Essentially Contested America

Recently, the Israeli government announced it would not accede to President Obama’s request to stop constructing settlements on the West Bank. This refusal indicates the new Israeli government will continue its obdurate intransigence which can only be explained by a rejection of justice and peace in favor of power and domination. No rational American Jew can sincerely believe that such a strategy will lead to the just claims of security for the Israeli people. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been driving politics in the area and throughout the world for several decades. We all know the complaints on both sides and each side has been right and wrong. The question we now face is whether a solution is conceivable.  Without granting a free Palestinian state absent walls, settlements, Bantustan-like divisions of Palestinian lands both Israelis and Palestinians are doomed to carnage indefinitely. The remedies are obvious: (1) a unified Palestinian government renouncing violence against the Jewish state and its right to peaceful existence, and (2) Israel must sincerely commit itself to recognizing a unified Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza roughly in accord with the geographical limits of the 1967 war.

Other sources of conflict need to be resolved by the parties.  But this post is directed to those American Jews who simply refuse to condemn the Israeli government’s intransigence even when they would do so in conflicts not involving Israel. Loyalty and dedication are virtues, but they become vices when they replace reason and commonsense. There is no way for this intractable conflict to be resolved without supporting the peace groups within Israel and only American Jews can strike a major blow in that direction. Consider how the Other Israel Newsletter of the struggle for Israeli-Palestinian Peace’s most recent issue states the current state of conflict:

“Unfortunately, right now what we’ve seen not just in Israel, but within the Palestinian territories, among the Arab states, world-wide, is a profound cynicism about the possibility of any progress whatsoever being made towards peace” said US President Obama when meeting King Abdullah of Jordan — the first Middle East leader to visit the White House under its new management. (Previous US Presidents had often granted this honour to the Prime Minister of Israel.)

If anyone could break through the stalemate, it should be Barack Hussein Obama — to arouse hope where there was despair, to set high goals and prove that “Yes, we can!” For a turn in US policy the Netanyahu-Lieberman crew in Israel may provide the right anvil. Still, it’s no mean task.

In the past nine years, “The Peace Process” — and also “Peace” itself — have become virtually dirty words. With the air of stating a self-evident fact, commentators nowadays habitually reiterate that “of course, peace with the Palestinians cannot be achieved in the foreseeable future.”

Israelis take for granted that their government had made “generous offers”, to which Palestinian “responded by suicide bombings and the lobbing of missiles.” As Palestinians see it, on the West Bank Israel never gave them more than a few miserable enclaves, soon engulfed and bloodily re-occupied — while direct Israeli rule in Gaza was merely replaced by a suffocating siege and murderous bombings.

The bottom line, as defined both by Israelis and by Palestinians, sounds remarkably similar: “We tried to make peace with them, but they don’t want it — they just want to kill us and take all the land.” The two sides differ only on who is “Us” and who are “Them.” All too often, this translates into a self-righteous ruthlessness and a total refusal to make any apology for killing and maiming — since “they” brought it upon themselves.

The dark forces on both sides have no intention of voluntarily working for a just and peaceful solution. The dark Israeli forces have no intention of voluntarily permitting an independent Palestinian state worth the name and the dark Palestinian forces will never on their own recognize the legitimacy of the existence of the nation of Israel. While resolution to this conflict cannot be militarily imposed on the parties only a courageous American President, perhaps one who would be willing to serve only one term, can impose the pressure necessary to bring the parties to their senses.  And only the American Jewish community can provide such a president with sufficient support for doing so. The first step is for American Jews to insist that the settlements must stop and stop now.

I’m reprinting this poignant letter I received in a Tikkun email.

Dear President Obama:

In approaching the task of addressing you directly about a personal issue, I feel daunted by the abyss that separates the two of us in status and power.  I am a retired public health physician, attempting to maintain a hold on his sanity and physical health by puttering around his garden in a Palestinian village in Galilee. You are the president of the nation most of humanity envies and desires to join, burdened with the task of saving the world from economic and political chaos and now from nuclear war.

