on a voyage equipped with a pair of
> spectacles that magnify things to an extraordinary degree. A hair on
> his hand, a spot on the tablecloth, the shifting fold of a coat, all
> will attract his attention; at this rate, he will not go far, he will
> spend his day taking six steps and will never get out of his room."
>
>
> We are content in our room and seek no exit.
>
> In our room, compassion and conscience are dismissed as weakness, where
> pinpoint surgical strikes constitute restraint and civility and
> momentary ceasefires, acts of humanity and kindness. "Leave your home,
> we are going to destroy it." Several minutes later another home in
> Gaza, another history, is taken, crushed. The warning, though, is not
> for them but for us-it makes us good and clean. What better
> illustration of our morality: when a call to leave one's home minutes
> before it is bombed is considered a humane gesture.
>
> Our warnings have another purpose: they make our actions legitimate and
> our desire for legitimacy is unbounded, voracious. This is perhaps the
> only thing Palestinians (and now the Lebanese) have withheld from us,
> this object of our desire. If legitimacy will not be bestowed then it
> must be created. This explains Israel's obsession with laws and
> legalities to insure in our own eyes that we do not transgress, making
> evil allowable by widening the parameters of license and transgression.
> In this way we insure our goodness and morality, through a piece of
> paper, which is enough for us.
>
> What are Jews now capable of resisting: tyranny? Oppression?
> Occupation? Injustice? We resist none of these things, no more. For too
> many among us they are no longer evil but necessary and good-we cannot
> live, survive without them. What does that make us? We look at
> ourselves and what do we see: a non-Jew, a child, whose pain we inflict
> effortlessly, whose death is demanded and unquestioned, bearing
> validity and purpose.
>
> What do we see: a people who now take pleasure in hating others. Hatred
> is familiar to us if nothing else. We understand it and it is safe. It
> is what we know. We do not fear our own distortion -- do we even see
> it? -- but the loss of our power to deter, and we shake with a violent
> palsy at a solution that shuns the suffering of others. Our pathology
> is this: it lies in our struggle to embrace a morality we no longer
> possess and in our need for persecution of a kind we can no longer
> claim but can only inflict.
>
> We are remote from the conscious world -- brilliantly ignorant, blindly
> visionary, unable to resist from within. We live in an unchanging
> place, absent of season and reflection, devoid of normality and growth,
> and most important of all, emptied-or so we aim -- of the other. A
> ghetto still but now, unlike before, a ghetto of our own making.
>
> What is our narrative of victory and defeat? What does it mean to win?
> Bombed cars with white civilian flags still attached to their windows?
> More dead and dismembered bodies of old people and children littered
> throughout villages that have been ravaged? An entire country disabled
> and broken? Non-ending war? This is our victory, our achievement,
> something we seek and applaud. And how do we measure defeat? Losing the
> will to continue the devastation? Admitting to our persecution of
> others, something we have never done?
>
> We can easily ignore their suffering, cut them from their food, water,
> electricity, and medicine, confiscate their land, demolish their crops
> and deny them egress -- suffocate them, our voices stilled. Racism does
> not allow us to see Arabs as we see ourselves; that is why we rage when
> they do not fail from weakness but instead we find ourselves failing
> from strength. Yet, in our view it is we who are the only victims,
> vulnerable and scarred. All we have is the unnaturalness of our
> condition.
>
> As an unconscious people, we have perhaps reached our nadir with many
> among us now calling for a redefinition of our ethics-the core of who
> we are -- to incorporate the need to kill women and children if Jewish
> security required it. "New realities do indeed require new responses,"
> says the Rabbinical Council of America. Now, for us, violence is
> creation and peace is destruction.
>
> Ending the process of creation and rebirth after the Holocaust
>
> Can we be ordinary, an essential part of our rebirth after the
> Holocaust? Is it possible to be normal when we seek refuge in the
> margin, and remedy in the dispossession and destruction of another
> people? How can we create when we acquiesce so willingly to the
> demolition of homes, construction of barriers, denial of sustenance,
> and ruin of innocents? How can we be merciful when, to use Rose's
> words, we seek "omnipotence as the answer to historical pain?" We
> refuse to hear their pleading, to see those chased from their homes,
> children incinerated in their mother's arms. Instead we tell our
> children to inscribe the bombs that will burn Arab babies.
>
> We argue that we must eliminate terrorism. What do we really know of
> their terrorism, and of ours? What do we care? Rather, with language
> that is denuded and infested-give them more time to bomb so that
> Israel's borders can be natural-we engage repeatedly in a war of
> desire, a war not thrust upon us but of our own choosing, ingratiating
> ourselves with the power to destroy others and insensate to the death
> of our own children. What happens to a nation, asks the Israeli writer
> David Grossman, that cannot save its own child, words written before
> his own son was killed in Lebanon?
>
> There are among Israelis real feelings of vulnerability and fear, never
> resolved but used, intensified. Seeing one's child injured or killed is
> the most horrible vision -- Israelis are vulnerable, far more than
> other Jews. Yet, we as a people have become a force of extremism, of
> chaos and disorder, trying to plow an unruly sea-addicted to death and
> cruelty, intoxicated, with one ambition: to mock the pauper.
