Phillip Weiss is a terrific writer and great fellow. He runs the blog Mondoweiss, which treats of matters Jewish, Zionist, and American-Jewish reactions to both. I was particularly struck by his post below and reproduce it entire. (I don't seem to be able to fix type size; also this is a longer post than most of mine. Apologies.) It is pretty much self-explanatory. He was out promoting his book on the Goldstone Report; he reports on some sessions in Michigan. Over to him:
The Jewish sideshow (and why I want to play in it)
I’m just home from a three-day swing to Michigan to promote our book; and the trip has sharpened my sense of purpose.
I had speaking engagements at two universities, and in both halls Israel supporters came out to oppose my views. The first night, Tuesday at Wayne State University, they were easier to handle because they were so intolerant. A tall man kept talking about the five Arab armies invading, and the anti-Semitic Hamas charter, and asked me how long I would tolerate people firing missiles at me. It gave me a chance to talk about Gaza being populated by the refugees from 1948, and the failure to address festering historic grievances. I said that Jews always worry about being pushed into the sea, but in the meantime who was actually pushed into the sea-- the Arabs of Jaffa in 1948.
After the event I went out to eat with a few friends, and one of the friends seemed very concerned about what will happen to Israel in the changing environment of the Middle East. He expressed concern about the Hamas charter and the irredentist feeling of the Palestinians: that if the state of Israel is not preserved, the Palestinians will wipe out the Jews. The others at the table sought to assuage his fears. I don’t think we were very successful.
As it turned out this was to be a theme the next night at the University of Michigan.
Over the next day I often thought about my dinner companion's fears and wondered how much energy I should put into this Jewish dialogue. Isn’t it just a sideshow? Isn't history unfolding in Israel-- from the Egyptian revolution to European impatience-- in ways that make conservative American Jewish attitudes irrelevant?
I was staying at a friend's house in Detroit and had an email exchange about the “sideshow” issue with a Jewish friend back in NY. We discussed the blindness to Palestinian suffering inside the Jewish community and Jews' fears about losing the Jewish state. My friend was long a supporter of the two-state solution, for practical reasons; but history has passed that view by, because guess what, it’s one state now. Here’s part of her very smart email:
I think that in the end the Jews and their lobby (and the Congress) won't be able to save Israel; in that sense they can be seen as an irrelevant sideshow. But for now American Jews matter in how things play out here. The future is not with Israel, but the process looks to be speeding up even here.They're hysterical in Israel because they know that on some level they've lost Europe (I heard a story that the lobby tried to shut out Gideon Levy at Jewish Book Week in London--they couldn't do it), and they fear the US is next.Honestly, I think they can't be saved. The vote at Brandeis Hillel to excludeJewish Voice for Peace is just another sign of the profound blindness to the fact of JVP and what it signals. An Israeli I know told me just the other day that Israel needs "better PR." This is a disagreement we've been having for decades: I've been telling him for almost 30 years that Israel needs better policies, not better PR. Look at Netanyahu; he's floundering because he doesn't know what to do in the face of a changing world.
That night in Ann Arbor nearly 50 people gathered in a large room at the Michigan League building and a local activist suggested that we put the chairs in a circle so everyone could see everyone else. I spoke for 25 minutes and then we had a conversation. I would say that the audience was ¼ Jewish; and a debate began about the sideshow issue: whether my message to Jews that we need to wake up to what we are supporting has any political significance. People (including a couple of Jews) made smart arguments against the sideshow: Jews are generally hopeless on the issue, and the most important forces that are bearing down on the issue are not Jewish any more. The European Union, the South American countries, and of course, the Egyptian revolution. Very few Jews involved at all. Even the Israel lobby is a spectator.
But soon the conversation became monopolized by Jews.
An Israeli-American who had served in the occupation said that Jews were now a minority between the river and the sea and they would just have to get used to that, and learn to live with a Palestinian majority. This statement was worrisome to a fellow from the local J Street chapter, a man in his 50s with a high forehead and small intelligent eyes and a thoughtful manner. During my presentation I thought he was on my side from the way he was nodding. But he said that there were no democracies in the middle east and he didn’t trust the talk of a one-state solution. He didn’t see who was going to prevent the persecution of the Jews. He was as fearful of the outcomes as my friend the night before.
A number of people went back and forth. How can you favor a peace process that has gone on for 20 years and produced nothing? Well, I don’t think it’s dead, the J Street guy said. He said he had relatives in Israel and he was a secularist. But they liked Zionism, they liked having a Jewish state. I said, you and I are both privileged. We enjoy incredible rights in this country. We’ve participated in great liberations, women’s liberation, the civil rights movement, the gay right’s movement. We live as a privileged minority without fear of discrimination. But look how Zionism has worked out. If tomorrow anyone were to put forward a law to keep Jews from renting apartments in the United States, we would be in the streets!