Yet I find enough shared experiences between us to embolden me to speak to you as an equal in humanity if in no other regard.  Like you, I am a product of Hawaii, where I attended university at the time your late parents did, and of Harvard, where we both received our professional training. I subsequently returned to my village and worked among my people to treat their illnesses and improve their wellbeing physically, mentally and socially with varying degrees of success and frustration. Unlike you, I came up fast against the glass ceiling set very low for Palestinian citizens of Israel like me. I have written a book of memoirs (see last below) that documents my professional struggle over three and a half decades. It would be a great honor for me if you were to read it as part of your education on the issues of my community and of our potential as a bridge for peace in the Middle East.

Now to the subject of my message, Mr. President: The newly-elected prime minister of Israel , Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu, and his foreign minister, Mr. Avigdor Lieberman, plan evict me from my home and to take away my garden. These two persons and their fellow ministers were democratically elected to their positions and will use ‘democratic’ means at their disposal to legitimize my disenfranchisement as have previous Israeli governments done in the past. The difference is that the current leaders are explicit and aggressive about disadvantaging me based on my ethnicity.  They have devised a way to blame me for my victimhood.  They intend to ask me to sign an oath of allegiance to Israel as a Jewish state, a state that defines itself as exclusive of me and my people.

Democracy, Mr. President, may be the best political system, but, alas, it is no guarantee of justice and equality when it is abused to give unrestricted power to an exclusivist majority. My community, citizens of Israel since its establishment, makes up a fifth of the country’s population but owns a constantly shrinking share of the land that currently stands at 3% of the total.  Our towns and villages receive 3-5% of municipal budgetary allocations.  Our infants and children die at over twice the level of our Jewish co-citizens — and the relative ratio is rising of late. Our two communities continue to live in racially segregated residential areas often separated by walls and barbwire. Mr. President, I am not writing of the West Bank or Gaza but of neighborhoods in ‘mixed cities’ within the Green line.

You are the lead protector and promoter of true democracy in the world.  As such, I call on you, Mr. President, to stand up to such corrupting practices presented to the world under the guise of sound democratic principles.

And as a fellow human being, I ask you, Mr. President, to put yourself momentarily in my position and consider how I should react to the racially-based transfer designs of these politicians.  Here, in the person of Avigdor Lieberman, is another presumably equal co-citizen of  Israel who calls openly for my disqualification from our shared citizenship because I want to be equal to him under the laws of our common country. He insists on having me step down from our presumed common stand of equality and kowtow openly to his privileged status as the son of a certain race and religion. Would you do that, Mr. President, were it to be demanded from you by a fellow American citizen, be he Anglo-Saxon, Hispanic or Asian immigrant, or even a Native American?

As an alternative, Mr. Lieberman wants me transferred out of the country though I have lived on land I inherited legally from forefathers who almost surely have better claim to descent from the ancient Hebrews than his. And mind you, Mr. President, my residence in the home he wants me evicted from predates the establishment of the state he wants to appropriate as his, and his alone, while he is a recent immigrant from Moldova. Would you, Mr. President, take a loyalty oath confirming your second-class status?

Mr. Lieberman’s best-case scenario for tolerating my existence in his vicinity is to have the homes of the likes of me re-zoned into one of the Bantustans he envisions, to be created and run by remote control from behind an ethnic separation wall. Would you succumb gracefully, without protest, to such a scheme, Mr. President?

You have to understand, sir, that I speak here of life-and-death issues for me and my family. Mr. Lieberman, Israel ‘s Foreign Minister, attained his impressive status through an openly racist election campaign that featured mass rallies at which calls of “Death to Arabs” were standard. Would you trust such a man with your future in the international arena, Mr. President? I surely hope not:  but the majority of Israeli citizens seem to have done exactly that.

That is where I sense danger, sir; in the assigning of my fellow countrymen of responsibility for our common future to fascist and untrustworthy representatives. Past injustices, and those were many and massive against my people, were never so clearly foretold as the ones the current Israeli government threatens to perpetrate against me, my family, my village and my people. It is with this clearly articulated plan of my transfer in mind that I call on you to use the undeniable prestige of your office to stop such plans from being implemented. I ask you, sir, to reassure me that you will never permit such schemes to be on any agenda discussed in the presence of representatives of the United States of America. I need that in order to be able to sleep, Mr. President.