>
> Judaism has always prided itself on reflection, critical examination,
> and philosophical inquiry. The Talmudic mind examines a sentence, a
> word, in a multitude of ways, seeking all possible interpretations and
> searching constantly for the one left unsaid. Through such scrutiny it
> is believed comes the awareness needed to protect the innocent, prevent
> injury or harm, and be closer to God.
>
> Now, these are abhorred, eviscerated from our ethical system. Rather
> the imperative is to see through eyes that are closed, unfettered by
> investigation. We conceal our guilt by remaining the abused, despite
> our power, creating situations where our victimization is assured and
> our innocence affirmed. We prefer this abyss to peace, which would hurl
> us unacceptably inward toward awareness and acknowledgement.
>
> Jews do not feel shame over what they have created: an inventory of
> inhumanity. Rather we remain oddly appeased, even calmed by the
> desolation. Our detachment allows us to bear such excess (and commit
> it), to sit in Jewish cafes while Palestinian mothers are murdered in
> front of their children in Gaza. I can now better understand how horror
> occurs-how people, not evil themselves, can allow evil to happen. We
> salve our wounds with our incapacity for remorse, which will be our
> undoing.
>
> Instead the Jewish community demands unity and conformity: "Stand with
> Israel" read the banners on synagogues throughout Boston last summer.
> Unity around what? There is enormous pressure -- indeed coercion --
> within organized American Jewry to present an image of "wall to wall
> unity" as a local Jewish leader put it. But this unity is an illusion
> -- at its edges a smoldering flame rapidly engulfing its core -- for
> mainstream Jewry does not speak for me or for many other Jews. And
> where such unity exists, it is hollow built around fear not humanity,
> on the need to understand reality as it has long been constructed for
> us -- with the Jew as the righteous victim, the innocent incapable of
> harm. It is as if our unbending support for Israel's militarism
> "requires putting our minds as it were into Auschwitz where being a Jew
> puts your existence on the line. To be Jewish means to be threatened,
> nothing more. Hence, the only morality we can acknowledge is saving
> Israel and by extension, ourselves." Within this paradigm, it is
> dissent not conformity that will diminish and destroy us. We hoard our
> victimization as we hoard our identity -- they are one -- incapable of
> change, a failing that will one day result in our own eviction. Is this
> what Zionism has done to Judaism?
>
> Israel's actions not only demonstrate the limits of Israeli power but
> our own limitations as a people: our inability to live a life without
> barriers, to free ourselves from an ethnic loyalty that binds and
> contorts, to emerge, finally, from our spectral chamber.
>
> Ending the (filial) link between Israel and the Holocaust
>
> How can the children of the Holocaust do such things, they ask? But are
> we really their rightful offspring?
>
> As the Holocaust survivor dies, the horror of that period and its
> attendant lessons withdraw further into abstraction and for some Jews,
> many of them in Israel, alienation. The Holocaust stands not as a
> lesson but as an internal act of purification where tribal attachment
> rather than ethical responsibility is demanded and used to define
> collective action. Perhaps this was an inevitable outcome of Jewish
> nationalism, of applying holiness to politics, but whatever its source,
> it has weakened us terribly and cost us greatly.
>
> Silvia Tennenbaum, a survivor and activist writes: "No matter what
> great accomplishments were ours in the diaspora, no matter that we
> produced Maimonides and Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn and hundreds of
> others of mankind's benefactors -- not a warrior among them! -- we look
> at the world of our long exile always in the dark light of the Shoah.
> But this, in itself, is an obscene distortion: would the author . . .
> Primo Levi, or the poet Paul Celan demand that we slaughter the
> innocents in a land far from the snow-clad forests of Poland? Is it a
> heroic act to murder a child, even the child of an enemy? Are my
> brethren glad and proud? . . . And, it goes without saying, loyal Jews
> must talk about the Holocaust. Ignore the images of today's dead and
> dying and focus on the grainy black and white pictures showing the
> death of Jews in the villages of Poland, at Auschwitz and Sobibor and
> Bergen-Belsen. We are the first, the only true victims, the champions
> of helplessness for all eternity."
>
> What did my family perish for in the ghettos and concentration camps of
> Poland? Is their role to be exploited and in the momentary absence of
> violence, to be forgotten and abandoned?
>
> Holocaust survivors stood between the past and the present, bearing
> witness, sometimes silently, and even in word, often unheard. Yet, they
> stood as a moral challenge among us and also as living embodiments of a
> history, way of life and culture that long predated the Holocaust and
> Zionism (and that Zionism has long denigrated), refusing, in their own
> way, to let us look past them. Yet, this generation is nearing its end
> and as they leave us, I wonder what is truly left to take their place,
> to fill the moral void created by their absence?