As I heard myself saying these words the fuel rods went into the nuclear reactor and I lost my composure and stood up, and started yelling—we would be in the streets of Washington, you and I both would. My mother wore a silver clothes hanger pendant around her neck to protest anti-abortion legislation, she would go crazy about such a thing. Well some are pushing that kind of legislation against Arabs renting apartments in Israel right now! That country has lost its way, and so why sholdn’t we try as liberal secular American Jews to impart our political experience to them, our understanding of being a minority, rather than deferring to racism?
I was just about screaming. Later I apologized to the guy for losing control. I’m your guest. I shouldn’t be going nuts, I said.
I felt so bad about my meltdown I even found myself standing up for the guy. Someone in the audience said, I'm confused, what’s the big deal about the end of a Jewish state, lots of unfair political orders have ended all around the world without this anguish in the U.S. I said the significance of the end of the Jewish state is that Israel was regarded by many Jews as the greatest Jewish achievement of the 20th century because it seemed to answer the Jewish question that had bedeviled Europe for many centuries and that had led to the Holocaust. Israel was seen as the deliverance and resolution. Losing it is very hard for Jews to accept, for it would seem to put us “at the mercy of the gentile world,” as Peter Beinart said recently.
I disagree with them, I think they're xenophobic, but that’s what they believe, I said. The guy from J Street nodded.
Afterward I hung around to talk to people, and the J Street guy and I talked for a few minutes. He berated me for exposing the Jews to greater danger. He is afraid of the Palestinian rage. The U.S. democracy is unique, and the benign view of the one-state solution is a delusion. They need partition there, or there will be massacres. Language differences alone are a cause for horrifying atrocities. And boycott will only make the Israelis feel more besieged.
I have a tribal side to my identity, an ethnocentric aspect, and in the day since the Ann Arbor meltdown I’ve felt called by my ethnocentrism, worried about the Jews and what will be brought down on them by the blindness to Palestinians suffering. I feel as determined as ever to speak to the Jewish community. The guy from J Street was clearly expressing a majority view inside the Jewish community that has licensed the Israel lobby: We have to safeguard Israel come what may, we have a solemn charge to protect other Jews.
Then I think about the email from my friend saying the two-state solution is dead and Jews are in denial. The political realities are these:
--There is one political entity right now in Israel and Palestine, controlled by Israel. Nearly half the people have no rights, and about half of them live in a prison.
--Israel long opposed a viable Palestinian state, most recently through its dismissal of the Arab Peace Initiative. Instead it has set up a Jim Crow regime, and Obama has been powerless to stop it. As John Mearsheimer has said, the likely eventualities at this point are: 1, one democratic state, 2, apartheid, 3, ethnic cleansing to try and preserve a Jewish majority.
--Christiane Amanpour, and the New York Times, and Bernard Avishai, and Congressman Jared Polis at J Street, and other mainstream voices are retarding the Jewish community’s ability to deal with these realities by insisting that an “extraordinary” (Ahmanpour’s word) two-state deal is ready to be had-- somehow reviving 3-year-old terms between teams that don’t represent either side, terms giving prime West Bank real estate and Jerusalem to settlers. I'm sure there are arguments for partition, I've made them myself; but fragments and tunnels for Palestinians aren't the answer.
--Israel doesn’t accept any of these realities. And Israel has nukes. A frightful situation. (There is evidence that in the Gulf War, Israel wanted to use tactical nukes against Iraq...)
--Meanwhile, rage continues to grow on the Palestinian side. I spent a lot of time in Detroit, a city devastated by white racism and the black backlash to that racism. The conditions are far worse in Israel/Palestine-- who doesn't fear the fire next time?
--Israel isn't going anywhere. The vibrant global institutions and infrastructure created in the state will be valued by its Palestinian citizens, if they are only granted rights to enjoy them too. That is the great challenge.
It struck me today that the tragedy here is if Jews fail to see the realities coming and fail to prepare their community to accept them. They will continue to support Israel in its Jim Crow treatment of Palestinians and bolster Netanyahu no matter what he does and contribute to widespread denial in the US political establishment. American Jews can actually help Israelis escape a psychosis-- the widespread belief that Michael Sfard laid out at J Street, that we must be either the victim or the victimizer, so let's be the victimizer. We ought to be talking about the possible/likely end of the Jewish state. A belief that this will come to pass along the lines of the Jewish experience in Europe in the last century only raises the likelihood of a bloodbath.
No comments:
Post a Comment