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Today's
Stories
February
7/8, 2004
Jeff Ballinger
No Sweat Shopping
Dave Lindorff
Spray and Pray in Iraq: a Marine in
Transit
Alexander
Cockburn
McNamara: the Sequel
February
6, 2004
Ron
Jacobs
Are the Kurds in the Way?
Joanne
Mariner
Anita Bryant's Legacy
Saul
Landau
Happiness and Botox
Kurt Nimmo
Horror Non-fiction: A How-To Guide from
Perle and Frum
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
The Real Intelligence Failure: Our
Own
February
5, 2004
Benjamin
Shepard
Turning NYC into a Patriot Act Free
Zone
Khury
Petersen-Smith
A Report from Occupied Iraq: "We Don't Want Army USA"
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
The 10 Worst Corporations of 2003
Teresa
Josette
The Exeuctioner's Pslam? Christian Nation? Yeah, Right
David Krieger
Why Dr. King's Message on Vietnam is Relevant to Iraq
Christopher
Brauchli
Monkey Business: Of Recess and Evolution in Georgia Schools
Norman
Solomon
The Deadly Lies of Reliable Sources
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Presenting President Edwards!
February
4, 2004
Brian
McKinlay
Bush's Australian Deputy: Howard's
Last Round Up?
Mark
Gaffney
Ariel Sharon's Favorite Senator: Ron Wyden and Israel
Judith
Brown
Palestine and the Media
Frederick
B. Hudson
Moseley-Braun and the Butcher: Campaign for Justice or Big Oil's
Junta?
Kurt Nimmo
Bush's Independent Commission: Exonerating
the Spooks
M.
Junaid Alam
Philly School Workers Fight for Fair Contract
Fran Shor
Whose Boob Tube?
Kevin
Cooper
This is Not My Execution and I Will Not Claim It
February
3, 2004
Alan
Maass
The
Dems' New Mantra: What They Really Mean by "Electability"
Nick
Halfinger
How the Other Half Lives: Embedded
in Iraq
Rahul
Mahajan
Our True Intelligence Failure
Neve Gordon
The Only Democracy in the Middle East?
Laura
Carlsen
Mexico: Two Anniversaries; Two Futures
Jordan
Green
Democratic Patronage in Northern New
Mexico
Terry
Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Powell from the Boobs & Body Parts
Fairness Campaign
Hammond
Guthrie
Investigating the Meaningless
Website
of the Day
Waging Peace
January
24/5, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn
Iraq's Shia: "Our Day Has Come"
Laura
Flanders
State of the Conservative Union
Simon
Helweg-Larsen
Enter Berger: Signs of Hope in Guatemala
Dave
Lindorff
Ground Control to Maj. George
Susan
Davis
The Birdwatcher Menace
Alexander
Cockburn
The Fog of Cop Out: McNamara 10, Morris
0
January
23, 2004
Yonathan Shapira
An Israeli Pilot Speaks Out
Standard
Schaefer
Italian Philosopher Giorgio Agamben
Protests US Travel Policy
Josh
Frank
In Defense of Polluters: Howard Dean's
Vermont
William
A. Cook
Rule by the Corrupt and the Capricious
January
22, 2004
Sam
Smith
Howards End?
Patricia
Koyce Wanniski
Lost in Space
Alexander
Lukin
Putin and the Clans
Katherine
van Wormer
Dry Drunk Confirmed: O'Neill's Revelations
and Bush's Mind
Forrest
Hylton
The Prisoner, the President and the Mafia
|
Weekend
Edition
February 7 / 8, 2004
Offending Valerie
Dealing
with Jewish Self-Absorption
By KATHLEEN
CHRISTISON
It’s
most challenging to go where the silence is and say something.
Amy
Goodman
I
was kidding a couple of Muslim Palestinian-American friends the other
day about being barbarians, by the lights of Israeli historian Benny
Morris. This was a day or two after this paragon of dispassionate Israeli
scholarship had expostulated in an interview published in Ha’aretz
on the benefits (if you’re Jewish) of ethnic cleansing, the critical
miscalculation of David Ben-Gurion in not having completed the total
ethnic cleansing of Palestine from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River
in 1948 when he had a chance, and the barbarity of Arab and Muslim culture.
“The Arab world as it is today is barbarian,” Morris declared.
Islamic and Arab culture is “a world in which human life doesn’t
have the same value as it does in the West,” in which freedom
and democracy are alien, in which there are “no moral inhibitions.”
He was speaking in sweeping terms, of entire cultures, of the mass of
individuals in the Arab and the Muslim worlds, not merely of governments
that are oppressive or undemocratic. Palestinians in particular, Morris
believes, are barbaric, “a very sick society,” and should
be treated “the way we treat individuals who are serial killers.
. . . Something like a cage has to be built for them.”
My
friends have a good sense of humor, and so we laughed uproariously at
the notion that they and every last Arab and Muslim throughout the world
are barbarians. Hilarity is the way you often react when confronted
with utter horror. What was so particularly horrifying about Morris’s
pronouncements was their resonance, their representativeness, the banality
of the evil they reflect. Meir Kahane, the assassinated Israeli-American
rabbi and politician who made a career out of propounding racist views,
always used to say that his anti-Arab pronouncements and policy positions
were simply what other Jews thought in their hearts but did not quite
dare to say out loud. Benny Morris -- who still considers himself a
leftist, still favors establishment of a Palestinian state in part of
Palestine, still exposes Israeli atrocities against the Palestinians
in his examination of early Israeli history -- is one of those people
Meir Kahane was describing, and he speaks for large numbers of his fellow
Israelis and his fellow Jews throughout the world.
