The other day Richard Witty challenged me, "Do you find anything of merit in the liberal Zionist critique of your blog?" Then attacked me for evading the question. I think I did evade the question, (though I responded to something else Richard said). At the risk of misrepresenting that critique, here's what I find of merit: They are urging me to be more sensitive to the mainstream Jewish position. I think that's meritorious. The dehumanization of the other is one of the great risks of this sort of engagement, and I feel as if I've made some progress in my own mind toward humanizing the liberal Zionists because of their critique.
On substance, I'm not really persuaded. A year ago I had a debate with Dan Fleshler, where at one point he equated the power of the Palestinian terrorist with the power of the Israeli border guard. Something like that. I don't think they're equal; and my problem with liberal Zionism is that it's a Jewish communal movement and so it tends to be Inside the Jewish community. When the great challenge of this era of Jewish history is to Look at our effects on other communities. That's where the liberal Zionists really fail for me. Ralph Seliger thinks that Israel is an essential place as a refuge against antisemitism. I don't think he's considering how safe Jews in America feel. I would ascribe the same attitude to Richard. I don't know him intimately, but I feel that he also is psychologically engaged by a time when Jews were the biggest victims in the world. This is the psychological error of Daniel Goldhagen and Doug Feith, both the sons of Holocaust survivors. Goldhagen needs full-time security when he's traveling in Germany. That to me is nuts. He's underseparated from his father's experience. I don't think he's a liberal Zionist, but Richard and Ralph Seliger both make a similar error: of failing to understand Jewish power.
I do think there's a way to reconcile liberal Zionism and progressivism. I get that vibe from M.J. Rosenberg and Dan Fleshler and Gershom Gorenberg and Jerry Haber. They're not deceiving themselves about the costs of the occupation. That's everything to me. A few weeks back, Gideon Levy in Haaretz reported on the Palestinian community that is fighting the separation wall that confiscates so much Arab land in Nil'in, and the girl who has been attacked for taking a video of Israeli soldiers shooting a bound man. Levy reported that the girl's father was jailed for 26 days after he lost his temper with Israeli soldiers and started grabbing earth and eating it. To show it's his land. There is no more piteous or poetic image of injustice than that one.
And that's enough for me. I don't need more information. When other Jews are doing that to someone in my name as a Jew, I don't care about anything else, it's time for me to bear witness. It's why David Bloom is such an activist, and why Adam Horowitz is active with the Friends. It's why Henry Herskovitz of Ann Arbor came back from Israel/Palestine and started protesting outside synagogues, it's why Hedy Epstein, a Holocaust survivor, went to Cyprus to join the Gaza blockade-runners last month. All these people saw enough injustice to say, Not in my name. And they're all Jews.
Steve F says to me I'm only looking at the bad stuff on the Jewish side of the ledger. Well he's largely right (though I do put in a word or two now and then about the oppressions of Arab society; and I'm no fan of radical Islam). But two wrongs don't make a right. I actually have some power over the wrongs my community does. I have been asked to sign off on it with an idiotic grin since 1967…
The same thing goes for the human devastation in Iraq, inasmuch as I believe that it originated, in some measure, out of neoconservative ideas that were aimed at protecting Israel. I don't want to protect Israel, or any other country, at the price of so much suffering. I feel that Richard and the other liberal Zionist critique'ers are stuck in a period of Jewish history that really doesn't illuminate this one; and that there's something terribly selfish about their worldview. They truly are thinking about what's good for the Jews. And thinking that way isn't good for anyone. Now Richard, tell me if I got you wrong here…
You definitely got me wrong. And, I think you got yourself wrong, in a glorious embellishment. And, you got history wrong.
0 for 3. Not major league material.
Peace is constructed of mutual engagement, between communities that are invested in their communities.
I think you are lying to yourself when you say "not in my name", because I think that all you feel and engage in is guilt, not genuine participation and relationship. I know you feel appreciation for many ideas and rituals in Judaism, and a sense of comraderie associated with familiarity. But your frequency of hopelessness expressed in your editorial choice and presentation of materials, is telling. (It should be telling to you, not only to Sword of Gideon or Ralph).
I think that the same political assertions of consideration by those that are actually engaged, rather than apologetic, carry more weight and more merit, and have greater chance of success.