>
> Is it, in the words of a friend, himself a Jew, a "memory manufactory,
> with statues, museums and platoons of 'scholars' designed to preserve,
> indeed ratchet up Jewish feelings of persecution and victimhood, a
> Hitler behind every Katyusha or border skirmish, which must be met with
> some of the same crude slaughterhouse tools the Nazis employed against
> the Jews six decades ago: ghettos, mass arrests and the denigration of
> their enemy's humanity?" Do we now measure success in human bodies and
> in carnage, arguing that our dead bodies are worth more than theirs,
> our children more vulnerable and holy, more in need of protection and
> love, their corpses more deserving of shrouds and burial? Is meaning
> for us to be derived from martyrdom or from children born with a knife
> in their hearts? Is this how my grandmother and grandfather are to be
> remembered?
>
> Our tortured past and its images trespass upon our present not only in
> Israel but in Gaza and Lebanon as well. "They were temporarily buried
> in an empty lot with dozens of others," writes a New York Times
> reporter in Lebanon. "They were assigned numbers, his wife and
> daughter. Alia is No. 35 and Sally is No. 67. 'They are numbers now,'
> said the father. There are no names anymore."
>
> "They were shrunken figures, dehydrated and hungry," observes the
> Washington Post. "Some had lived on candy bars, others on pieces of dry
> bread. Some were shell-shocked, their faces blank . . . One never made
> it. He was carried out on a stretcher, flies landing on lifeless eyes
> that were still open."
>
> As the rightful claimants to our past we should ask, How much damage
> can be done to a soul? But we do not ask. We do not question the
> destruction but only our inability to complete it, to create more
> slaughter sites.
>
> Can we ever emerge from our torpor, able to mourn the devastation?
>
> Our ultimate eviction?
>
> Where do Jews belong? Where is our place? Is it in the ghetto of a
> Jewish state whose shrinking boundaries threaten, one day, to evict us?
> We are powerful but not strong. Our power is our weakness, not our
> strength, because it is used to instill fear rather than trust, and
> because of that, it will one day destroy us if we do not change. More
> and more we find ourselves detached from our past, suspended and
> abandoned, alone, without anchor, aching-if not now, eventually-for
> connection and succor. Grossman has written that as a dream fades it
> does not become a weaker force but a more potent one, desperately clung
> to, even as it ravages and devours.
>
> We consume the land and the water behind walls and steel gates forcing
> out all others. What kind of place are we creating? Are we fated to be
> an intruder in the dust to borrow from Faulkner, whose presence shall
> evaporate with the shifting sands? Are these the boundaries of our
> rebirth after the Holocaust?
>
> I have come to accept that Jewish power and sovereignty and Jewish
> ethics and spiritual integrity are, in the absence of reform,
> incompatible, unable to coexist or be reconciled. For if speaking out
> against the wanton murder of children is considered an act of
> disloyalty and betrayal rather than a legitimate act of dissent, and
> where dissent is so ineffective and reviled, a choice is ultimately
> forced upon us between Zionism and Judaism.
>
> Rabbi Hillel the Elder long ago emphasized ethics as the center of
> Jewish life. Ethical principles or their absence will contribute to the
> survival or destruction of our people. Yet, today what we face is
> something different and possibly more perverse: it is not the
> disappearance of our ethical system but its rewriting into something
> disfigured and execrable.
>
> As Jews in a post-Holocaust world empowered by a Jewish state, how do
> we as a people emerge from atrocity and abjection, empowered and also
> humane, something that still eludes us? How do we move beyond fear and
> omnipotence, beyond innocence and militarism, to envision something
> different, even if uncertain? "How," asks Ahad Haam, the founding
> father of cultural Zionism, "do you make a nation pause for thought?"
>
> For many Jews (and Christians), the answer lies in a strong and
> militarized Jewish state. For others, it is found in the very act of
> survival. For my parents-defeating Hitler meant living a moral life.
> They sought a world where "affirmation is possible and . . . dissent is
> mandatory," where our capacity to witness is restored and sanctioned,
> where we as a people refuse to be overcome by the darkness.
>
> Can we ever turn away from our power to destroy?
>
> It is here that I want to share a story from my family, to describe a
> moment that has inspired all of my work and writing.
>
> My mother and her sister had just been liberated from concentration
> camp by the Russian army. After having captured all the Nazi officials
> and guards who ran the camp, the Russian soldiers told the Jewish
> survivors that they could do whatever they wanted to their German
> persecutors. Many survivors, themselves emaciated and barely alive,
> immediately fell on the Germans, ravaging them. My mother and my aunt,
> standing just yards from the terrible scene unfolding in front of them,
> fell into each other's arms weeping. My mother, who was the physically
> stronger of the two, embraced my aunt, holding her close and my aunt,
> who had difficulty standing, grabbed my mother as if she would never
> let go. She said to my mother, "We cannot do this. Our father and
> mother would say this is wrong. Even now, even after everything we have
> endured, we must seek justice, not revenge. There is no other way." My
> mother, still crying, kissed her sister and the two of them, still one,
> turned and walked away.