Morris’s
blunt soul-bearing has lifted the last barrier of propriety to the open
expression of raw Arab hatred. One longs for some gigantic outcry of
opposition or disgust over this confession of deep bigotry, but there
has been none. Except for a few letters to the editor of Ha’aretz
from American Jews, the interview has aroused little attention in the
Jewish-American community: no denunciation, no shock, little or no discussion
on any but the most progressive Jewish e-mail lists. You have to assume
that, however awkward Morris’s blunt language may be, he is speaking
for a large segment of American Jews who say they oppose the occupation,
say they hate Sharon, say they hate Israel’s oppression of the
Palestinians, but who do nothing about any of these things and who in
the end would not grieve, either for the Palestinians or for the Jewish
soul, if Israel wiped the Palestinians off the map.
One
of Morris’s fellow revisionist historians, Oxford University professor
Avi Shlaim, observed when Morris first came out as an Arabaphobe in
leftist clothing a couple of years ago that Morris was wallowing in
self-pity. Self-pity over the supposed victimization of Israel and total
absorption in a world in which only Jewish interests matter rang out
loud and clear in Morris’s interview. Although he lectures about
what he sees as Arab and Muslim moral failings, Morris thinks it impractical
to demand morality of Jews. “I’m trying to be realistic,”
he said. “Preserving my people is more important than universal
moral concepts.” This self-absorbed focus on Jews, Jewish interests,
Jewish self-preservation is characteristic of a substantial subset of
American Jews who I have to assume secretly do not disagree with Morris’s
world view.
Take
Valerie. Valerie is an actual person (although not her actual name);
she is also the perfect representation of a large number of American
Jews who seem to approach the Palestinian-Israeli conflict from an identical
script: they are at pains to tell you they don’t like Ariel Sharon,
have “always” opposed the occupation, and support two states
in Palestine-Israel, but if anyone else ventures to describe what the
occupation is really like on the ground in Palestine or what Palestinians
endure at the hands of Israel’s occupation administrators, they
react with bristling hostility and respond that they cannot “hear”
such Israel-bashing. Jews are suffering in Israel, they tell you, and
that is what takes precedence.
It
is obviously politically dangerous to talk about any group of Jews who
seem to think or act alike. One is immediately attacked for labeling
all Jews as identical, for stereotyping, and of course the notion that
one is anti-Semitic always hangs over the discussion, either explicitly
or implicitly. These days it is almost impossible even to discuss “Israel”
and its actions and policies without being criticized for generalizing
and failing to take account of those Israelis and American Jews who
oppose the Israeli government’s policies. I want to make it clear
that I am very well aware that Jews come in all varieties -- all political
inclinations, all degrees of dedication to Israel, all degrees of religiosity
and of ethnic self-identification. I am not by any means declaring that
all Jews are like Valerie, or like Benny Morris, simply that Valerie
represents a line of thinking about Israel that I have found quite common
among many American Jews.
Valerie
and those who think like her on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict are
somewhere in the middle along the Jewish political spectrum. They are
well to the left of the conservatives who oppose any peace process and
any Israeli concessions to the Palestinians, even somewhat to the left
of the mainstream Jewish-American organizations that refuse to criticize
any Israeli policy, but very much to the right of those Jews whose self-identity
is not intimately linked to Israel. There are a great many Jews of this
progressive stripe who are very proudly Jewish without feeling a particular
need to protect Israel and its flaws, who can look at Israel with the
same emotional distance and honest appraisal that they apply to any
other country in the world.
Valerie
and all the figurative “Valeries” are incapable of distance
where Israel is concerned. I find Valerie and those like her to be so
very emotional about Israel and so inwardly focused on their own Jewishness
that it is impossible to argue with them, impossible to persuade them
of any viewpoint not their own, impossible to talk reasonably with them
about Israeli actions that are obstructing a stable peace settlement.
An Israeli commentator recently referred to people like this as “self-righteous
centrists.” Benny Morris was once a self-righteous centrist, but
self-righteousness finally got the better of him and he dropped the
centrism, falling squarely into the arms of the right wing. You might
call him an Israeli neo-con. Valerie and her friends seem to be moving
in that direction.
I
no longer try to address the Valeries directly, but I find that they
are always in my face about what I say and write to others. The point
here is not that I am being criticized; my feelings are not that fragile,
and the attacks are not unique to me. Nor are the attacks anything like
the personal threats and the vile hate mail that many critics of Israel,
particularly Jewish critics, receive. But therein lies the point. The
point is precisely the apparent moderation of the attackers, and the
pervasiveness of their attacks -- the fact that they and their particular
line of argumentation are so seemingly reasonable and now so widespread,
so typical of a significant portion of public opinion on Palestinian-Israeli
issues. These people, and those to their right, hold a corner on public
discourse.
Because
the Valeries appear to be so “reasonable” in their enthusiasm
for a two-state solution in Palestine-Israel and in their implicit (although
almost never explicit or specific) opposition to the occupation, I find
their particular political approach to the conflict to be very dangerous.
They will say they support independence for the Palestinians, but they
never do anything meaningful about it; in particular they never oppose
the Israeli policies and actions that prevent it. More significantly,
they will not permit honest criticism of Israel’s actions, and
they undermine the Palestinian position at every turn. They often tend,
in fact, when they talk about Palestinians, to exhibit an anti-Palestinian
bigotry only a bit less elaborate than Benny Morris’s.
The
real Valerie lives in my community; she is very active in the local
Tikkun organization; she writes letters to the president, to congressmen,
and to the local newspaper whenever a peace plan is afoot, enthusiastically
urging support for it; she attends national conventions of Tikkun and
other pro-peace Jewish-American organizations that discuss the need
for a Palestinian state. But whenever the local Tikkun group invites
a speaker who actually knows something about the reality of occupation,
Valerie turns to stone. In the last several months, Tikkun in Santa
Fe has shown videos of Israeli house demolitions, shown film clips of
Israeli peace activists like Jeff Halper describing the occupation,
hosted International Solidarity Movement volunteers with vivid stories
of life under occupation, and sponsored the appearance of an Israeli
Refusenik. Valerie calls this Israel-bashing and thinks these events
are an unbalanced presentation of only one perspective on the conflict.