With my best wishes for a peaceful and happy Easter for you and your family and for all of humanity, I remain,

Sincerely,

Hatim Kanaaneh,  MD , MPH
Author of ‘A Doctor in Galilee : the Life and Struggle of a Palestinian in  Israel ‘, Pluto Press, 2008
Active Blog: http://a-doctor-in-galilee.blogspot.com/

When will Israelis and their supporters awake from their slumbers and realize the moral jeopardy that their intransigence puts the Jewish people in? Justice for Palestinians and security for Israelis are both a moral imperative. Fortunately, some observers recognize the Israeli’s government disinclination to embrace peace and justice: “Successive Israeli governments since 1993 certainly must have known what they were doing, being in no hurry to make peace with the Palestinians. As representatives of Israeli society, these governments understood that peace would involve serious damage to national interests.” What kind of national interests does a genuine peace damage?

Last week, Haaretz.com reported extensive excerpts from a meeting of Israeli soldiers indicating their treatment of civilians in Gaza.  Here’s a sample:

I am squad commander of a company that is still in training, from the Givati Brigade. We went into a neighborhood in the southern part of Gaza City. Altogether, this is a special experience. In the course of the training, you wait for the day you will go into Gaza, and in the end it isn’t really like they say it is. It’s more like, you come, you take over a house, you kick the tenants out and you move in. We stayed in a house for something like a week.

Toward the end of the operation there was a plan to go into a very densely populated area inside Gaza City itself. In the briefings they started to talk to us about orders for opening fire inside the city, because as you know they used a huge amount of firepower and killed a huge number of people along the way, so that we wouldn’t get hurt and they wouldn’t fire on us.

At first the specified action was to go into a house. We go into the house, they have five minutes to escape, we check each person who goes out individually to see that he has no weapons, and then we start going into the house floor by floor to clean it out … This means going into the house, opening fire at everything that moves , throwing a grenade, all those things. And then there was a very annoying moment. One of my soldiers came to me and asked, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘What isn’t clear? We don’t want to kill innocent civilians.’ He goes, ‘Yeah? Anyone who’s in there is a terrorist, that’s a known fact.’ I said, ‘Do you think the people there will really run away? No one will run away.’ He says, ‘That’s clear,’ and then his buddies join in: ‘We need to murder any person who’s in there. Yeah, any person who’s in Gaza is a terrorist,’ and all the other things that they stuff our heads with, in the media.

And then I try to explain to the guy that not everyone who is in there is a terrorist, and that after he kills, say, three children and four mothers, we’ll go upstairs and kill another 20 or so people. And in the end it turns out that [there are] eight floors times five apartments on a floor – something like a minimum of 40 or 50 families that you murder. I tried to explain why we had to let them leave, and only then go into the houses. It didn’t really help. This is really frustrating, to see that they understand that inside Gaza you are allowed to do anything you want, to break down doors of houses for no reason other than it’s cool.

“You do not get the impression from the officers that there is any logic to it, but they won’t say anything. To write ‘death to the Arabs’ on the walls, to take family pictures and spit on them, just because you can. I think this is the main thing in understanding how much the IDF has fallen in the realm of ethics, really. It’s what I’ll remember the most.

One of our officers, a company commander, saw someone coming on some road, a woman, an old woman. She was walking along pretty far away, but close enough so you could take out someone you saw there. If she were suspicious, not suspicious – I don’t know. In the end, he sent people up to the roof, to take her out with their weapons. From the description of this story, I simply felt it was murder in cold blood.

To read the full account click here.

It’s critical to understand that these reports are not the work of Hamas or some other Palestinian terrorist group, nor are they accusations lodged by anti-Israeli Americans.  These descriptions are from Israeli soldiers themselves reported in a respected Israeli medium. Consequently, talk of Jewish self-hatred or vitriolic inquiries demanding to know why Hamas’ atrocities are not reported is completely beside the point.

