[R-G] The Jewish Divide on Israel

Wed Jun 30 17:14:25 MDT 2004

> http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040712&s=kaplan
>
> The Nation [from the July 12, 2004 issue]
>
> The Jewish Divide on Israel
>
> by Esther Kaplan
>
> For a glimpse of how Israel plays out in an American election year, recall
> the day in September when then-Democratic presidential frontrunner Howard
> Dean told reporters he would like to see the United States take an
> "even-handed" approach to Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Thirty-four
> Congressional Democrats responded by sending Dean a harsh letter
questioning
> whether he shared their "unequivocal support for Israel's right to exist,"
> and anonymous e-mails inundated Jewish listservs, accusing him of
abandoning
> Israel. Dean promptly appeared on CNN to defend Israel's assassinations of
> Palestinian militants. 
>
> Or consider the day in February when John Kerry sat down in New York to
> discuss issues with a group of Jewish leaders hand-selected by the
> Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Hannah
> Rosenthal, executive director of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and
> one of the few liberals invited, said she had her hand in the air, ready
to
> ask questions about civil rights, poverty and the erosion of the
> church/state divide, but she was avoided by the facilitators, and the
> meeting shaped up as a single-agenda affair. "The central issue, no matter
> how they came at it, was, 'Are you going to be there for Israel in these
> difficult times?'" Rosenthal recalls. "It was, 'We're putting you on
notice
> that this is our number-one concern.'" Kerry took his cue. During the
> meeting, he backed off from earlier statements that he'd send Jimmy Carter
> (seen by the right as pro-Palestinian) to the region to jump-start
> negotiations, and six weeks later, when George W. Bush, in an agreement
with
> Ariel Sharon, accepted Jewish settlements as permanent and renounced
> Palestinian refugees' right of return, Kerry immediately endorsed it. 
>
> Or consider May 18, when the hawkish American Israel Public Affairs
> Committee (AIPAC) held its annual conference in Washington. House majority
> leader Tom DeLay showed up to speak, along with two assistant secretaries
of
> state, an assistant secretary of defense and the President himself. Bush's
> speech was regularly interrupted by cheering and chants of "Four more
> years!" The meeting of the Jewish community's most prominent voice on
> Capitol Hill may as well have been a Republican political rally. 
>
> These events reveal a stubborn political fact: that AIPAC and the
Conference
> of Presidents, along with their powerful fellow travelers, Christian
> Zionists, have forged a bipartisan consensus in Washington that Middle
East
> policy must privilege the "special relationship" between the United States
> and Israel. In practice, this solid consensus means putting Israeli
security
> before peace; supporting even such extreme Israeli measures as the
> separation wall and assassinations; and delegitimizing the Palestinian
> leadership. In AIPAC's view, even Bush's unambitious Middle East "road
map"
> conceded too much to the Palestinians. Until the late 1980s, when the PLO
> publicly affirmed Israel's right to exist, such positions may truly have
> represented the vast majority of American Jews. But ever since the 1993
Oslo
> Accord proved that negotiations were possible, surveys have consistently
> found that 50 to 60 percent of American Jews favor ending the occupation
and
> dismantling settlements in return for peace. 
>
> The trouble is, AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents never fully
embraced
> the Oslo thaw, and once peace talks failed in 2000, they snapped back to
> their hard-line stance. The combination of Palestinian suicide bombings,
the
> election of Sharon, the ultimate hawk, as prime minister and Bush's
> with-us-or-against-us "war on terror" allowed the AIPAC consensus to
harden
> throughout the Jewish establishment. After 9/11, United Jewish
Communities,
> the joint Jewish charity, decided to direct funds to Jewish settlers for
the
> first time. And 2002 was a banner year: At a pro-Israel rally in
Washington
> that April, busloads of demonstrators from Jewish social-service agencies
> and Hillels (the network of Jewish campus organizations) booed Deputy
> Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz for speaking about Palestinian suffering,
> and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and other groups published manuals on
> how to discredit "anti-Israel propaganda" on campuses. "Arafat had a
chance
> to move toward peace and he rejected it," says Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the
leader
> of the 1.5 million-strong Reform Jewish movement, and one of mainstream
> Jewry's most outspoken voices against settlement expansion. "We rallied to
> Israel's side out of the sense that it was the right thing to do, and out
of
> real anger toward the Palestinians." The joke used to be two rabbis, three
> congregations; over the past two or three years it's become 6 million
> American Jews, one official opinion. 