Although the majority of the local organization’s leadership has
persisted in its determination to sponsor speakers who honestly discuss
the realities of occupation, there are others prominent in the leadership
who are like Valerie in their reluctance to listen to the facts and
to criticism of Israeli policies.
But
Do You Love Israel?
Although
they call for balanced presentations, condemning Palestinian terrorism
is not enough for them; they appear to appreciate only speakers who
will also express their love for Israel and their deep understanding
for Israel as victim. One of Valerie’s colleagues in the local
Tikkun leadership, a thoughtful man named Daniel who has been agonizing
for the last two years over how to call Israel to some account for its
occupation policies and actions without seeming to criticize too harshly
(after having been totally uninterested in Israel’s oppressive
rule for the previous 30-plus years of the occupation), wrote in a recent
e-mail circulated to the group, “What I have missed of late in
Tikkun is the love” -- which he specified as love of Judaism,
love of Israel, criticism of Israel only from a perspective within Judaism.
“Who among us loves us [i.e., Jews] enough to say what needs to
be said with a heart that will open rather than close ours?” he
wondered rhetorically. His answer: “Only the prophetic call working
from within Judaism itself, only Jews themselves doing the hard work
of returning to themselves.”
The
reference to opening the hearts of Jews, like the notion that Jews can
“hear” criticism of Israel only if it is put forth from
a position of love and empathy for Jewish suffering, is a constant refrain
with Daniel. He has been urging me in e-mail correspondence for years
to speak so that he can “hear” me. Perhaps he no longer
cares about hearing me, now that he has decided he will listen only
to Jews. Although I used to take his plea to say something he could
“hear” as a sincere appeal for honest dialogue, in fact
when it is repeated again and again, no matter what I say, no matter
what the reality I am describing, it becomes an arrogant assertion of
his refusal to listen to anything that he does not like the sound of.
It becomes total denial of any reality but the reality of Jewish suffering.
Ultimately, it becomes a license to Jews, because they have suffered
and need love, to do whatever they wish to the Palestinians and their
land.
Although
Daniel is at least gentle if unbending in his approach, the real Valerie
is always aggressively after me, and others of their colleagues have
gotten their licks in as well. Until recently, I have always either
refrained from answering their missives, particularly when these are
barbed, or tried reasoned argumentation, emphasizing my empathy for
Jewish suffering and my feeling that the only possible way to resolve
the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is to approach the issue from a position
of understanding for the sufferings and the aspirations of both Palestinians
and Jews. Neither of my responses has done any good. Valerie continues
to attack gratuitously; Daniel continues to tell me sweetly that he
cannot hear me because I don’t understand Jewish pain; others
have given up talking to me at all and simply complain to others about
my “bias.” I’ve come to the conclusion that, if you
criticize Israel in any way, there is no possible way to love Israel
and love Jews enough to satisfy these people.
I
have now grown weary of this. It is time to stop walking on eggshells
with such people. One can in fact still have great empathy for what
Jews have endured through the ages without allowing this feeling to
paralyze discourse or blind us to the inhumane policies pursued by the
Israeli government. Philosopher and CounterPunch contributor Michael
Neumann recently demonstrated a clear sense of proportion on this issue
when he wrote that he would “feel a bit embarrassed saying to
a homeless person on the streets of Toronto, much less to the inhabitants
of a Philippine garbage dump: ‘Oh yeah? You think you know suffering?
My grandmother died in a concentration camp!’”
Without
meaning to enlist Neumann without his consent on my side in this particular
argument -- and without denying the significance of the Jews’
long history of persecution or the vividness of the suffering Israelis
currently endure from suicide bombings -- I would like to be able to
throw Neumann’s statement up to Valerie and Daniel and those many
others like them, and ask if they could say this to a West Bank or Gaza
Palestinian with a straight face: “Oh yeah? You think you know
suffering? My grandmother died in a concentration camp!” This
is exactly what Valerie and Daniel et al. are saying when they demand
love for Israel in its role as oppressor, and I would like to think
they could be brought to a better understanding of their own absurdity
with a down-to-earth reality check like Neumann’s.
But
I think my hope is forlorn, and so I have decided to counterattack,
not in order to persuade Valerie and Daniel and their friends, but in
the hope of undermining the manipulative message they and the vast numbers
like them spread throughout the United States. Their message is at bottom
so extremely anti-Palestinian despite its moderate disguise, so bigoted
in its elevation of Jewish pain and Jewish morality above all else,
that it must be countered. It is, very precisely, the exact reverse
of real anti-Semitism, and just as wrong.
Some
examples of the Valerie-Daniel line of argument will demonstrate where
they are coming from. A few years ago Valerie wrote a letter to the
editor of the local newspaper gratuitously attacking one of my books
and suggesting that Palestinians have no legitimate grievances and simply
want the destruction of Israel. Six months later, after listening to
a talk I had given on the relationship between Palestinian terrorism
and the Israeli occupation (which appeared as “Before There Was
Terrorism” on CounterPunch on May 2, 2002), Valerie wrote me an
e-mail charging that I was being “preachy” because I had
criticized those like George W. Bush -- and Israel defenders like Valerie
herself -- who are selectively moral in their condemnation of Palestinian
terrorism and their refusal to condemn Israel’s human rights violations
and its continuing absorption of Palestinian land into Israel.
