A few months back at a party in New York, I met the wife of a prominent liberal journalist and mentioned that I had lately been in Hebron, in Palestine. This woman said that she had close relatives in the settlement in Hebron. They had made aliyah to Israel some years ago; indeed many of the extremists in the West Bank are transplanted Americans. We talked about it for a while, and bewailed the settlement, which has fostered apartheid conditions in the center of the second largest city in the West Bank. The woman said that she speaks to her relatives, sees them, they visit her; but they agree to disagree about the legitimacy of Israeli colonization of the West Bank.
A couple of weeks ago, I emailed the journalist, whom I know as an acquaintance, and said that I wanted to mention his personal connection to the settlement in the West Bank. He asked me not to. He said that this was party talk, and he preferred that it remain off the record.
I’m honoring his request, inasmuch as I’m not giving his name. But I need to write about it all the same. For this is frequently the character of liberal American Jewish connection to Israel and to the colonization there. Yes, this journalist has been to Israel, unlike so many other Jews. And of course, like so many other American Jews, he laments the Occupation and wishes there was a Palestinian state. And yet, on the simple question of being open about his own connection to the illegal settlement program that has so corrupted Israel, he cannot be honest with me or his own readers. His discretion is understandable; we are talking about his relations. And this is the cultural question I have repeatedly visited here: American Jews feel different levels of intimate connection to the Jewish state. Some of them are hawkish supporters, some are liberal demurrers. But to renounce or repudiate the colonization scheme–in which Israelis destroy Palestinian ways of life and humiliate them? That is hard to do. After all, family is involved.