Hence, Rabin appealing to a peace of the brave, a peace of the engaged, of the fully loyal (dual or treble or hundredfold), remains MUCH more profound than the "peace" of habitual dissent.
I think it is an enormous failure on your part when you describe yourself as having studied and experienced less history than a 23 year activist. How is that possible?
How could you write about an issue for eight years, and not study the history in any depth, or from multiple perspectives?
How could you possibly be confident that you are portraying anything accurately without that study, from multiple perspectives most importantly.
About me, I was a student and critic of the occupation since 1973, the time of my first argument with my father and aunt about it. Jonathon sided with me. (You know Jonathon.)
Me taking that side was wrenching to my family, as yours is wrenching to yours. I didn't have 5 brothers and sisters to bounce it off of. I stood alone.
You piss me off when you pigeon-hole me as anti-Palestinian or "old and in the way" when I comment in this den of habitual "dissenters" and the few genuine anti-semites.
You don't bother to read my posts arguing with settlers in different settings, or presentations that I bring to my own Jewish community assertively conveying the common humanity of Palestinian neighbors of Israelis.
So you form this trivial political view (evil/good same as George Bush's but with different language) rather than hold multiple respected story and history in your being.
I learned second hand (better than first hand, better than abstraction or history), the experience of the holocaust, by marrying the child of a holocaust survivor that I met in India at the community of the radical yoga group, that we later distanced from. (For reference, the "guru's" third cousin was Subhash Chandra Bose.)
I heard her mothers' and aunts first-hand experiences as hated in Hungary and informed to the occupying Germans, then harrangued by their own patients when herded on the train to slave labor camps, then there experience underground with false identity papers after escaping from slave labor camps (with experiencing both help with great personal risk to the helpers, and betrayal), then liberation to return to their former home towns again to taunts and threats, then as homeless refugees in Budapest, then their migration to Israel, poverty, and two wars in 8 years, and the low-level imprisonment of Jews within Israel (not permitted to leave), and their post traumatic existential homelessness in England and US.
Somehow, REAL experience gets imprinted. Remembered. NOT abstracted, not politicized into polemic.
And, what did they and I derive from that experience. NOT permanent victimhood in the slightest, but liberal compassion, permanent, committed.
Not forgetting my own and my new family's experience, and not dismissing others.
Not all diaspora Jews or survivors responded to their experiences with sympathy for others. Some only politicized their experience (a form of abstraction, of denial of themselves and other). Others adopted fascist likud commitments to Greater Israel and screw the Arabs.
Most of the people that you criticize among AIPAC are very interesting studies for their motivation. Very different from the liberal, in that they use the valid concept of self-defense as a rationale not for confident defense, but as a rationalization for offense.
When you infer in any way that people like Ralph, or Dan Fleshler are racist for validating the compelling experience that Jews are a people, you sicken me. (Literally that strongly.)
"Stuck".
The way that I stay UNSTUCK, is to read the works of people that disagree with me, with the intention to learn, NOT to repeat to myself (as comforting as that is, to add up to the same right conclusion after each study).
So, I read Pappe, I read biography of Begin, I read Kimmerling, Chomsky. I read Darwish respectfully. I read Amichai respectfully. (Darwish wrote of his affinity for Amichai in an introduction to a collection of poems that I bought.) If they bring relevant perspective, I take it in. If they bring bias, I acknowledge it. If they bring distortion, I object and specifically.
I do not call Saif an imbecile. And, I don't call Ralph Seliger a racist.
If you can't respect that dual awareness, that dual loyalty, then screw you.
We'll argue vicously rather than laugh next time we meet in Brooklyn at a wedding or bar mitzvah.
Or, you can approach our liberal Zionist courage with respect, rather than dismissal and contempt.
God help us if Jews raelly are running the nation. Do the rest of us even have a place here? This almost funny!
"If you can't respect that dual awareness, that dual loyalty, then screw you."
There it is again. The ubiquitous perniciousness of "dual loyalty."
I haven't read what Richard Witty has to say but I am surprised by his relentless posting of opinions on this site. He acts as if people like Philip Weiss had to be contained. As if his kind of thinking had to be fought at every corner. The bad thing is that it works: Witty has become part of the conversation. Weiss is slowed down in his thinking by Witty and his likes. Also he is somehow calling Philip on his lack of Jewish loyalty which is certainly taking a toll after a while.