Israel,
Valerie said, is only a “tiny sliver of land amidst many Arab
foes,” and I was being “smug” to sit in Santa Fe and
tell a “vulnerable” people what to do with “their”
land. When I responded (magnanimously acknowledging that I might indeed
be preachy now and then) that she did not seem to mind telling Palestinians,
an even more vulnerable people, being stateless, what to do with their
land, she rejoined with a little history lesson designed to let Israel
off the hook: injustice and land theft had prevailed throughout history,
including depredations committed by the United States itself, but here
we were in the 21st century unfairly training our sights on “this
little country Israel and demand[ing] that Israel behave in such a moral
way.” The echoes of Benny Morris in this statement -- the notion
that morality does not matter when it comes to Jewish and/or Israeli
self-preservation -- are striking.
Valerie
also echoes Morris’s justification of Israeli mistreatment of
Palestinians on the basis of U.S. mistreatment of Native Americans.
The “great American democracy,” Morris said, “could
not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians. There
are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel
acts that are committed in the course of history.” Valerie has
not (quite) gone so far as to praise the “harsh and cruel acts
that are committed in the course of history” or to call this an
“overall, final good,” but she is rather casual about excusing
the depredations of settler colonial societies that oppress and displace
native populations. History is full of these cruelties, she has said,
and Israel should not be blamed for participating.
Most
recently, Valerie attacked both Christisons. After Bill and I wrote
a commentary for the local newspaper in November in which we enumerated
the aspects of Israel’s occupation -- expanding settlements, Israeli-only
roads, bulldozed Palestinian agricultural land, demolished Palestinian
homes, the separation wall -- that we had witnessed during two trips
to Palestine in 2003, she wrote us another e-mail saying we were being
“particularly mean-spirited” and “totally one-sided.”
I was tempted to respond by asking, do you mean to tell me that when
the entire structure of Israeli society is descending into an obscene
frenzy of destruction and brutality -- in which Israelis steal and bulldoze
Palestinian property with impunity, in which Israeli soldiers indiscriminately
kill children and adult civilians, shoot at ambulances, let the sick
die at checkpoints -- you are actually worried that two people in Santa
Fe are being mean-spirited??? But I didn’t -- until now.
Revealing
the real source of her problem with our article, Valerie fumed over
our observation that Palestinian terrorism (which we stipulated could
not be excused) does not arise from hatred of Jews or a desire to destroy
Israel but is a direct response to Israeli oppression, and to U.S. support
for Israeli oppression. With people like Valerie, one must never suggest
that Palestinians have legitimate grievances against Israel or that
terrorism, however indefensible, might have its source in Israel’s
actions -- or, of course, that any of Israel’s actions are oppressive
or constitute terrorism. Suggesting such things would mean that Valerie
and her comrades might actually have to do something, might actually
have to put some substance behind their empty assertions that they have
“always” opposed the occupation, might have to look beyond
themselves and their self-absorption.
In
the end, suggesting such things would mean that they might have to stop
enabling the occupation with their deadly silence.
Suggesting
such things, particularly that Palestinian terrorism arises from Israel’s
actions and not from a deep-seated, murderous Palestinian hatred of
Jews, actually destroys Valerie’s principal political refuge.
The notion that the Palestinians want to destroy Israel, and are somehow
capable of doing this if criticism of Israel is permitted, is the bottom
line in every communication she has sent us, and it is the bottom line
of virtually every “moderate” Israel supporter who has challenged
us: ultimately, their argument goes, although we want peace and are
“willing” to give the Palestinians a state (they are never
embarrassed by the arrogance of their “willingness” to cede
what is not theirs, or Israel’s), the Palestinians do not want
peace and will not live peaceably alongside Israel. Despite having offered
“one concession after another” to the Palestinians, Israelis
are being killed “every day” in cafes and restaurants and
at bus stops. Therefore, there is nothing more that we can do -- and,
the underlying message goes, there is nothing we have to do.
Instead,
Valerie turns victim and affects an offended tone. “Perhaps you
don’t care who [sic] you offend or alienate,” she wrote
to Bill and me. “Perhaps there are others you please by being
so offensive.” Her real meaning: you are anti-Semitic if you criticize
Israel too harshly or too specifically. Or, if it is obvious even to
myopic accusers that you like -- and indeed feel great affection for
-- many Jews, agree with many Jews, and cannot credibly be called a
Jew-hater, then you are being “mean” if you say certain
things; you’re offending her. And, just to make it a little bit
worse, by being so mean and offensive you must in some way be in the
service of dark, sinister forces -- dupes of real anti-Semites or, gasp!,
servants of that ultimate terrorist, Yasir Arafat.
Refuges
from Reality
Valerie
obviously favors ad hominem attacks. You see, she takes all this very
personally because she identifies so closely with Israel, and so her
attacks are personal. She and Daniel and the others actually feel criticism
of Israel -- feel it as if it were a personal attack on themselves.
Like that vast segment of the Jewish-American community for whom Valerie
is a caricature, she talks reasonably: the Palestinians should have
a state, it is unfair to treat the Palestinians as merely terrorists,
Israel’s actions in the occupied territories, as she says, are
worsening a very bad situation (meaning that the Palestinians started
it all, and Israel is merely compounding the problem). But when it comes
to specifics, she cannot view the situation except from her inward-looking
Jewish perspective. Israel is personal for her: some mild criticism
is acceptable, like any reasonable person’s self-criticism, but
real probing self-analysis is beyond her capability.
Like
the conviction that Palestinians are out to destroy Israel, peace plans
are another refuge, an escape, for Valerie and people like her. Peace
initiatives provide a comfortable space from which they can promote
an amorphous concept of “peace,” declaring their dedication
to “balance” and giving all-out support by writing letters
to politicians and newspapers, without having to face the grim realities
of why peace plans are necessary in the first place, or why they always
fail. Promoting “peace” allows them to escape the details
of the actual realities on the ground. Valerie is an enthusiast for
the People’s Voice plan drawn up by Israeli Ami Ayalon and Palestinian
Sari Nusseibeh, as she is for the Geneva Accord, but her enthusiasm
allows her to escape the details that the authors of those plans know
all too well and openly recognize.