>
> But tens of thousands of American Jews have had a very different response
to
> the failed talks and the new Palestinian uprising. They began to ask
> heretical questions about whether former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, or
Oslo,
> had really offered Palestinians a viable state, and whether the harsh
> occupation was to blame for rising Palestinian anger. Most American Jewish
> peace organizations had closed up shop during the hopeful Oslo years, so
> these marginalized doves started almost from scratch, launching dozens of
> local and national organizations dedicated to ending the occupation.
"Since
> the intifada began, the mantra in the American Jewish community was that
> Israel's existence was being threatened and we had to stand by the
> government of Israel no matter what it did. This idea, brilliantly
> manipulated by the Israeli government, became sacrosanct," says Marcia
> Freedman, a former Knesset member who co-founded one of these new groups,
> the Chicago-based Brit Tzedek v'Shalom, in 2002. "There just happens to
be a
> very right-wing government in Israel that does not support a two-state
> solution, so this lockstep solidarity gave that government carte blanche
> support." The new grassroots efforts are determined to revoke that carte
> blanche. Brit Tzedek already has chapters in twenty-seven cities; Michael
> Lerner's Berkeley-based Tikkun Community and the Oakland-based Jewish
Voice
> for Peace, which just went national in May, have joined the few remaining
> older peace outfits like Americans for Peace Now (APN) and Arthur Waskow's
> Philadelphia-based Shalom Center to create an incipient counterforce,
which
> exists almost entirely outside official Jewish channels. 
>
> Some of the new groups, like Brit Tzedek and Tikkun, consider themselves
to
> be strongly pro-Israel but seek to radically redefine the term. ("So the
> definition of being pro-Israel is to be pro-Sharon?" asks Tikkun's Deborah
> Kory. "Well, maybe assassinating a guy in a wheelchair is not the best
thing
> for Israel.") Others, like New York City's Jews Against the Occupation,
> define themselves as pro-Jewish and pro-Palestinian, and are open to the
> idea of a single, binational state. Most of the new organizations are
> explicitly Jewish, but American Jewish activists have also been central
> players in the founding of multiethnic organizations like the
International
> Solidarity Movement (ISM), which sends international observers, about a
> fifth of whom are American Jews, into the occupied territories, and the
> Washington, DC-based US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, which
> advocates divestment from Israel bonds. And they are becoming increasingly
> visible. In March one older peace group, Rabbis for Human Rights of North
> America, sent an open letter to Sharon protesting Israel's
house-demolition
> policy, which was signed by 400 rabbis, including leaders of some of the
> largest congregations in the country; in April Brit Tzedek organized
10,000
> US Jews to sign another open letter, this one calling on Israel and the
> United States to fund the relocation of Jewish settlers from the occupied
> territories to Israel. 
>
> Over the past three years, these organizations have lobbied Congress,
> picketed Israeli consulates, initiated campus divestment campaigns, set up
> informational listservs and held hundreds of vigils and teach-ins. Though
> they lack support from major Jewish donors or Jewish foundations, their
> numbers are fast approaching AIPAC's 65,000 members (APN has some 25,000
> supporters, Brit Tzedek another 17,000 and so on), and polls show that
there
> is tremendous room for growth. When former Israeli and Palestinian
officials
> crafted the Geneva Accord last year as a model peace agreement, an APN
> survey found that five times more American Jews supported the plan than
> opposed it. AIPAC, on the other hand, dismissed Geneva as irrelevant and
> used its political muscle to block a mild Congressional resolution
> applauding the "courage and vision" of those who fashioned it. It turns
out
> that far from being more unified than ever in support of Israeli policies,
> American Jews are as polarized on Israel as Americans as a whole are
> polarized about George W. Bush. 