I'm not sure Witty is here to discuss. He is here on a mission to slow things down.
"Weiss is slowed down in his thinking by Witty and his likes. Also he is somehow calling Philip on his lack of Jewish loyalty which is certainly taking a toll after a while."
You're right. Witty is guilt-tripping Weiss and too often Weiss buys into it.
'He acts as if people like Philip Weiss had to be contained. As if his kind of thinking had to be fought at every corner.'
Well said, and spot on. There is an ugly intolerance, it's more than defensiveness or even never-againism, in Richard's attitude. It's a limiting exercise, and I don't like others to try to enforce limits on my thinking. Phil shouldn't either, though I tend to admire his capacity to put up with the assorted characters he has drawn here. Where Richard and co are madly painting the bubbles they are trapped in, so to keep the sunshine out, Phil is always trying to burst the bubbles his circumstances trap him in. As Ali G might say – respect.
'our liberal Zionist courage'
It's this pride in a form of ideology that has victims who are invisible. In fact, Richard often paints the perpetrators of the injustice as the victims. The quality, not to mention the acceptability of an ideologue's thought is terminally affected by the twists of logic and reason they have to make to accommodate the cherished idea.
Courage Richard consists in being able to question and even break away from your preferences, not in succumbing to them.
Who is Todd Gitlin? Is it you Bill?
Phil, you keep taking the damn bait… what will teach you that Witty ain't about rational debate. He lives to see his one-liners taken on as positions – you can sense his self-importance inflate with each attempt to talk to him. But if you bother to actually read his prose it simply makes no sense! Again, it's fine and interesting when you engage in debate with other "liberal" Zionists – I liked the back and forth with Realistic Dove, for example, and even Ralph S. has his value – but I beg you, stop bringing the level of debate on your excellent blog down by trying to reason with those who seem incapable of reason. Every village has its idiot…
Phil, keep on truckin. All that matter is the inhumanity that israel has shown the palestinians throughout all these years, and to say nothing of the way that zionism is dominating in american politics through oppressive malicious means.
look at the way Jimmy Carter has been blacklisted by the power zionist.
its oppression pure and simple…
Screw you, screw you, screw you for thinking out of the box!!!!!!!
"We'll argue vicously rather than laugh next time we meet in Brooklyn at a wedding or bar mitzvah."
Phil, if you are really in bad shape for money, you could always sell online access to the vicious event. For entertainment value alone, it has to be worth a few dollars a head. I'd even buy a t-shirt and a poster.
R. Witty: "Or, you can approach our liberal Zionist courage with respect, rather than dismissal and contempt."
Right – because liberal Zionism is such a *courageous* position to take. I'm truly in awe of your bravery. The steadfast resistance of Palestinians suffering under occupation or in refugee camps is nothing compared to your heroic stand in defense of their oppressor.
What was that Phil said about Jewish naval gazing?
Lets hold a televised dialog between Phil and I.
Phil, you wrote,
"A year ago I had a debate with Dan Fleshler, where at one point he equated the power of the Palestinian terrorist with the power of the Israeli border guard. Something like that…"
I never said anything "like that." Clearly, there is a profound assymetry of power and an assymetry of suffering. What I conveyed is that a 19-year-old Israeli soldier (not a border guard, but a regular guy who joins the army by law) at a checkpoint is also victimized by the situation, in the sense that the occupation, by its very nature, corrodes his soul. That is something Ghandi and Martin Luther King understood about British soldiers and southern whites during the Jim Crow era –they were pawns in a game they could not control.
It is easy to sit in our comfortable American chairs and say that Israeli soldiers should refuse to join the army and choose to completely isolate themselves from their own society. But that is an extremely tough thing for a typical 18-year-old kid to do. So is refusing to serve in the territories, although more and more Israelis are choosing to refuse.
When I made the comment, way back when, you wrote a post that was also inaccurate. You claimed that I said the Israeli soldier was suffering as much as the Palestinian who had been waiting on line for hours. I would never make such an absurb claim. Of course the Palestinian is suffering more. But you seem unable and unwilling to give people the leeway to ALSO be concerned about the Israeli soldier, who is enforcing a dehumanizing occupation he probably wants to end.