Valerie
would no doubt be irked if she knew what Ayalon, a former head of Israel’s
security service, Shin Bet, recently said about the Palestinian-Israeli
situation and about why he believes his plan is necessary. In a recent
appearance in Washington with Nusseibeh to advertise the plan, Ayalon
drew a correlation between Palestinian hopes for peace, on the one hand,
and terrorism: when hopes are high, terrorism has always been low; Hamas
will not challenge majority Palestinian opinion and will always cease
or sharply reduce terrorism when the people have high expectations.
But terrorism rose when the Palestinian people lost any hope for peace
in the summer of 2000. The missing part of the puzzle, Ayalon said,
is hope. Valerie would not like this. Were she forced to hear this little
dose of reality, she might have to label it mean-spirited, offensive,
because it is a explicit acknowledgement by a former senior Israeli
official that Israel was at least partially responsible for causing
the Palestinian people to lose hope in the peace process, for causing
the utter despair that led to the intifada and led to suicide bombings.
Jewish
suffering is another, and perhaps the most manipulative, refuge. This
is Daniel’s principal preoccupation, which he focused on in December
2001, when a group of concerned citizens in Santa Fe took out a full-page
ad in the local newspaper calling for a reassessment of U.S. policy
toward the conflict. The text of the ad, which was addressed as an open
letter to the New Mexico congressional delegation, was authored by a
friend of ours. He is an ordinary intelligent citizen, a retired professional,
non-Jewish, who had grown concerned about the state of the Palestinian-Israeli
conflict and the dangers U.S. policy toward that conflict posed to the
United States, particularly in the aftermath of September 11. We helped
him gather over 130 signatures for the letter, including those of many
Jews.
The
open letter read as follows:
“Many
of us here in Santa Fe believe our foreign policy toward Israel and
the Palestinians is inherently flawed. Our massive and almost unqualified
support of the Israeli government has not only incurred the legitimate
wrath of countless Arabs, but has made us accomplices in a great historical
injustice against the Palestinian people.
“We
believe in a strong Israel securely safeguarded by treaty. We speak
out against an expansionist Israeli foreign policy which maintains an
illegal and oppressive occupation of the Palestinians. The land belongs
to both peoples; we ought to treat them both even-handedly.
“We
are also aware that this point of view has seldom been expressed publicly,
in part because people fear being branded anti-Semitic. It is now time
to get beyond these fears and openly debate an alternative policy rooted
in fairness.
“In
short, we strongly urge you to press forward on Secretary of State Powell’s
initiative to end the occupation [this was our own attempt to escape
into the eager promotion of futile peace plans, but how were we to know
in December 2001 just how ineffectual Colin Powell would be as a peacemaker
and how uninterested the Bush administration would be in seriously pursuing
peace?], not only because it will remove one of the underlying causes
of hatred of the U.S., but also because it is the right thing to do.”
The
reaction to this ad was electrifying in a small town. The statement
garnered a great deal of support, but on the other side there were charges
of anti-Semitism, counter op-eds, letters to the editor. It caused some
tension in the antiwar community, and it was probably a contributing
factor to the formation of the local Tikkun group by a group of Jews
awakened by the events of September 11 and by the realization that unquestioning
support for Israel was not necessarily a sure thing. It caused Daniel
to do a lot of soul-searching; he wrote a lengthy critique of the ad,
never published and unknown to me until he sent it to me six months
later along with a similarly long response to my “Before There
Was Terrorism” talk and article.
His
principal theme in both critiques was that we had presumed to stand
in judgment over Israel for its occupation policies without, he claimed,
being balanced in that judgment or sensitive to Jewish pain and suffering.
Despite applauding the signatories of the ad (with only one hand, he
hastened to note) for having the “laudable audacity” to
raise a subject that many find convenient to ignore, he declared us
all guilty of “moral grand-standing.” He objected that the
ad had taken a “judging, moralizing approach,” which he
read (mistakenly) as a demand that the United States drop its friendship
with Israel and “adopt the Palestinian narrative [as being] the
truer and more deserving of support.” Many concerned people in
the West “without an obvious stake in the conflict,” he
asserted, “find it easier to be outraged by the brutality and
brazenness of the Israeli occupation than to take seriously many Jews’
and Israelis’ fears for their personal and collective survival.”
He appears from this and other statements to be under the impression
that only Jews have a stake in the conflict; the terrorism and wars
that result from the conflict should apparently not concern the rest
of us.
In
his later message to me, Daniel adopted a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger
tone: he thought I could be “an important ally to the Jewish people
in its struggle for recognition and security in the Middle East”
if only he could “hear” me. But before I could be heard,
he said bluntly, I would first have to be able to “effectively
counter the suspicion that you are one-sided in your sympathies and
concerns, that you feel and are outraged by Palestinian suffering but
remain lukewarm if not subtly disapproving in the face of Jewish suffering.
More specifically, you will have to be able to feel not only Jewish
grief and rage in response to actual depredations but the enormous reservoir
of historically determined Jewish fear of the worst in other peoples.”
I
responded by doing, at least initially, exactly what I thought Daniel
wanted: by groveling, by exposing at embarrassing length but quite sincerely
my emotional feelings about Jews, my longstanding deep sense of empathy
and, to the extent possible as a non-Jew, my identity with Jewish suffering.
I probably ruined it for him, however, by also expressing my equal sense
of empathy for Palestinian suffering and my belief that Israeli policy
was responsible for most of this suffering. I detailed several examples
of what I took to be his own and other Jews’ obliviousness to
the Palestinian side of the conflict and the refusal by many Jews to
recognize any pain but their own.
