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CounterPunch
November
8, 2002
Apocalypse...Soon!
by ANN PETTIFER
At the end of August, Jonathan Freedland - a senior
journalist at the Guardian, a liberal British newspaper - interviewed
Britain's Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks. It caused a furor: a voice
that does not echo the party line is not tolerated. The scholarly
Sacks belongs to the Orthodox wing of Judaism and was well known
in the 1980s for being Margaret Thatcher's favorite clergyperson:
there was the shared admiration for Victorian family values and
neo-liberal economics. Rabbi Sacks never embarrassed his Prime
Minister with crusades for social justice, and on issues like
homosexuality he was impeccably Levitical. Within his own faith
community his support for the state of Israel was unwavering;
not a single word of criticism ever passed his lips - until now.
In his conversation with Freedland, Rabbi
Sacks was emphatic about how besieged Israelis felt. Sickened
by suicide bombing, he expressed frustration with the Palestinians
for not seizing the prospects for peace which he felt were offered
by the Oslo agreement. But then Sacks did the unthinkable - he
volunteered a temperate, cautious even, reading of Israel's 35
year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. It doesn't square,
he said, with Yahweh's admonition, repeated 36 times in the Mosaic
books: " You were exiled in order to know what it feels
like to be exiles." Sacks sees the current situation as
"nothing less than tragic." The occupation is forcing
Israel "into postures that are at odds with its deepest
ideals." To underscore his point he quotes the 12th century
Jewish sage Maimonides: "Israel did not long for the Messiah
so it could lord it over other nations."
His remarks created a rumpus, both inside
Israel and across the diaspora. There were calls from the Jerusalem
Post for Sacks' resignation. He had made himself irrelevant,
the paper thundered. Other rabbis pronounced his statement "far
beyond the pale." The attacks were surprisingly hostile
and left Sacks shaken. Gerald Kaufmann, a Member of Parliament
for more than 30 years, shrewdly observed that Rabbi Sacks had
not encountered Jewish abuse before, had never been called a
self-hating Jew as he, Kaufmann, often has - as when he announced
that he would not be visiting Israel again until the occupation
ended. (In a film he made for the BBC, Kaufmann pays lyrical
tribute to his first visit in the 1960s.) However, in a follow-up
piece, Jonathan Freedland went on to commend Rabbi Sacks for
coming down on the right side of the issue. History, said Freedland,
is certain to judge the occupation harshly and he called upon
the rest of the Jewish world to decide where it stands on "this
folly."
A couple of years ago, just before the
second intifada, I had the opportunity to visit Gaza. On the
day after our arrival in Israel - the spouse was there to lecture
on post-apartheid South Africa - we had the chance to accompany
a small group of progressive Knesset members to Gaza. They were
going to gather evidence from Palestinian fishermen being harassed
by young conscripts in the Israeli navy. On a very cold March
day, we listened as these barefoot men told their harrowing stories.
Very early in the morning and again late in the afternoon, we
had also observed the rituals of Palestinian humiliation at checkpoints
in which the parallels with apartheid South Africa were obvious.
The gut-wrenching poverty of the area was thrown into high relief
by the settlements we passed: neat villages behind high walls,
razor wire and gun emplacements. Settler children were in colorful
costumes for the feast of Purim. On our side of the barricades
exhausted looking Palestinian children rode or drove scrawny
donkeys. A few days later, the University where the spouse had
lectured sent a car to drive us from the Negev to Jerusalem.
Our host, an old friend, was with us. The Israeli driver asked
her, in Hebrew, if it would be OK for us to take the route through
the Occupied Territories, which we did. At one point a toxic
smell wafted through the open windows and I wondered out loud
about its source. Our driver made a jocular remark, again in
Hebrew, which our companion translated: "He says it's dead
Arab - an Arab graveyard." The racism was reflexive.
The vitriol leveled at Rabbi Sacks surprised
me, and it was almost certainly coming from Jews who have never
witnessed the Occupation first hand. I thought such harsh treatment
was reserved for the likes of an Israeli friend who actively
opposes the Likud government and writes excoriating pieces on
the occupation for the Israeli and American press. (Now back
in Israel, he had come to Notre Dame to work for his doctorate
- after having done military service, in the course of which
he sustained a severe combat injury from a grenade.) The abuse
this man gets goes way beyond being called a self-hating Jew.