>
> The divide is not only political but existential. AIPAC, the ADL and the
> Conference of Presidents see Palestinian suicide bombs as part of a global
> attack on Jews that includes everything from the murder of Daniel Pearl to
> the spike in anti-Jewish attacks in France; in their view, Palestinian
> attacks on Israelis are fueled by hatred of Jews. The peace groups believe
> that Israel, with one of the world's most powerful militaries, can't claim
> its existence is at risk, and they see in Israel's occupation, separation
> wall and collective punishment a moral challenge to the Jewish soul. News
> and commentary circulated by the two camps, even regarding the same
events,
> bear almost no relation to each other. In late May, as the Israeli army's
> Operation Rainbow crested in Gaza, ISM e-mails included an eyewitness
> account of Israeli soldiers shooting tear gas at children and a graphic
> description of tanks firing shells into a peaceful demonstration in Rafah.
> E-mails from the Conference of Presidents, on the other hand, told of
> tunnels used by Palestinians to smuggle weapons and a Jewish settler whose
> wife and four daughters were killed by terrorists. In the eyes of
peaceniks,
> such as Anita Altman, a Jewish communal professional in New York City,
> mainstream Jewish institutions are concerned so exclusively with Israeli
> security that "we've lost the capacity to recognize the other and to
> acknowledge Palestinans' humanity." In the eyes of establishment Jewish
> leaders, such as Ernest Weiner, director of the American Jewish
Committee's
> San Francisco chapter, the doves, by concerning themselves primarily with
> the rights of Palestinians under occupation, have become "nothing more
than
> a mouthpiece of the Arabs." One of these camps has positioned itself as
the
> legitimate voice of American Jews, and has the ear of both parties in
> Washington; the other, the anti-occupation majority, is being quashed. 
>
> Charney Bromberg, executive director of the peace and civil rights
> organization Meretz USA, an affiliate of Israel's left-wing Meretz Party,
> calls this phenomenon "the Israeli disease," in which a handful of
far-right
> ideologues dictate policy for the moderate masses; he warns that it has
now
> taken root in American Jewish politics. Palestinian suicide bombers and
the
> war on terror, he argues, have increased the right's leverage. "You get
this
> sense in the Jewish community that we're under siege and anyone who
> challenges the consensus is a traitor who has to be purged," Bromberg
says.
> "The right has the capacity to instantly inflate any expression of civil
> discourse, doubt or questioning into an act of disloyalty." Historian
> Michael Staub, author of Torn at the Roots: The Crisis of Jewish
Liberalism
> in Postwar America, says this split in the Jewish community between an
> institutional mainstream and a liberal/left alternative dates to the early
> 1970s, when young Jews, who disproportionately populated the New Left,
> challenged the major Jewish organizations over Vietnam, urban poverty and
> assimilation. The difference, says Staub, is that then, when dissidents
> picketed a synagogue or stormed a meeting of the Jewish Federation, the
> mainstream leadership scrambled to set up meetings. Now, with dissent
> centered around Israel, mainstream communal leaders attack anti-occupation
> protesters as self-hating Jews or take steps to shut them out of the
debate
> entirely. "There is a silencing going on at the local level by American
> Jewish institutions that is very unhealthy," says Brit Tzedek's Freedman. 