I
criticized the sense I had gained from his messages and from others
like him that they were “just now,” as he put it, beginning
to look seriously at the conflict and at Israel’s actions. He
had referred to the “less and less avoidable spectacle”
of the Israeli occupation. I pointed out to him that Palestinians had
themselves not been fortunate enough to be able to “avoid the
spectacle” of the then 34-year-old occupation and that, if he
and others had not avoided it, we might have a solution by now. I ended
by criticizing what I saw as the selective hearing of many Jews: “The
idea that Israel must not be judged on moral grounds, or that the Jewish
community cannot hear or be expected to hear such judgments, is totally
unacceptable. . . . We must never allow Jewish fears to paralyze us,
and we must never allow Jewish suffering and fears to become the reason
for ignoring another people’s suffering and fears, or to be the
justification for oppressing another people.”
An
Excuse for Every Inconvenient Reality
Although
I had naively believed that my logic would convince Daniel, he was not
satisfied. I heard from a friend that he felt he still could not “hear”
me. He later told me that he wanted to continue the dialogue but was
just too busy. I refrained from observing that this had been the problem
all along: supporters of Israel had always been just too busy, or just
too disinterested, or just too much concerned with Jewish pain to care
about Palestinians, to recognize Palestinians as a people with a stake
in Palestine and a stake in independence. Daniel’s response told
me a great deal about him, primarily that he was not so much interested
in hearing expressions of empathy for Jewish pain as he was in simply
not hearing any criticism of Israel.
Two
years later, Daniel is still at the same point. Although he thinks he
is open-minded, he still writes long messages to the Tikkun group about
the need to speak only from a perspective of a love for Jews. He seems
to have an excuse for every inconvenient reality. When at a meeting
last year Uri Avnery’s name was raised as a credible Israeli voice
standing in moral judgment over Israel’s occupation, Daniel demurred.
He had heard something or other about Avnery’s supposedly shady
past; he did not know the details, of course.
When
at a recent meeting it was noted that 750,000 Palestinians had been
displaced in 1948 to make way for creation of a Jewish-majority state
and that this majority could not have been achieved without removing
the large non-Jewish population, Daniel spoke up to say that, according
to his reading, “only” 200,000 Palestinians had been displaced.
(Not only is this a gross underestimate -- and quite a surprising assertion
from a man who lectures on the history of Zionism -- but the cavalier
dismissal of the dispossession of even 200,000 people is not what one
would expect from someone who claims the high moral ground.) He tries
to portray the separation wall as entirely a security measure against
Palestinian terrorists, even when the evidence of Israel’s massive
land grab inside the West Bank is as plain as the map in front of him.
He will even stand in front of that map and argue that the wall’s
route does not close the Palestinians into area constituting less than
50 percent of the West Bank. Such is the power of self-absorbed denial
in even the most analytical and thoughtful of intellects.
Daniel
and Valerie have many fellow travelers along their particular path of
manipulative argumentation. A few examples demonstrate how remarkably
common their approach is.
During
a talk several months ago by a local rabbi well known as a political
and social liberal, she described what she characterized as an anti-Semitic
atmosphere in Santa Fe. She contended that there had recently been so
many letters to the editor critical of Israel in the local newspaper
that she believed all Jews in Santa Fe must now feel under siege. Noting
that people tell her she should not worry because the letters are political
and have to do with Israel, not with Jews, she countered, “But,
after all, Israel is the Jewish homeland” -- the clear implication
being that any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic. (I was so dumbfounded
by this baldfaced equation of policy criticism with ethnic hatred that
I was initially unsure I had heard correctly, but several other audience
members heard the same thing). The rabbi protested several times that
she was “pro-Palestinian” and that she had been a member
of Peace Now for 20 years -- meaning, I suppose, in the context of her
other remarks that, since she has established her own credentials as
a sometime critic of Israel, no one else may criticize, and she herself
need not worry any further about what transpires in the occupied territories.
Coincidentally,
a letter to the editor by the same rabbi appeared the following day.
It was in the same vein, observing that the critical letters to the
editor had taken away her sense of belonging to the Santa Fe community,
and concluding that the Jews’ two millennia of persecution should
be taken into account when considering Israel’s actions, that
we do not have the right to talk about the conflict because we don’t
live there, and that in the end “What makes most sense is not
to offer an opinion about this complicated and painful conflict.”
The notion that no one who does not live there can criticize Israel
is a common escape for people like this. These same people never have
trouble criticizing the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza although
they don’t live there either.
Shortly
thereafter, I had a weird and frustrating e-mail exchange with a prominent
local attorney and former city councilman, begun when he broadcast a
criticism of my “Before There Was Terrorism” article on
the Tikkun group’s e-mail list (not knowing, I suspect, that I
was also on the list). This man too, who is Jewish, protested that he
opposed the occupation and had “publicly stated this on many occasions”
but believed I was being hopelessly one-sided and was blind to the realities,
particularly the “fact” that the real problem was Palestinian
refusal to guarantee Israel’s security as a Jewish state. Still
in that naïve period when I thought logic and facts had some capacity
to sway opinions, I decided to discuss this with him, enumerating the
instances in which the Palestinian leadership had recognized Israel’s
existence and right to exist. He did not like this and signed off angrily
after a brief exchange, saying I had missed the point of his communications
but that as a working man he did not have the time to point out where
I had gone wrong. Another example of a fervent supporter of Israel who
has no time to care about the conflict but resents anyone else doing
so.
In
April 2003, at the annual Conference on World Affairs at the University
of Colorado at Boulder, Bill Christison spoke on a panel on the critical
demographic issue in Palestine-Israel with four other panelists, including
one who represented the Palestinian position and one the Israeli position.
The panel was entitled “Middle East Arithmetic: Israeli Ideology
and Arab Demographics.” Bill and Michael Tarazi, a Palestinian
American who serves as a legal adviser to the PLO, directly addressed
the inherent contradiction between Zionism’s insistence that Israel
be a Jewish-majority state and the fact that, until their expulsion
when Israel was established in 1948, Palestinian non-Jews made up the
vast majority of the population of Palestine and are again nearing the
point of demographic parity in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza.