I have seen some of the e-mails. They are vile. From the safety
of his perch in the natural sciences at Notre Dame, a Jewish
professor wrote: "Please do us all a favor and visit all
the discos, pizza places, dining halls, malls and super markets
you can. Perhaps one of these days you will be in the path of
those liberators of Palestinian suffering and be blown right
out of this world." And someone who guest lectures at synagogues
and to Jewish organizations in South Bend tells me that very
senior people often wish my friend dead - in the most graphic
of terms.
Such barbaric attempts to silence the
critics of occupation are inexcusable and, moreover, inexplicable
given that Israeli colonialism and the settler communities appear
to have won the political battle in Israel and, more importantly,
in the US. AIPAC (the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee
- otherwise known as the Israeli lobby) has spent vast amounts
of money on politicians, Republicans and Democrats, to ensure
that Israel's government gets to write its own ticket. The real
coup, however, has been in the Pentagon where Jewish-Americans
Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and Richard Perle are calling the
shots. Not only do these men back the right-wing Likud Party's
policies on the Occupied Territories and the settlers, they helped
to formulate them. Douglas Feith, in a previous incarnation as
policy chairman of the National Unity Coalition for Israel, argued
that Israel should re-occupy all land ceded to the Palestinian
Authority, even as he acknowledged that "the price in blood
would be high." This sentiment is not very different from
one expressed by the ultra-right leader of Israel's National
Religious Party and quoted in Freedland's Guardian piece: he
called Israel's Arab citizens "a cancer to be removed."
(To which Rabbi Sacks responded, to his credit, "God forbid.")
Furthermore, the Pentagon troika has
skilled propagandists in Jewish neo-cons like the ubiquitous
David Brooks and William Kristol, both at the influential Weekly
Standard which has become a wholly owned subsidiary of the Pentagon.
And, as an article in The Nation points out, the editorial page
at the Washington Post is also resolutely in the Pentagon's corner.
Now Perle, Woflowitz and Feith are planning the war against Saddam
Hussein, at the end of which the issue of the Occupied Territories,
they hope, will be settled once and for all in Israel's favor.
Anatol Lieven, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, writing in The London Review of Books, argues
that another Gulf war would be "breathtakingly reckless."
The push is coming from men, in Washington and Jerusalem, obsessed
with power who "take an extremely unreal view of the rest
of the world and are insensitive to the point of autism when
it comes to the character and motivation of others." Still,
Lieven says, should things go wrong and war ignite a conflagration
in the Middle East, it might at least trigger a discussion and
bring into the open "the calamitous role of the Israeli
lobby" in US politics.
The lobby has been successful in getting
the media and politicians to change the subject whenever debate
about weaponsofmassdestruction (as Gore Vidal now calls them)
turns to Israel. An unstated assumption is that Israel, as a
rational polity, can be trusted never to do anything rash or
vengeful. This, I think, underestimates the rabid strain of Jewish
fundamentalism in Israeli politics. Some years ago, I was part
of a Jewish-Christian dialogue in which participants were drawn
from the University and the local community. I still recall the
chilling response from an Israeli rabbi - a visiting scholar
in the Notre Dame Theology Department - during an energetic discussion
of the Occupied Territories. The rabbi insisted they were necessary
for Israel's security and went on to warn that should Israel
ever feel threatened, it would not hesitate "to bring down
the whole Temple." His threat, not in the least veiled,
was made in the context of Israel being a nuclear power.
A last word on the dangers posed to world
peace should go to a Californian rabbi, Haim Dov Beliak , who
studied at the Merkaz Harav yeshiva in Israel when it was the
ideological center for the settler movement. He is quoted in
a sober analysis (published recently in the National Catholic
Reporter) of the apocalyptic, Christian Zionist movement which
supports both the Occupation and the settlements. Rabbi Beliak
is troubled that "the American public knows little about
the settlersSthere is a profound lack of curiosity about them."
They are, he believes, "deeply problematic because they
are going to cause World War III. They are not dealing with normal
political reality. There is a complete denial of any rights Arabs
might have."
Ann Pettifer
is a freelance writer and a the publisher of Common Sense, the
alternative newspaper at the University of Notre Dame. She can
be reached at awalshe@nd.edu
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