>
> What then is the source of our redemption, our salvation? It lies
> ultimately in our willingness to acknowledge the other-the victims we
> have created-Palestinian, Lebanese and also Jewish-and the injustice we
> have perpetrated as a grieving people. Perhaps then we can pursue a
> more just solution in which we seek to be ordinary rather then
> absolute, where we finally come to understand that our only hope is not
> to die peacefully in our homes as one Zionist official put it long ago
> but to live peacefully in those homes.
>
> When my daughter Jess was submerged under the waters of the mikvah for
> the third and final time, she told me she saw rainbows under the water.
> I shall take this beautiful image as a sign of her rebirth and plead
> desperately for ours.
>
> ========================================================================
> ==============
>
> Sara Roy is Senior Research Scholar, Center for Middle Eastern Studie,
> Harvard University. "A Jewish Plea" will be published in The War on
> Lebanon: A Reader . Nubar Hovsepian (ed), Interlink Publishing, Spring
> 2007.
> April 7 / 8, 2007
> http://www.counterpunch.org/roy04072007.html
>
> A Jewish Plea
>
> By SARA ROY
>
> We have nothing to lose except everything. - Albert Camus
>
>
> During the summer my husband and I had a conversion ceremony for our
> adopted daughter, Jess. We took her to the mikvah, a Jewish ritual bath
> where she was totally submerged in a pool of living water -- living
> because it is fed in part by heavenly rain -- and momentarily suspended
> as we are in the womb, emerging the same yet transformed. This ritual
> of purification, transformation and rebirth is central to Judaism and
> it signifies renewal and possibility.
>
> The day of Jess's conversion was also the day that Israel began its
> pitiless bombing of Lebanon and nearly three weeks into Israel's
> violent assault on Gaza, a place that has been my second home for the
> last two decades. This painful juxtaposition of rebirth and destruction
> remains with me, weighing heavily, without respite. Yet, the link
> deeply forged in our construction of self as Jews, between my
> daughter's acceptance into Judaism and Israel's actions-between Judaism
> and Zionism -- a link that I never accepted uncritically but understood
> as historically inevitable and understandable, is one that for me, at
> least, has now been broken.
>
> For unlike past conflicts involving Israel and the Palestinian and Arab
> peoples this one feels qualitatively different -- a turning point --
> not only with regard to the nature of Israel's horrific response -- its
> willingness to destroy and to do so utterly -- but also with regard to
> the virtually unqualified support of organized American Jewry for
> Israel's brutal actions, something that is not new but now no longer
> tolerable to me.
>
> I grew up in a home where Judaism was defined and practiced not so much
> as a religion but as a system of ethics and culture. God was present
> but not central. Israel and the notion of a Jewish homeland were very
> important to my parents, who survived Auschwitz, Chelmno and
> Buchenwald. But unlike many of their friends, my parents were not
> uncritical of Israel. Obedience to a state was not a primary Jewish
> value, especially after the Holocaust. Judaism provided the context for
> Jewish life, for values and beliefs that were not dependent upon
> national or territorial boundaries, but transcended them to include the
> other, always the other. For my mother and father Judaism meant bearing
> witness, raging against injustice and refusing silence. It meant
> compassion, tolerance, and rescue. In the absence of these imperatives,
> they taught me, we cease to be Jews.
>
> Many of the people, both Jewish and others, who write about
> Palestinians and Arabs fail to accept the fundamental humanity of the
> people they are writing about, a failing born of ignorance, fear and
> racism. Within the organized Jewish community especially, it has always
> been unacceptable to claim that Arabs, Palestinians especially, are
> like us, that they, too, possess an essential humanity and must be
> included within our moral boundaries, ceasing to be "a kind of
> solution," a useful, hostile "other" to borrow from Edward Said. That
> any attempt at separation is artificial, an abstraction.
>
> By refusing to seek proximity over distance, we calmly, even gratefully
> refuse to see what is right before our eyes. We are no longer
> compelled, if we ever were, to understand our behavior from positions
> outside our own, to enter, as Jacqueline Rose has written, into each
> other's predicaments and make what is one of the hardest journeys of
> the mind. Hence, there is no need to maintain a living connection with
> the people we are oppressing, to humanize them, taking into account the
> experience of subordination itself, as Said would say. We are not
> preoccupied by our cruelty nor are we haunted by it. The task,
> ultimately, is to tribalize pain, narrowing the scope of human
> suffering to ourselves alone. Such willful blindness leads to the
> destruction of principle and the destruction of people, eliminating all
> possibility of embrace, but it gives us solace.
>
> Why is it so difficult, even impossible to incorporate Palestinians and
> other Arab peoples into the Jewish understanding of history? Why is
> there so little perceived need to question our own narrative (for want
> of a better word) and the one we have given others, preferring instead
> to cherish beliefs and sentiments that remain impenetrable? Why is it
> virtually mandatory among Jewish intellectuals to oppose racism,
> repression and injustice almost anywhere in the world and unacceptable
> -- indeed, for some, an act of heresy -- to oppose it when Israel is
> the oppressor, choosing concealment over exposure? For many among us
> history and memory adhere to preclude reflection and tolerance, where,
> in the words of Northrop Frye, "the enemy become, not people to be
> defeated, but embodiments of an idea to be exterminated."