The
other speakers dodged the issue altogether. Stuart Schoffman, an American-Israeli
journalist who has lived in Israel for 15 years, devoted his initial
remarks to a rationale for the creation of Israel and spent most of
the rest of the discussion pleading his support for two states in Palestine,
his opposition to the occupation, his distaste for Sharon, but his great
concern that Palestinians are allegedly not accepting Israel’s
legitimacy, and his pain over the “demonization” of Israel
in which Bill and Tarazi had engaged. Schoffman was a perfect echo of
Valerie, Daniel, the rabbi, the lawyer, and on and on.
Bill
addressed the panel topic directly in his initial remarks: “The
stark truth is that there is no way to create and maintain a Jewish
state in Palestine without displacing the native Palestinian population
and without ensuring through non-democratic means that the Palestinian
population never grows to the point of outnumbering the Jewish population.
. . . [Since the occupation] Israel has been able to rule over the Palestinian
people without granting them citizenship, thus artificially maintaining
its Jewish voting majority and cynically maintaining its façade
of democracy. But in fact what this has meant is that Israel has been
using the Palestinians’ land without their democratic consent,
ruling over them without their democratic consent, and calling itself
a democracy because it allows the small proportion of Palestinians who
live inside its 1967 borders to vote.”
Tarazi,
a Christian Palestinian, put his argument in terms of religious rather
than ethnic identity to dramatize the impact on non-Jews of the establishment
of Israel as a Jewish state. In 1948, he said, hundreds of thousands
of Christian and Muslim Palestinians were expelled or fled, and Israel
refused to allow them to return “for one reason, and one reason
only, and that’s because they’re the wrong religion. This
is religious discrimination in its purest form, and yet no one recognizes
that that’s what Israelis mean when they talk about a Jewish state.
They mean the right to discriminate against non-Jews, who were, of course,
the majority population.” Today, Tarazi asserted, “Israel’s
motivation for peace has nothing to do with mutual reconciliation, nothing
to do with equality, the application of international law. It has to
do with getting as much Palestinian land as possible with as few Palestinians
on that land as possible.” People don’t realize that the
motivation even of the Israel left in espousing the two-state solution
“has nothing to do with seeing us [Palestinian Christians and
Muslims] as equals, and they still don’t. It has to do with getting
rid of us as a demographic problem.”
Schoffman
took umbrage and launched into an indignant justification of Israel,
explaining again how Israel had been created as “not only a refuge
for the Jewish people, [but] a place that tries to put into practice,
and struggles to put into practice, Jewish values, social justice, under
enormously, enormously difficult conditions” (etcetera, at considerable
length -- his emphasis.) Yet, here were these insensitive critics “demonizing”
Israel, “making it into some kind of malevolent racist entity,
turning it into a pariah state.” This is “a very, very dangerous
game. I don’t -- I myself as an Israeli don’t presume to
speak for the motivations of Israelis en bloc, but one of the things
I can say is this, that I don’t even begin to understand the notion
that the only thing that motivates the state of Israel is to be a discriminatory
entity. I can’t even fathom that.” He could, he asserted,
“give you myriad examples of the respect which is given to other
religions within Israel proper. Freedom of religion, freedom of dissent,
freedom of press, freedom of assembly, all those things are there.”
The
exchange between Tarazi and Schoffman that followed provides a striking
example of a hearing man trying, and failing, to get through to a deaf
man. Tarazi responded, “It’s amazing to hear Israelis speak,
because they say it’s a Jewish state but that doesn’t mean
we discriminate against non-Jews. What does it mean to be a Jewish state?
They never ask themselves that question. . . . What I would like to
see, as a Palestinian, is for Israel to announce that Christians and
Muslims actually have an equal right to live there, that Jews are not
superior to Christians and Muslims.”
Another
panelist, confused by Tarazi’s talk of Muslims and Christians
rather than Palestinians, asked him, “Has there actually been
some kind of a failure by the Israelis to acknowledge the right of other
religions to be practiced?” No, no, no, Tarazi answered emphatically,
“the right to be there, not the right to be practiced. They’re
perfectly happy to allow a Christian every once in a while to go to
the Church of the Nativity, but they’re not going to say they
actually have the right to be there, they have as much right to live
in the Holy Land as Jews do, because if [Israelis] do say that, they’re
going to say, well then how can we justify not letting Christians and
Muslims back in under the right of return? They have an attitude that
is, We have superior rights to be here, and therefore we’ll tolerate
them to the extent that we can, but not wholesale.”
Schoffman’s
response to this clear and irrefutable enunciation of the essence of
the Zionist ideology that underlies the existence of Israel was again
to take offense. “Michael, if you want to come out and say that
you deny the fundamental right of the state of Israel to exist, which
is implicit in what you’re saying, then please do say it,”
he declared righteously. Schoffman’s obtuseness was breathtaking,
but Tarazi tried to clear things up for him. “I would say the
exact opposite,” he emphasized. “I recognize the right of
Israel to exist. I do not recognize the right of Israel to exist and
discriminate against the majority population.” This particular
exchange ended at this point, Schoffman pleading that there was not
enough time to examine the issue any further -- yet another example
of an Israeli defender pleading the press of time when confronted too
closely with real life.
Immersed
in Bereavement
Sometimes
I think these people all went to the same debate school. Almost universally,
they engage in the same tactics of argumentation: when confronted with
facts, blithely deny them; when faced with reality, deny it or minimize
it or create an elaborate excuse for it, and then turn on the interlocutor
as an Israel-hater or a Jew-hater. Or sometimes they deny it and use
reassurance to undermine the interlocutor’s point: everything
will soon work out; many of us have always opposed the occupation; the
Jewish people are intrinsically just and humane, never deviate seriously
from Jewish values, and in the end will correct the unfortunate hiccup
that Sharon represents in the practice of those deeply imbedded values;
Jewish suffering has attuned Jews to the universal attributes of justice;
and so on.