>
> New to Jewish religious practice and even newer to Israel/Palestine
> politics, University of Richmond junior Jilian Redford, 20, quickly
> discovered the Jewish establishment's line in the sand. The elected
> president of her campus Hillel, she tried to pull together a balanced
panel
> discussion on the conflict, but soon butted heads with her supervisor at
the
> local Jewish Community Center, Lisa Looney. Looney proposed a particular
> professor as a speaker, and Redford declined, calling the professor
"racist"
> for private comments she'd made that Palestinians, unlike Jews, have an
> inherent capacity to kill people in cold blood. "Lisa was extremely taken
> aback by me using such a strong word," Redford recalls. Redford's second
> strike--there wouldn't be a third--was her angry response in February to
> several e-mails she had received from the Israeli Embassy: "Could you
please
> stop sending me email after email about radical Zionist propaganda?" she
> wrote, adding that it was wrong to "encourage us to hate our Palestinian
> neighbors in Israel." Three weeks later, after a hostile meeting where
> Looney insisted that Redford apologize to the embassy, Looney dismissed
> Redford from her post. "I felt that all of my hard work had been
completely
> overlooked because of my political views on Israel," Redford says. "It was
> like I revealed that I was from some other planet." 
>
> Redford's experience follows a familiar pattern. Liz Harr, an activist
with
> Jewish Students for Palestinian Rights at the University of Texas, was
> denied space at her campus Hillel in spring 2002 when she sought to
organize
> a study group on the history of the conflict. Hillel program directors at
UC
> Santa Cruz and Ithaca College resigned in frustration after being
> reprimanded for publishing articles supporting Israeli and Palestinian
> activism against the occupation. "We think the campus is a great place for
> there to be very open and contentious debate," says Wayne Firestone,
> director of Hillel International's Center for Israel Affairs. "But that
> doesn't give people unconditional rights to attack Israel in any manner or
> any fashion." In fact, Hillel distributes materials that offer "reactive
> strategies" for responding to "anti-Israel" events, such as a report from
> GOP pollster Frank Luntz that details how to better market the
"pro-Israel"
> message to Jewish youth. 
>
> Hillel is hardly the only enforcer of a narrow "pro-Israel" orthodoxy.
After
> a four-year battle to gain entry, two dovish organizations, Meretz USA and
> the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, were rejected for membership
> in the Conference of Presidents in December 2002. Some of the conference's
> most significant organizations, including the Reform movement, supported
> Meretz's application, but on the Conference of Presidents, it's one
> organization, one vote, and executive vice president Malcolm Hoenlein (who
> likes to refer to the West Bank as "Judea and Samaria") had stacked the
> committee with right-wing groups. When Jewish Voice for Peace applied for
a
> booth at the Bay Area's biggest Jewish community event of the year, Israel
> in the Ballpark, its application was rejected; the local Jewish Community
> Relations Council told JVP's program director, Liat Weingart, that JVP
> didn't sufficiently support Israel. When Drorah Setel, a Seattle rabbi
> affiliated with the local Jewish organization Pursue the Peace, showed up
at
> a local pro-Israel rally in April 2002 carrying a sign supportive of both
> Palestinians and Israelis, a representative of the ADL, one of the rally
> organizers, insisted to police that she was a counterdemonstrator who
should
> be removed; she ended up under arrest. Michael Bernstein, who led the
> young-adult program at the American Jewish Committee's San Francisco
> chapter, was dismissed from his voluntary post after he organized a panel
> discussion on the prospects for peace in Israel/Palestine in which two out
> of three speakers reflected a left perspective; according to Bernstein,
> chapter director Ernest Weiner charged up to him at the event and accused
> him, in profane terms, of bias (Weiner insists that Bernstein left of his
> own accord). 
>
> The consensus is manufactured in more subtle ways as well. For that
> right-wing pro-Israel rally in Washington, buses at many Jewish
federations
> and Hillels were free, memos about it went out on organizational
letterhead
> and attendance counted as a workday. Employees of such organizations
report
> being strongly discouraged, on the other hand, from sending out notices
> about peace vigils from work e-mail accounts. "We hear from people
> constantly, staffers at mainstream Jewish institutions, reporters at
Jewish
> papers and rabbis who say in hushed tones, 'I agree with you, but I can't
> say anything,'" says Cecilie Surasky, a spokesperson for JVP. "A rabbi
will
> say, 'I totally support you, but my congregation is too conservative';
then
> a synagogue member will say, 'I can't say anything because my rabbi is too
> conservative.' There's an incredible amount of fear." Marcia Freedman of
> Brit Tzedek says that when she speaks to Jewish audiences, the room is
> typically split between supporters of the Sharon government and supporters
> of a negotiated peace, "but the pro-Israeli-government half has no idea
> about the other half." 