One crucial question remains.  Why aren’t these events, reported in an Israeli newspaper, discussed in the United States?  Is the reason that one faction in the multi-faceted American Jewish community virtually controls what Israeli news is disseminated in the American press?

Jerome Slater has an intriguing piece in Tikkun Magazine on the role of journalists, specifically Tom Friedman of the New York Times, in distorting the history of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.  Here’s the editor’s note:

[Editor’s Note: Jerome Slater’s critique of Thomas Friedman raises important questions about the role of journalists in mis-shaping public understanding of the Israel/Palestine struggle. As we have repeatedly argued in Tikkun, the mistakes made in the creation and perpetuation of that struggle come from both sides, and any historical reading must acknowledge the continued propensity on both sides to engage in acts of violence. Palestinian extremists and terrorists are culpable too—not just Israelis. Because this magazine emerges from the West, where Israel’s side of the story is well known and largely accepted blindly, while the Palestinian side is systematically kept from public consideration, we have often tried to re-balance the story by presenting the facts that the American media and the cheerleaders for the right wing in Israel have kept out of public view. Slater’s critique of Thomas Friedman is part of that effort. In 2003 Tikkun published the book Healing Israel/Palestine in which we try to give a more fully balanced account of the struggle, recognizing that both sides have full culpability for the origin and continuation of the struggle, and we are proud to say that the book is as relevant today as it was when we first published it. Saying that does not diminish the importance of Slater’s challenging of the deep misunderstandings of the situation perpetrated in Western media—misunderstandings which continue to constrain the possibilities of rational pro-peace intervention by the United States.]

Click here to read the entire piece.

The intractability of this conflict continues to kill and injure both Israelis and Palestinians. Both parties seem to think that the same tired and failed behavior, having devastating consequences for both sides in the past, will somehow miraculously succeed in the future. This strategy satisfies Einstein’s conception of “insanity.” namely, “doing the same thing over an over again and expecting different results.” Perseverance or insanity?  And this obduracy has the collateral effects of demonizing one’s opponents and sacrificing the venerable value of free speech to the purveyors of intolerance, and intimidation. (There are chilling historical examples of this bullying. In the antebellum South even bringing up the issue of slavery could damn you for attacking the glorious southern way of life. In the throes of moral conflict one of the first values to be trampled upon is free speech and unfettered public debate.) Consider the predilection of some groups who distort and slander those who deviate from the group’s party line. Click here for an especially egregious example of one such anti-democratic, fascist-leaning group.  Deliberative democracy founders when such groups gain power and attempt to stifle political debate by slandering their opponents. Every reasonable person should abjure such slander.

While the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts continues to percolate, it is gratifying to observe a respected Israeli civil rights organizations abandoning an entrenched taboo against comparing Israel’s occupation of the West Bank with the erstwhile apartheid regime in South Africa. According to the Independent: “Israel’s leading civil rights organisation yesterday broke a taboo by describing Israeli policies in the occupied West Bank as being ‘reminiscent of apartheid’ in South Africa. . . . Alleging an intensification of human rights abuses against Palestinians, the respected Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) made the comparison in an annual report that described the existence of separate legal, planning and transportation systems for Jewish settlers and Palestinians in the West Bank. . . . ‘Israel has built a modern arterial road system in the West Bank intended in fact only for use by Israeli traffic, whereas the Palestinians are forced to travel for the most part on twisting and dangerous roads,’ the report said. While Israel facilitates the expansion of Jewish settlements, it restricts the growth of Palestinian towns, the report added. ‘This state of affairs in which all the services, budgets and the access to natural resources are granted along discriminatory and separatist lines according to ethnic-national criteria is a blatant violation of the principle of equality and is in many ways reminiscent of the Apartheid regime in South Africa.’” For further reading click here.

Although the current economic crisis and the two wars bequeathed to the new president might not permit devoting time and energy to one of the most important and intractable world conflicts, it might now be time for Israeli Jews to combat the political stranglehold the American Jewish community holds over American Jewish public opinion regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. American Jews are often bullied, intimated, and slandered if they should voice an opinion against the occupation of Palestinian territories. Independent thinking American Jews are called traitors, self-hating Jews, and a host of other description designed to silence any criticism of Israel. Just as antebellum southern states and traditions forbade white southerners from discussing the abolition of slavery, so too do many American Jews refuse to tolerate an open discussion of Israel’s culpability in preventing a solution to this devastating conflict. Perhaps with such groups as ACRI comparing Israel’s occupation of the West Bank to South African apartheid, Israelis committed to security and justice will begin to change the policy of the current Israeli government.