>
> What happens to the other as we, a broken and weary people, continually
> abuse him, turning him into the enemy we now want and need, secure in a
> prophecy that is thankfully self-fulfilling?
>
> What happens to a people when renewal and injustice are rapturously
> joined?
>
> A new discourse of the unconscious
>
> We speak without mercy, numb to the pain of others, incapable of being
> reached-unconscious. Our words are these:
>
> * " . . . [W]e must not forget,' wrote Ze'ev Schiff, the senior
> political and military analyst for the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, "the
> most important aspect of this war: Hezbollah and what this terrorist
> organization symbolizes must be destroyed at any price. . . .What
> matters is not the future of the Shiite town of Bint Jbail or the
> Hezbollah positions in Maroun Ras, but the future and safety of the
> State of Israel." "If Israel doesn't improve its military cards in the
> fighting, we will feel the results in the political solution."
>
> * "We must reduce to dust the villages of the south . . ." stated
> Haim Ramon, long known as a political dove and Israel's Minister of
> Justice. "I don't understand why there is still electricity there."
> "Everyone in southern Lebanon is a terrorist and is connected to
> Hizbollah. . . What we should do in southern Lebanon is employ huge
> firepower before a ground force goes in." Israel's largest selling
> newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth put it this way: "A village from which
> rockets are fired at Israel will simply be destroyed by fire. This
> decision should have been made and executed after the first Katyusha.
> But better late than never."
>
> * "[F]or every katyusha barrage on Haifa, 10 Dahiya buildings will
> be bombed," said the IDF Chief of Staff, Dan Halutz. Eli Yishai,
> Israel's Deputy Prime Minister, proposed turning south Lebanon into a
> "sandbox", while Knesset member Moshe Sharoni called for the
> obliteration of Gaza, and Yoav Limor, a Channel 1 military
> correspondent, suggested an exhibition of Hezbollah corpses followed by
> a parade of prisoners in their underwear in order "to strengthen the
> home front's morale."
>
> * "Remember: distorted philosophical sensitivity [sic] to human
> lives will make us pay the real price of the lives of many, and the
> blood of our sons," read an advertisement in Ha'aretz.
>
> * "[A]ccording to Jewish law," announced the Yesha Rabbinical
> Council, "during a time of battle and war, there is no such term as
> 'innocents of the enemy'."
>
> * "But speaking from our own Judaic faith and legal legacy," argued
> the Rabbinical Council of America, "we believe that Judaism would
> neither require nor permit a Jewish soldier to sacrifice himself in
> order to save deliberately endangered enemy civilians. This is
> especially true when confronting a barbaric enemy who would by such
> illicit, consistent, and systematic means seek to destroy not only the
> Jewish soldier, but defeat and destroy the Jewish homeland. New
> realities do indeed require new responses."
>
> * The Israeli author, Naomi Ragan, after learning that many of the
> war dead in Lebanon were children, wrote "Save your sympathy for the
> mothers and sisters and girlfriends of our young soldiers who would
> rather be sitting in study halls learning Torah, but have no choice but
> to risk their precious lives full of hope, goodness and endless
> potential, to wipe out the cancerous terrorist cells that threaten
> their people and all mankind. Make your choice, and save your tears."
>
> Many of us, perhaps most, have declared that all Palestinians and
> Lebanese are the enemy, threatening our -- Israel and the Jewish
> people's -- existence. Everyone we kill and every house we demolish is
> therefore a military target, legitimate and deserving. Terrorism is
> part of their culture and we must strengthen our ability to deter.
> Negotiation, to paraphrase the Israeli scholar, Yehoshua Porat, writing
> during the 1982 Lebanon war, is a "veritable catastrophe for Israel."
> The battlefield will preserve us.
>
> The French critic and historian, Hippolyte Taine, observed:
>
> "Imagine a man who sets out on a voyage equipped with a pair of
> spectacles that magnify things to an extraordinary degree. A hair on
> his hand, a spot on the tablecloth, the shifting fold of a coat, all
> will attract his attention; at this rate, he will not go far, he will
> spend his day taking six steps and will never get out of his room."
>
>
> We are content in our room and seek no exit.
>
> In our room, compassion and conscience are dismissed as weakness, where
> pinpoint surgical strikes constitute restraint and civility and
> momentary ceasefires, acts of humanity and kindness. "Leave your home,
> we are going to destroy it." Several minutes later another home in
> Gaza, another history, is taken, crushed. The warning, though, is not
> for them but for us-it makes us good and clean. What better
> illustration of our morality: when a call to leave one's home minutes
> before it is bombed is considered a humane gesture.
