This week two Nobel Peace Prizers knelt before my people–American Jews–to ask them to acknowledge the suffering of the Palestinians.
At a church in Boston, Desmond Tutu gave a speech about apartheid and
Israel/Palestine. He invoked a
passage from Deuteronomy about compassion. When we harvest olives, we
must not shake the boughs–but leave some for the "widow, the orphan
and the sojourner…" American support for Israel may make it impregnable, Tutu said; still it is
corrupted by the occupation, which is in ways worse than South African
apartheid. He said that American Jews need to come alive to these facts. Amen.
Meantime, The Forward reports that Jimmy Carter met with a small group of progressive Jews to try and build bridges with the Jewish community, but that representatives of the larger Jewish political community declined to do so. A pity. In the Forward, M.J. Rosenberg of the pro-Oslo-process Israel Policy Forum, who did see Carter, says that it is "offensive" that mainline Jewish organizations declined the former president’s offer.
I submit that M.J. Rosenberg is the most crucial figure in Jewish politics in America today. He is part of the heart and soul of Jewish organizational life. He works in Washington, he knows the Hill, he knows the lobby. He has complete street-cred. And he has spoken up for Carter, and Walt &
Mearsheimer, while keeping the faith as a member of
organizational life.
Rosenberg’s Jewish soul caught fire (according to J.J. Goldberg’s fine book Jewish Power) in ’67 when he was leading the anti-war movement at SUNY Albany, and the Six-Day war happened. He became a pro-Israel campus activist, then went to work at AIPAC. But where ’67 and ’73 cast the Jewish community in concrete, as a support organization for Israel-right-or-wrong, M.J. has been working on these issues ever since and has often questioned Israeli policy, even in the Jerusalem Post. When talk of an alternative lobby bubbled up last year, the name you always heard was Rosenberg’s.
Rosenberg is important because he has great journalistic/political instincts. In this column for IPF, for instance, he is unstinting in describing the rocket attacks on Sderot as terrorist, but also speaks movingly of the 8 Palestinian Fulbright scholars who have been basically imprisoned in Gaza by Israeli measures. No wonder Jimmy Carter wants Rosenberg’s ear. So does SAIS at Hopkins.
In the Middle-East-politics world, both right and left watch him. We on
the left sometimes wish he would be more outspoken on our side. But he
is in a far more sensitive spot than any of us are. He’s not in Brooklyn,
Boston or Berkeley, the three Bs of progressive Jewishness. He’s right
there in Washington.
Rosenberg’s gift, I think, is that he behaves like an Israeli journalist. He loves the openness of the discussion of
these issues is in Israel, and he wants to bring that discussion here… Amazing.