Most
often, particularly since the intifada broke out, the tactic has been
to create an enemy. The emphasis is on Palestinian perfidy and Jewish
innocence: the Palestinians, as an entire people, are immoral, inherently
violent, undeserving of true independence, certainly not the “moral
equivalent” of the Jewish people, and always, always bent on Israel’s
destruction; Israel’s actions are always justifiable self-defense;
it is anti-Semitism speaking when anyone charges Israel with terrorism,
or deliberate killing, or deliberate property destruction, or land theft,
or hegemonic ambitions. And in the end, particularly when they cannot
argue away reality, they become offended, or there is just not enough
time for probing discussion. Always, the focus is on Jewish suffering,
past and anticipated. One is reminded, when listening to these defenders
of Israel excuse its depredations and plead Jewish pain, of the man
who killed his parents and threw himself on the mercy of the court because
he was an orphan.
There
is so much I would like to say to Valerie and her compatriots: I’d
like to tell her about the recent Gideon Levy article in Haaretz called
“The Price of Ignorance,” which discusses the denial by
most Israelis of the Israeli killing and destruction that go on in the
West Bank and Gaza every day. “Few Israelis are capable of imagining
what life is like” in the towns of the West Bank where suicide
bombers live, he wrote. These are young people who have “no reason
to get up in the morning other than to face another day of joblessness
and humiliation.” Most Israelis have little interest in knowing
this; most of the Israeli media don’t report it, don’t show
the killings, or the bulldozers that demolish homes, or the injured
being taken to hospitals (or, he might have added, the injured who are
never taken to hospitals because Israeli soldiers prevent ambulances
from reaching them). “A society that disregards loss of human
life, caused by its own soldiers, is a tainted society,” Levy
declared, and the situation is compounded by Israel’s victimology:
“there aren’t many societies that immerse themselves in
bereavement so intensely. . . . We count only our own dead, all the
rest don’t exist.” This selectivity permits Israelis, conscience-free,
to present Palestinians as the only guilty party.
I’d
like to read Valerie and Daniel and the others this statement from Amira
Hass, another of those honest Israelis like Levy who know and report
what goes on in the occupied territories. In the introduction of Drinking
the Sea at Gaza, a description of her years living among Palestinians
in Gaza in the mid-1990s, Hass tells a story she had heard from childhood,
of her mother being herded from a cattle car at Bergen-Belsen in the
summer of 1944 and being watched by a group of curious but indifferent
German women who had been bicycling past. “For me,” Hass
writes, “these women became a loathsome symbol of watching from
the sidelines, and at an early age I decided that my place was not with
the bystanders. . . . To me, Gaza embodies the entire saga of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict; it represents the central contradiction of the State of Israel
-- democracy for some, dispossession for others; it is our exposed nerve.
I needed to know the people whose lives had been forever altered by
my society and my history.”
I
would love to tell Valerie these things, to urge her to stop being among
Levy’s blindly bereaved, among Hass’s bystanders, among
the destroyers of hope whom Ami Ayalon is trying to take some responsibility
for. But I know it would do no good. Valerie is busy being bereaved,
and so she is not interested in being a witness, or in examining Israel’s
exposed nerve, or in knowing how Israel’s society and history
have affected the lives of Palestinians. She is not interested in examining
her own conscience. Now, in fact, she can invoke Benny Morris on her
side and go on ignoring reality and her conscience, secure in the knowledge
that one of Israel’s preeminent historians is leading the way.
Sometimes
it is difficult to get over the frustration. I want to demand of these
people, where were you in the 34 years of occupation before the intifada
broke out and you suddenly became interested? Or in the years of occupation
before terrorism hit U.S. shores and you suddenly had to think about
why people have such deep grievances against the U.S.? To the rabbi:
if you have really been a member of Peace Now for 20 years, what were
you doing in those years, and where were you for the decade of the occupation
before Peace Now even came into existence, and what about the decades
before that when no one, no one, cared about the grievances of Palestinians
dispossessed for Israel’s benefit? If you have truly “always”
been opposed to the occupation, what have you done to end it? What have
any of these people done; where were they when Israel, pretending to
be negotiating a final peace agreement throughout the 1990s, well before
the intifada erupted, was proceeding with the settlement expansion,
the roadblocks, the checkpoints, the highway construction, the land
confiscation, the settler increases, the apartheid that were the principal
spark for the intifada? Or, I want to ask them, did your silence and
your revulsion at criticizing Israel because it is Jewish simply help
to perpetuate and consolidate occupation and injustice?
If
Valerie and her friends open their eyes, acquire the honesty of a Gideon
Levy or an Amira Hass, stop immersing themselves in bereavement, then
they will be able to listen, to hear, to see. But, like Jeff Halper,
the Israeli activist who rebuilds demolished Palestinian homes, who
has written that he despairs of “ever convincing my own people
that a just peace is the way,” I despair of ever being able to
bring Valerie or Daniel or any of their vast crowd of fellow deniers
to the point of listening. Halper writes that as one of the few Israelis
who have ever even been to Palestine, he finds it “impossible
to convey to my own people, my own neighbors (good people all, even
the Likud voters), what occupation means, why they should feel responsible
and resist with me. Israel is a self-contained bubble with a self-contained
and exclusively Jewish narrative.”
Valerie
and Daniel and the others are living in the same bubble.
Kathleen
Christison worked as a policy analyst in the CIA, retiring
in 1979. Since then she has been mainly preoccupied by the issue of
Palestine. She is the author of Perceptions of Palestine and The Wound
of Dispossession.
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