>
> Our warnings have another purpose: they make our actions legitimate and
> our desire for legitimacy is unbounded, voracious. This is perhaps the
> only thing Palestinians (and now the Lebanese) have withheld from us,
> this object of our desire. If legitimacy will not be bestowed then it
> must be created. This explains Israel's obsession with laws and
> legalities to insure in our own eyes that we do not transgress, making
> evil allowable by widening the parameters of license and transgression.
> In this way we insure our goodness and morality, through a piece of
> paper, which is enough for us.
>
> What are Jews now capable of resisting: tyranny? Oppression?
> Occupation? Injustice? We resist none of these things, no more. For too
> many among us they are no longer evil but necessary and good-we cannot
> live, survive without them. What does that make us? We look at
> ourselves and what do we see: a non-Jew, a child, whose pain we inflict
> effortlessly, whose death is demanded and unquestioned, bearing
> validity and purpose.
>
> What do we see: a people who now take pleasure in hating others. Hatred
> is familiar to us if nothing else. We understand it and it is safe. It
> is what we know. We do not fear our own distortion -- do we even see
> it? -- but the loss of our power to deter, and we shake with a violent
> palsy at a solution that shuns the suffering of others. Our pathology
> is this: it lies in our struggle to embrace a morality we no longer
> possess and in our need for persecution of a kind we can no longer
> claim but can only inflict.
>
> We are remote from the conscious world -- brilliantly ignorant, blindly
> visionary, unable to resist from within. We live in an unchanging
> place, absent of season and reflection, devoid of normality and growth,
> and most important of all, emptied-or so we aim -- of the other. A
> ghetto still but now, unlike before, a ghetto of our own making.
>
> What is our narrative of victory and defeat? What does it mean to win?
> Bombed cars with white civilian flags still attached to their windows?
> More dead and dismembered bodies of old people and children littered
> throughout villages that have been ravaged? An entire country disabled
> and broken? Non-ending war? This is our victory, our achievement,
> something we seek and applaud. And how do we measure defeat? Losing the
> will to continue the devastation? Admitting to our persecution of
> others, something we have never done?
>
> We can easily ignore their suffering, cut them from their food, water,
> electricity, and medicine, confiscate their land, demolish their crops
> and deny them egress -- suffocate them, our voices stilled. Racism does
> not allow us to see Arabs as we see ourselves; that is why we rage when
> they do not fail from weakness but instead we find ourselves failing
> from strength. Yet, in our view it is we who are the only victims,
> vulnerable and scarred. All we have is the unnaturalness of our
> condition.
>
> As an unconscious people, we have perhaps reached our nadir with many
> among us now calling for a redefinition of our ethics-the core of who
> we are -- to incorporate the need to kill women and children if Jewish
> security required it. "New realities do indeed require new responses,"
> says the Rabbinical Council of America. Now, for us, violence is
> creation and peace is destruction.
>
> Ending the process of creation and rebirth after the Holocaust
>
> Can we be ordinary, an essential part of our rebirth after the
> Holocaust? Is it possible to be normal when we seek refuge in the
> margin, and remedy in the dispossession and destruction of another
> people? How can we create when we acquiesce so willingly to the
> demolition of homes, construction of barriers, denial of sustenance,
> and ruin of innocents? How can we be merciful when, to use Rose's
> words, we seek "omnipotence as the answer to historical pain?" We
> refuse to hear their pleading, to see those chased from their homes,
> children incinerated in their mother's arms. Instead we tell our
> children to inscribe the bombs that will burn Arab babies.
>
> We argue that we must eliminate terrorism. What do we really know of
> their terrorism, and of ours? What do we care? Rather, with language
> that is denuded and infested-give them more time to bomb so that
> Israel's borders can be natural-we engage repeatedly in a war of
> desire, a war not thrust upon us but of our own choosing, ingratiating
> ourselves with the power to destroy others and insensate to the death
> of our own children. What happens to a nation, asks the Israeli writer
> David Grossman, that cannot save its own child, words written before
> his own son was killed in Lebanon?
>
> There are among Israelis real feelings of vulnerability and fear, never
> resolved but used, intensified. Seeing one's child injured or killed is
> the most horrible vision -- Israelis are vulnerable, far more than
> other Jews. Yet, we as a people have become a force of extremism, of
> chaos and disorder, trying to plow an unruly sea-addicted to death and
> cruelty, intoxicated, with one ambition: to mock the pauper.
>
> Judaism has always prided itself on reflection, critical examination,
> and philosophical inquiry. The Talmudic mind examines a sentence, a
> word, in a multitude of ways, seeking all possible interpretations and
> searching constantly for the one left unsaid. Through such scrutiny it
> is believed comes the awareness needed to protect the innocent, prevent
> injury or harm, and be closer to God.
>
> Now, these are abhorred, eviscerated from our ethical system. Rather
> the imperative is to see through eyes that are closed, unfettered by
> investigation. We conceal our guilt by remaining the abused, despite
> our power, creating situations where our victimization is assured and
> our innocence affirmed. We prefer this abyss to peace, which would hurl
> us unacceptably inward toward awareness and acknowledgement.
