Settlements. Settlements. Settlements. (Remember When It Was Kibbutzes?)

One of my themes about Israel is that it has lost the international public relations battle–even if this is not yet news in the U.S.– for a true and simple reason: The image of Israel used to be kibbutzes, now it's settlements. I think even Alan Dershowitz would agree with me that this paradigm shift has taken place; and it is based on living realities. This is widely understood in England, where the New Statesman prints this piece by Joyce Hurndall. An idealistic Brit, Hurndall went to Israel in 1971 when she was 21 to volunteer at a kibbutz in the Golan, picking peaches. Exactly one generation on and her son Tom went to Gaza in 2003, to try and protect Palestinians from occupation soldiers. He was killed by
the Israeli Defense Force, just weeks after Rachel
Corrie's death.

Her son's death has made Joyce Hurndall a crusader for a beautiful cause, trying to ensure education for Palestinian children:

As happens after such life-changing moments, a line was drawn. The
span of my life was abruptly dislocated and past, present and future no
longer seemed to bear any relation to each other. In the months that
followed our small family was to take on Israel’s most powerful
institution, the Israeli Defence Forces, in a search for the facts
about the shooting of our son.

Although I have since been re-stringing my life the feeling of
disorientation lasted until I at last found a way of piecing the
fragments together in a job. A particular job. In April 2008 I became
Development Director of Friends of Birzeit University,
which has been supporting education in the West Bank since 1978. As a
former teacher and Head of Learning Support, I am acutely aware of the
right of young Palestinians to education, which is being severely
jeopardised at a time when the creation of future leaders has never
been more vital.

Notice that it has taken Joyce Hurndall 5 years to restring her life. I can only imagine. Yom Kippur, and our prayers are with her…

Something else. I just used the word "ensure." It is the word you hear more than any other at AIPAC. It is repeated countless times, and printed endlessly in AIPAC's literature. Ensure the continuing and strong relationship of the two countries. Everyone says it. I have a thick AIPAC book called Commitment Matters, and I am tempted to count the number of times that donors use the ensure-word in there. A very positive word. Well, imagine for one second that American Jews, who are so wealthy and powerful, took on Joyce Hurndall's task! I believe this can happen, I really do. For the truth is that this is the only way to ensure the happiness of Jews in the Middle East. And if we did take on that task, just imagine the result: the image of that country, call it I or P I don't care, would change again, to a very positive one. And what is the challenge in that imagining: It is that American Jews will overcome our ethnocentrism.