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No Peace Without
Justice, No Justice Without Truth
Pulling
the Plug on Israel
By DAVID HIMMELSTEIN
Whether or not it has reached critical
mass, there exists a heterogeneous agglomeration of Jewish people
around the world-- e.g., moi--for whom the state of Israel has
come to represent an 800-pound albatross that needs to be pried
from our necks before it drags us over a cliff. A sense of urgency
is propelled by the U.S.-sanctioned bloodletting in Lebanon and
Gaza (which now seems to have been planned in advance) and the
evident flimsiness of its official justification. With Israeli
adventurism on the march, there are well founded fears concerning
the general threat that country poses to the peace of the world.
And there is a paticularized
danger which stirs a thick chunk of self-interest into the universalism
of enlightened Jewish concern. In terms of the fabled Jewish-interest
litmus, it is proving decidedly not "good for the Jews"
when Israel gets away with murder. The spillover is ubiquitous.
After all, we have it on no lesser authority than New York Times
heavyweight Thomas Friedman that, in the early days of the American
occupation of Iraq, American soldiers in Iraq were being referred
to on the Iraqi street as "the Jews".
The worst-case scenario was
laid out with characteristic bluntness by dissident Israeli historian
Ilan Pappe in a Zmag interview:
"I believe what Israel
is doing will destroy the Jewish people in the near or distant
future as well. Even with 250 nuclear weapons and the support
of the world,s only superpower." Supporting scenario has
been sketched in by veteran peace activist Uri Avnery:
"What would happen for
example if the United States sank ever deeper into the bloody
swamp of Iraq, into an atmosphere of national calamity? When
the search for a scapegoat is on, the Jewish neo-cons will stick
out. . . .One should not exaggerate these dangers. At present
they are hardly specks on the horizon. But I would advise the
leaders of the Jewish institutions in the United States to exercise
some self-restraint. Intoxication with power can easily lead
to dangerous excesses."
Sadly, this advice has not
been taken. As a result, it is neither surrealistic or irresponsibly
alarmist to worry about a multi-continental outburst of anti-Semitism--
especially when fuel for a new firestorm is being splashed about
by those representing themselves as the quintessential defenders
of Jewish interests. This present concern should not be confounded
with the perennial wolf-crying (the flip side of wolf-baiting)
by apologists like the Anti-Defamation League's Abraham Foxman.
The current unease is a spontaneous phenomenon-- rippling across
a broad range of independently minded Jews, stoking a visceral
need to express (even if only in the privacy of their own minds)
emphatic disavowal of the self-proclaimed Jewish State.
The endgame denoted in the
title of this piece, although a seemingly chimerical wet dream
today, is a wish list with three main components.
1. In terms of immediate impact,
the highest priority would be the withdrawal of lockstep United
States support for Israel's provocative adventurism and its brutal
stranglehold on Gaza and the West Bank. Maximum U.S. pressure
would be applied to hold Israel to its responsibilities under
international law and force it to address the basic issues that
have generated most of its problems.
2. Another high-impact development
would be the voluntary drying up of the river of financial support
Israel receives from its many supporters in North America. Obviously,
such a stoppage would presuppose a prior psychological upheaval
within and among those supporters-- indeed in all diaspora Zionists,
i.e., those who believe that Israel is the homeland of the Jewish
people
3. Such a psychosocial earthquake
would involve upending deeply entrenched and cherished beliefs
that contribute to a sense of entitlement, such as that which
comes to play when, at any point in his/her life, a North American
Jew discovers his/her inner Zionist. He/She can draw on sacred
and secular authorization to jet off to the homeland and get
fast tracked to a swimming pool in a hillside villa--down below
which the indigenous holdouts line up for water from the well.
Given Israel's present commanding
hegemony of resources and discourse, such an upheaval may appear
as unlikely as the "spiritual seizure" which a pessimistic
George McGovern wished for on a long-ago Election Day. Nevertheless,
there is abundant anecdotal evidence of increasing Jewish alienation.
While Israel's life-disrupting separation wall goes forward on
the ground, Israel itself is being walled off in independently
minded Jewish minds and hearts around the world. (Even some of
those who consider their metaphysical identity and destiny thoroughly
intertwined with the nation of Israel are troubled by twitches
in a vestigial generic-- not proprietary-- human sensitivity.
However, the fundamentalist core will cling even more fervently
to triumphalism, and carry on with the sanctimonious gong-ringing.)
Always seeking ways to "think
outside the box", this writer sees advantage in recycling
a pop-psych chestnut to offer non-Jews (not to mention Jews)
a certain scope on the unspoken-for world Jewish community. The
lens consists of Elsabeth Kubler-Ross's five stages of grieving:
denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Interestingly,
they were first labeled the five stages of receiving catastrophic
news. Both terms are applicable here: decades of "catastrophic
news" about Israel and its history have culminated (sometimes
outside of conscious awareness) in widespread Jewish mourning
and grieving for a lost Zio-innocence.
The most immediate catastrophic
news is coming out of Lebanon, but a steady stream has emerged
from Gaza and the West Bank during the four decades of Israeli
occupation. Perhaps even more unsettling is the cloud of ethnic
cleansing which increasingly hangs over the establishment of
the state of Israel in 1948. And any rewind winds up in the original
traumatic "primal scene": early Zionist settlers' shocked
discovery that Palestine was not, in fact, the "land without
people" they'd been led to believe.
Many Jews have been shaken
out of the denial stage by the substantive force of the bad news,
but anger, bargaining ("I promise --.") and depression
remain seductive lures. Getting to acceptance implies uncomfortable
acknowledgements and adjustments. In the most optimistic of images,
it will be a bumpy ride. But no alternative exists. And the hour
is late.
There will be no peace in the
Middle East without justice, and no justice without truth.
David Himmelstein is a writer and teacher in Montreal.
Reachable at chebrexy@hotmail.com.
Now
Available
from CounterPunch Books!
The Case
Against Israel
By Michael Neumann
CounterPunch
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