Here’s Ralph Seliger back at me. I have some responses, but they’ll wait till tomorrow. My parents are here. Also I’m going to be posting in a separate blogpost below Jack Ross’s response to Ralph’s earlier comments. Got all that straight? Here’s Seliger:
I didn’t use the term, “short-term” to minimize what the
Palestinians have experienced as a people since 1948. Instead, I was
thinking back to what Neve Gordon,
the leftist (and non-Zionist) Israeli political scientist told a
visiting Meretz USA group a few years ago, when asked about the
one-state solution: “We’re living in the one-state solution.” By this
he meant that because Israel and Palestine have not been properly formed as separate sovereign entities, one people will inevitably dominate the other.
Right now (in the “short term,” as I put it), Israeli Jews dominate Palestinian Arabs.
In the “long term,” if Arabs come to outnumber the Jews in
Israel/Palestine, it will eventually be the Jews who suffer as a hated
minority.
As you graciously acknowledge, we progressive Zionists advocate
for Palestinian Arab rights. Yet you dismiss this by observing (with a
mixture of truth and exaggeration) that we “get rolled by the
big orgaizations.” This is a curious form of attack: the fact that your
left-wing views are constantly “rolled” by the vast majority of “big
organizations” doesn’t make you quit your convictions, does it? Does
the fact that we all fight uphill denigrate our struggles?
Everybody knows that J Street was founded as a counterbalance to AIPAC.
I don’t know in what sense J Street “won’t oppose AIPAC,” except that
it must feel that it’s better strategically if AIPAC is not explicitly
attacked. This is J Street’s self-description of its purpose:
“J Street
was founded to promote meaningful American leadership to end the
Arab-Israeli and Palestinian-Israel conflicts peacefully and
diplomatically. We support a new direction for American policy in the Middle East and a broad public and policy debate about the U.S. role in the region.” This sounds bad or AIPAC-ish to you?
Phil, you exaggerate and distort (unintentionally, I hope) in
characterizing my views. When I described the experience of Jews with
American antisemitism, I wasn’t seeing “Jewish persecution as
eternal”; I was saying that we are a small and vulnerable minority
group everywhere, except in Israel. To our sorrow, even where we are a
majority (especially where we are a majority, you’d say), we are still
a target. I have no idea if antisemitism is eternal, and I certainly
don’t believe in arguing that it is. But we remain vulnerable as Jews.
I actually thought– for two very different reasons– that the
year 2000 would mark a kind of official end to antisemitism as a
meaningful influence in the world. First, I thought that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would be peacefully resolved with a final implementation of the two-state solution.
Sadly, and for a variety of reasons having to do with the
moral limitations, errors of judgment and practical mistakes of
Israeli, Palestinian and American negotiators and their political
leaderships, peace did not happen. And the televised images of Israel’s
harsh reaction to Palestinian violence unleashed a new round of
antisemitism, which have impacted the lives of Jews in France and other
parts of Europe.
The second failed opportunity to mark an end to antisemitism was
the bizarre and court-ordered electoral defeat of the Gore-Lieberman
ticket. It’s not that Joe Lieberman is my ideal Democrat or VP (au contraire!),
but the election of a (mostly) liberal-minded and religiously-oriented
Jew as VP would have been almost as monumental for its
significance symbolically as the election of Obama would be or Hillary
would have been.
Instead, for a variety of reasons, we live in an era where almost
a billion Muslims reflexively dislike Jews, many of them hate
Jews, some of them wish to harm Jews, and a few actually go on Jihad
to do so. And I don’t state this out of malice or out of a conviction
that “Jewish blood” is worth more than that of others. But Jews are
permitted to care about their fellow Jews.
We still are within living memory of the Holocaust, when one third of the world’s Jews were annihilated, including over 60% of the entire Jewish population of Europe.
We have not yet recovered from this trauma either in numbers or
psychologically: there were 18 million Jews in the world in 1939; there
are a mere 15 million alive today.
The exaggerated concerns, the paranoia and the aggressive politics of AIPAC and the so-called Israel Lobby
have everything to do with this fact. And US Jews became particularly
energetic in building a powerful body of communal defense organizations
(the “Lobby”) as a reaction to the fact that they were mostly cowed and
quiet in the face of an antisemitic political climate, before and
during the Holocaust, and thereby failed utterly to save people who
might have been saved by more aggressive action.
I suggest that Phil stop his petty sniping at the likes of Daniel Levy, Eric Alterman
and myself. If he truly believes in working for Palestinian rights and
a two-state solution, he doesn’t have to call himself a Zionist or even
suggest that he likes Israel, but he should realize that we are natural
allies in this struggle.