Words of war are heating up between Israel and Iran. “The sabre-rattling over Iran’s nuclear progamme has grown louder as a defiant Tehran claimed to have conducted missile tests for a second day running, the US warned that it would defend its interests and its allies in the region, and Israel hinted it was ready to stage a preventive attack to destroy Iranian nuclear installations. . . . With the latest tests–and the wide front-page coverage given to them by the national media–Tehran is signalling it will not be cowed by international pressure to end a programme which the West suspects is aimed at producing nuclear weapons, and that any attack by the US or Israel will be answered in kind. . . . The tests, including launching the 1,250-mile range Shahab-3 missile that can hit Israel, should be ‘a lesson to our enemies’, the commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard was quoted as saying. But some of the talk may be bravado. Pentagon officials told CNN that surveillance suggested only a single missile was fired yesterday, apparently one that failed to launch on Wednesday. . . . Even so, the show of strength drew an unprecedentedly blunt response from Washington and Israel. No one should doubt US resolve, said Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State, on a visit to Georgia. ‘We are sending a message to Iran that we will defend American interests and the interests of our allies.’ . . . More ominously, Ehud Barak, the Israeli Defence Minister, noted pointedly that while diplomatic pressure remained the preferred way of persuading Iran to halt uranium enrichment, Israel ‘has proved in the past it is not afraid to take action when its vital security interests are at stake’.” To continue reading click here.

One needs to be careful here. Are both sides ratcheting up words of war just to satisfy domestic constituencies or to generate their machismo in the region. Or is this just the preface of a last ditch effort on the part of the Bush administration to either directly or by proxy take out Iran’s nuclear threat? Whatever the dynamics are here, it is quite clear that Iran is stronger and far more menacing now, since the invasion of Iraq, than it was pre-2003. The blowback from the invasion will haunt the U.S. and the region for years. Unless there is some reasonable means of negotiating with Iran regarding its interest in acquiring nuclear arms, March 19, 2003 will serve as the beginning of an Iranian supremacy in the region, or the reason the region was plunged into war. One final point. Is it possible that George W. Bush is so bereft of principles that he would invade Iran to tie the hands of the next president, especially if it becomes clear that the next president will be Barack Obama?

As an American Jew who supports Israel’s right to exist, I am ashamed at some of my fellow Jews in Florida. “At the Aberdeen Golf and Country Club on Sunday, the fountains were burbling, the man-made lakes were shining, and Shirley Weitz and Ruth Grossman were debating why Jews in this gated neighborhood of airy retirement homes feel so much trepidation about Senator Barack Obama. . . . “The people here, liberal people, will not vote for Obama because of his attitude towards Israel,’ Ms. Weitz, 83, said, lingering over brunch. . . . ‘They’re going to vote for McCain,’ she said. . . . Ms. Grossman, 80, agreed with her friend’s conclusion, but not her reasoning. . . . ‘They’ll pick on the minister thing, they’ll pick on the wife, but the major issue is color,’ she said, quietly fingering a coffee cup. Ms. Grossman said she was thinking of voting for Mr. Obama, who is leading in the delegate count for the nomination, as was Ms. Weitz. . . . But Ms. Grossman does not tell the neighbors. ‘I keep my mouth shut,’ she said.” Click here for more.

These same “liberal” Jews who would reject litmus tests in other areas of politics embrace one here with gay abandon. Turning to McCain just on the basis of the Israel-Palestinian conflict is scandalous. And what precisely has Obama said to suggest that he would not defend Israel’s right to exist? That he wants a two-state solution? Israel is committed to this solution. Why then should Obama be condemned for sharing the same goal as Israel in this awful conflict that has brutalized both Israelis and Palestinians alike?

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