>
> Jews do not feel shame over what they have created: an inventory of
> inhumanity. Rather we remain oddly appeased, even calmed by the
> desolation. Our detachment allows us to bear such excess (and commit
> it), to sit in Jewish cafes while Palestinian mothers are murdered in
> front of their children in Gaza. I can now better understand how horror
> occurs-how people, not evil themselves, can allow evil to happen. We
> salve our wounds with our incapacity for remorse, which will be our
> undoing.
>
> Instead the Jewish community demands unity and conformity: "Stand with
> Israel" read the banners on synagogues throughout Boston last summer.
> Unity around what? There is enormous pressure -- indeed coercion --
> within organized American Jewry to present an image of "wall to wall
> unity" as a local Jewish leader put it. But this unity is an illusion
> -- at its edges a smoldering flame rapidly engulfing its core -- for
> mainstream Jewry does not speak for me or for many other Jews. And
> where such unity exists, it is hollow built around fear not humanity,
> on the need to understand reality as it has long been constructed for
> us -- with the Jew as the righteous victim, the innocent incapable of
> harm. It is as if our unbending support for Israel's militarism
> "requires putting our minds as it were into Auschwitz where being a Jew
> puts your existence on the line. To be Jewish means to be threatened,
> nothing more. Hence, the only morality we can acknowledge is saving
> Israel and by extension, ourselves." Within this paradigm, it is
> dissent not conformity that will diminish and destroy us. We hoard our
> victimization as we hoard our identity -- they are one -- incapable of
> change, a failing that will one day result in our own eviction. Is this
> what Zionism has done to Judaism?
>
> Israel's actions not only demonstrate the limits of Israeli power but
> our own limitations as a people: our inability to live a life without
> barriers, to free ourselves from an ethnic loyalty that binds and
> contorts, to emerge, finally, from our spectral chamber.
>
> Ending the (filial) link between Israel and the Holocaust
>
> How can the children of the Holocaust do such things, they ask? But are
> we really their rightful offspring?
>
> As the Holocaust survivor dies, the horror of that period and its
> attendant lessons withdraw further into abstraction and for some Jews,
> many of them in Israel, alienation. The Holocaust stands not as a
> lesson but as an internal act of purification where tribal attachment
> rather than ethical responsibility is demanded and used to define
> collective action. Perhaps this was an inevitable outcome of Jewish
> nationalism, of applying holiness to politics, but whatever its source,
> it has weakened us terribly and cost us greatly.
>
> Silvia Tennenbaum, a survivor and activist writes: "No matter what
> great accomplishments were ours in the diaspora, no matter that we
> produced Maimonides and Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn and hundreds of
> others of mankind's benefactors -- not a warrior among them! -- we look
> at the world of our long exile always in the dark light of the Shoah.
> But this, in itself, is an obscene distortion: would the author . . .
> Primo Levi, or the poet Paul Celan demand that we slaughter the
> innocents in a land far from the snow-clad forests of Poland? Is it a
> heroic act to murder a child, even the child of an enemy? Are my
> brethren glad and proud? . . . And, it goes without saying, loyal Jews
> must talk about the Holocaust. Ignore the images of today's dead and
> dying and focus on the grainy black and white pictures showing the
> death of Jews in the villages of Poland, at Auschwitz and Sobibor and
> Bergen-Belsen. We are the first, the only true victims, the champions
> of helplessness for all eternity."
>
> What did my family perish for in the ghettos and concentration camps of
> Poland? Is their role to be exploited and in the momentary absence of
> violence, to be forgotten and abandoned?
>
> Holocaust survivors stood between the past and the present, bearing
> witness, sometimes silently, and even in word, often unheard. Yet, they
> stood as a moral challenge among us and also as living embodiments of a
> history, way of life and culture that long predated the Holocaust and
> Zionism (and that Zionism has long denigrated), refusing, in their own
> way, to let us look past them. Yet, this generation is nearing its end
> and as they leave us, I wonder what is truly left to take their place,
> to fill the moral void created by their absence?
>
> Is it, in the words of a friend, himself a Jew, a "memory manufactory,
> with statues, museums and platoons of 'scholars' designed to preserve,
> indeed ratchet up Jewish feelings of persecution and victimhood, a
> Hitler behind every Katyusha or border skirmish, which must be met with
> some of the same crude slaughterhouse tools the Nazis employed against
> the Jews six decades ago: ghettos, mass arrests and the denigration of
> their enemy's humanity?" Do we now measure success in human bodies and
> in carnage, arguing that our dead bodies are worth more than theirs,
> our children more vulnerable and holy, more in need of protection and
> love, their corpses more deserving of shrouds and burial? Is meaning
> for us to be derived from martyrdom or from children born with a knife
> in their hearts? Is this how my grandmother and grandfather are to be
> remembered?
>
> Our tortured past and its images trespass upon our present not only in
> Israel but in Gaza and Lebanon as well. "They were temporarily buried
> in an empty lot with dozens of others," writes a New York Times
> reporter in Lebanon. "They were assigned numbers, his wife and
> daughter. Alia is No. 35 and Sally is No. 67. 'They are numbers now,'
> said the father. There are no names anymore."