In doing so, you are doing the dehumanizing. I reserve the right to care about both peoples.
I'd prefer a cage match between Witty and Alan Dershoshitz. Make it a competition as to who can hyperventilate "anti-semite" the loudest while simultaneously declaring themselves to be "liberal Zionists" – a purely oxymoronic description for racists who support the Apartheid regime of Israel.
"But you seem unable and unwilling to give people the leeway to ALSO be concerned about the Israeli soldier, who is enforcing a dehumanizing occupation he probably wants to end."
Dan, you are right about the position that young soldiers are put in. I knew several new IDF recruits who didn't want to do what they were doing, and I saw the pressure that Israeli society puts on them to serve. They didn't enter the IDF broken, but I saw the process of breaking them on their trips home.
I also knew people who gladly joined the IDF, and didn't seem to suffer for it-yet.(My relatives and acquaintances who have participated in conflict all came away traumatized in some way.) Israel is a nation of people shaped by conflict, whether each individual person is traumatized or not. Unfortunately, Israel has only itself to blame, and Palestinians are morally superior by far and far worse off in every other way.
My primary concern is for America, and taking a side in Palestine does nothing good for me.
"Steve F says to me I'm only looking at the bad stuff on the Jewish side of the ledger. Well he's largely right (though I do put in a word or two now and then about the oppressions of Arab society; and I'm no fan of radical Islam). But two wrongs don't make a right."
No – two wrongs don't make a right but the "wrongs" committed by the Arab side which include historic rejection of compromise, terrorism, the election of Hamas in Gaza, government by ruthless dictatorships elsewhere, Hizbollah in Lebanon (which fights even after Lebanon has been evacuated), rocket attacks from Gaza, etc., impacts how Israel will to extract itself from the occupation. Actions have reactions and those living in a democracy are impacted by horrendous acts by the other side.
"Lets hold a televised dialog between Phil and I."
Are you short of money too, Richard? I smell a rat.
Thanks for joining in the fray Dan.
Abbas yesterday referred to Olmert as admirable for publicly declaring that the concept of greater Israel is dead, and for persevering in respectful negotiation. Olmert stated "I once believed in the effort. Now I don't."
That change occurred through the human appeal, largely of his children who had personal contacts with Arab young adults and valued their humanity, and their experience.
Abbas was asked by a Haaretz interviewer (I'm paraphrasing) "Livni suggested that peace is only possible when the word "nakba" is no longer part of the Palestinian vocabulary." Abbas responded "How is that possible. I can not possibly erase my own people's and my own experience, anymore than you can erase your people's and personal experience."
The implication is that peace is constructed by valuing one's own experience so fully, that one can move on.
It does NOT occur by dismissal, but by fully remembering, in the context of ALL being human beings, respectable.
Can you all rise to that, to regard even liberal Zionists as fully human?
I am surprised you put me in with Dan Fleshler, Gershom Gorenberg, and M. J. Rosenberg. Well, not so surprised. I call myself a Zionist (cultural, not statist), and this much Zionism I share with those guys. And I also focus on the Jewish angle, and enjoy the liberal democrat lable.
But more divides us. I am not wedded to a two-state solution; I think that the state founded in 1948 was not a liberal democracy (and, in hindsight, not even a good idea) that ending the occupation is only the first step to a more just solution, that Israel should absorb a significant number of Palestinian refugees (say, a half a million), and that it should become a state of all its citizens. Correct me if I am wrong, but this goes beyond what the liberal zionist label, as that is used.
Of course, building coalitions with them, and, for that matter, with groups like ISM, to end the occupation is something different.
It does go beyond the liberal Zionist label, and seems impractical during your and my lifetime at least.
While I am called racist frequently here, maybe you would be too, maybe not. My emphasis on what constitutes Jewish community and Jewish identity similarly is social and secondarily political.
Diaspora Judaism (ashkenazi and sephardic) was oriented towards community similarly, and most orthodox and chasidim rejected the prospect of political Zionism.
The question is and has been, relative to that assertion is is a state necessary. Is it necessary to establish distinct law to govern Jewish community? Is it necessary to have a political identity, a foreign policy? Is it necessary to defend as a state, or is more local defense necessary, even at all?