>
> Rosenthal of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the lobbying arm of
> local Jewish federations across the country, says that "the issue of how
big
> is our tent and how civil is our dissent is the question of our time." At
> JCPA's annual conference in February, several hundred people packed a
forum
> on dialogue and dissent over Israel. "We heard most poignantly from
> students, who said, 'I want to be able to ask questions and not be called
an
> anti-Semite,'" Rosenthal recalls. The divide has become so pronounced that
> both sides have begun to address it as a crisis in its own right. Brit
> Tzedek has launched a Listening Project, and Jews Against the Occupation
> held a national Day of Debate on June 6; both entail small group
encounters
> where the full range of views on Israel/Palestine can be heard. "We want
to
> create a space where support for Palestinian rights is not seen as
> traitorous or self-hating," says JATO's Lorne Lieb, "but rather as
something
> people can think about and talk to each other about." Hillel will roll
out a
> similar campaign timed for the fall holiday of Sukkot, which will feature
> intimate conversations where, Wayne Firestone says, "students on the right
> will have to listen respectfully to students on the left and vice versa." 
>
> But such tentative efforts to pry open space for Jewish debate is unlikely
> to tear down the artificial AIPAC consensus anytime soon. When the Tikkun
> Community brought some 350 activists to Capitol Hill in April to lobby
> members of Congress to support a return to negotiations, recalls co-chair
> Michael Lerner, "there was an astonishing openness--behind closed doors."
> But most members said AIPAC's presence, both on the Hill and in their home
> districts, was overwhelming, especially in tandem with Israel hawks on the
> Christian right. "One member of Congress said it even feels dangerous to
> meet with us, because they have such good radar screens that they find out
> almost immediately," Lerner says. 
>
> His finger to the wind, John Kerry has uncritically endorsed Bush's
> enthusiasm for Sharon; while he once spoke somewhat critically of the wall
> Sharon is erecting deep inside the West Bank, Kerry now wholeheartedly
> endorses it as a necessary security measure. "The unwritten rule," says
APN
> president Debrah DeLee, "is don't let anyone get to the right of you on
> Israel." The math is simple: Jews on the right will vote on the single
issue
> of Israel, but liberal Jews vote on a range of issues. So for political
> candidates, tacking to the right is all gain, no pain. 
>
> Over and over, activists like Freedman have been told by sympathetic
elected
> officials, "We support your positions, but we need the telephone calls,
the
> faxes, the letters to the editor, the visits to our office in the home
> districts." Jewish anti-occupation forces are slowly getting the message.
In
> July Brit Tzedek will post an open letter to the next President asking for
> an aggressive commitment to push for a final-status Israeli-Palestinian
> agreement; the organization is now collecting signatures from American
Jews.
> The US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation has just published a
> first-ever dovish voter guide, in which members of Congress who support
the
> occupation get a negative score; and Tikkun is working on a private letter
> to Kerry from peace activists across the country. 
>
> At the very least, their presence has exposed the lack of unanimous US
> Jewish support for Sharon, and that may itself have salutary effects.
> Cecilie Surasky of JVP says her organization's Jewish presence in
alliances
> for Palestinian rights has opened up the space for other dissenters,
> mentioning that, with JVP's support, Catholic investors in Caterpillar
felt
> emboldened to introduce a shareholder resolution against the military use
of
> its bulldozers in the occupied territories. "For Americans to be persuaded
> [to support the Palestinian cause]," says Hany Khalil, organizing
> coordinator for United for Peace and Justice, a national antiwar
> organization that opposes the Israeli occupation, "we have to build
support
> across all sectors of the United States, and that will never happen
without
> a significant and visible split within the Jewish community."
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Rad-Green mailing list
> Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu
> To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
> http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green