>
> "They were shrunken figures, dehydrated and hungry," observes the
> Washington Post. "Some had lived on candy bars, others on pieces of dry
> bread. Some were shell-shocked, their faces blank . . . One never made
> it. He was carried out on a stretcher, flies landing on lifeless eyes
> that were still open."
>
> As the rightful claimants to our past we should ask, How much damage
> can be done to a soul? But we do not ask. We do not question the
> destruction but only our inability to complete it, to create more
> slaughter sites.
>
> Can we ever emerge from our torpor, able to mourn the devastation?
>
> Our ultimate eviction?
>
> Where do Jews belong? Where is our place? Is it in the ghetto of a
> Jewish state whose shrinking boundaries threaten, one day, to evict us?
> We are powerful but not strong. Our power is our weakness, not our
> strength, because it is used to instill fear rather than trust, and
> because of that, it will one day destroy us if we do not change. More
> and more we find ourselves detached from our past, suspended and
> abandoned, alone, without anchor, aching-if not now, eventually-for
> connection and succor. Grossman has written that as a dream fades it
> does not become a weaker force but a more potent one, desperately clung
> to, even as it ravages and devours.
>
> We consume the land and the water behind walls and steel gates forcing
> out all others. What kind of place are we creating? Are we fated to be
> an intruder in the dust to borrow from Faulkner, whose presence shall
> evaporate with the shifting sands? Are these the boundaries of our
> rebirth after the Holocaust?
>
> I have come to accept that Jewish power and sovereignty and Jewish
> ethics and spiritual integrity are, in the absence of reform,
> incompatible, unable to coexist or be reconciled. For if speaking out
> against the wanton murder of children is considered an act of
> disloyalty and betrayal rather than a legitimate act of dissent, and
> where dissent is so ineffective and reviled, a choice is ultimately
> forced upon us between Zionism and Judaism.
>
> Rabbi Hillel the Elder long ago emphasized ethics as the center of
> Jewish life. Ethical principles or their absence will contribute to the
> survival or destruction of our people. Yet, today what we face is
> something different and possibly more perverse: it is not the
> disappearance of our ethical system but its rewriting into something
> disfigured and execrable.
>
> As Jews in a post-Holocaust world empowered by a Jewish state, how do
> we as a people emerge from atrocity and abjection, empowered and also
> humane, something that still eludes us? How do we move beyond fear and
> omnipotence, beyond innocence and militarism, to envision something
> different, even if uncertain? "How," asks Ahad Haam, the founding
> father of cultural Zionism, "do you make a nation pause for thought?"
>
> For many Jews (and Christians), the answer lies in a strong and
> militarized Jewish state. For others, it is found in the very act of
> survival. For my parents-defeating Hitler meant living a moral life.
> They sought a world where "affirmation is possible and . . . dissent is
> mandatory," where our capacity to witness is restored and sanctioned,
> where we as a people refuse to be overcome by the darkness.
>
> Can we ever turn away from our power to destroy?
>
> It is here that I want to share a story from my family, to describe a
> moment that has inspired all of my work and writing.
>
> My mother and her sister had just been liberated from concentration
> camp by the Russian army. After having captured all the Nazi officials
> and guards who ran the camp, the Russian soldiers told the Jewish
> survivors that they could do whatever they wanted to their German
> persecutors. Many survivors, themselves emaciated and barely alive,
> immediately fell on the Germans, ravaging them. My mother and my aunt,
> standing just yards from the terrible scene unfolding in front of them,
> fell into each other's arms weeping. My mother, who was the physically
> stronger of the two, embraced my aunt, holding her close and my aunt,
> who had difficulty standing, grabbed my mother as if she would never
> let go. She said to my mother, "We cannot do this. Our father and
> mother would say this is wrong. Even now, even after everything we have
> endured, we must seek justice, not revenge. There is no other way." My
> mother, still crying, kissed her sister and the two of them, still one,
> turned and walked away.
>
> What then is the source of our redemption, our salvation? It lies
> ultimately in our willingness to acknowledge the other-the victims we
> have created-Palestinian, Lebanese and also Jewish-and the injustice we
> have perpetrated as a grieving people. Perhaps then we can pursue a
> more just solution in which we seek to be ordinary rather then
> absolute, where we finally come to understand that our only hope is not
> to die peacefully in our homes as one Zionist official put it long ago
> but to live peacefully in those homes.
>
> When my daughter Jess was submerged under the waters of the mikvah for
> the third and final time, she told me she saw rainbows under the water.
> I shall take this beautiful image as a sign of her rebirth and plead
> desperately for ours.
>
> ========================================================================
> ==============
>
> Sara Roy is Senior Research Scholar, Center for Middle Eastern Studie,
> Harvard University. "A Jewish Plea" will be published in The War on
> Lebanon: A Reader . Nubar Hovsepian (ed), Interlink Publishing, Spring
> 2007.
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