As a faith in human nature, maybe it would have been possible, and would be possible still not have defense. Maybe the Arab population would tolerate the rantings of a minority advocating for state Zionism, but confidently know that social Zionism was no threat, and accept the Jewish community even to the point of majority as a whole.
Or, maybe not. Maybe internal and external groups would undertake perpetual and intimate violent harrassment of Jewish civilian community. Maybe the prospect of Jews as peers, or Jews as majority would be too threatening to the local Arab population and result in orchestrated persecution.
I'm sure that you've engaged the period of the formation of the kingdom of Israel as parallel in some respects to the present.
Saul, David, Solomon. Saul forming a state at all. David consolidating the state. Solomon expanding the state, building the temple solidifying the "permanent" Jewish relevance and nature of the state while simultaneiously permitting diversity within the state to the extent of empire by delegation, and diluted Jewish identity within the state.
How would one reliably test your thesis?
One can't reasonably say currently that a status of Jewish majority in any large geography has been accepted by the general or regional Arab community. (Hopefully the Arab League's conditional acceptance of Israel will bear fruit.)
Do you agree that there is significant risk that a single-state effort BEFORE social acceptance as facts on the ground, would likely result in quite violent and intimately violent civil war?
I hope that you loudly applaud the report by the times on the collaboration between citizens of Jenin and their Israeli neighbors.
Wherever that led.
"It does NOT occur by dismissal, but by fully remembering, in the context of ALL being human beings, respectable."
Er, can we cut the poetic nonsense, please? Peace will happen when Israel agrees to withdraw to its legal borders. The reason it refuses to do so is not because of Olmert's psychology or because of either the Israeli or Palestinian "vocabulary", but because the Israeli state reasons – correctly, it would seem – that it can continue to expand Israel's borders without paying any significant price for doing so.
As for this:
"Can you all rise to that, to regard even liberal Zionists as fully human?"
Are you being serious? This is like a parody of the 'shoot-and-cry' liberal. No-one's denying your humanity – an unfortunately small minority of people are arguing that your position is wrong, and racist to boot. Apparently used to having the debate completely on your terms – or, at least, on terms you feel comfortable with – you now regard even the slightest challenge to the liberal Zionist line as a rejection of nothing less than your humanity. Truly bizarre.
Aside from the fact that there are not clear borders now, nor have there been since Begin, your statement "Peace will happen when Israel agrees to withdraw to its legal borders." is a gamble.
What brings peace is acceptance.
I agree that establishing mutually consented borders is a likely path to peace (key word "consented"), but it is no guarantee.
For an Israeli politician whose responsibilities include protecting Israeli civilians from physical assault, a gamble is really not sufficient.
The mature Palestinian negotiators acknowledge that and creatively, assertively, and responsibly are actively pursuing a consented outcome.
It won't satisfy 1967 or 1948 purists, as all compromises are known to activists as betrayals, rather than as accomplishments.
And, they will always be waiting in the wings to say with vanity, "I told you so".
While your description of Palestinian leaders who have agreed to compromise on basic Palestinian rights as "mature" is just adorable, you're really not making much sense here.
Israel's legal borders are very clear, and are subject to no controversy whatsoever – to quote the International Court of Justice, all of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem constitutes "occupied Palestinian territory". Israel has as much sovereignty over Ma'aleh Adumim as Iran does over Texas. If Iran invaded Texas, would we regard it as a "compromise" if it was then pressured to return it to the U.S.? Would we talk sagely about how what matters is "acceptance" on both sides, and praise "mature" American leaders who agreed to allow Iran to keep 10% of Texas?
Again, the facts are very straightforward: Israel has no right to any of the West Bank, East Jerusalem or Gaza. Despite that, Palestinians have compromised and agreed to a land swap of around 2%. Israel refuses, in violation of international, insisting instead on a "swap" of closer to 10%. This Israeli rejectionism is the fundamental reason for the continuation of the violence, a fact the suggests an obvious course of action for those who want to see a reasonable settlement to the conflict.
Of course it makes sense.
YOU are not at the table. Abbas is not a pushover. He will not accept a fundamental compromise as you describe.
He will form a consented agreement, one that is durable, clear, fair.