Yesterday I had an exchange with a good friend who said that he has friends living in Israel and while it might be the fairest way to go to have a one-state solution, it would involve great bloodshed. Steve Walt has said the same thing, terrible bloodshed, in saying, Get on the two-state solution now! Though it may be too late.
I want to unpack the two elements of my friend's statements: the close friends and the bloodshed. They're both important.
To begin with, the connection to Israel. Many American Jews have it. This was the essence of a great question that the progressive Brooklyn congregation Kolot Chayeinu asked at its post-Gaza encounter session 10 days ago: How many of you have family in Israel, please stand up?
The essential issue here is, emotional ties to Israel and resulting dual loyalty inside the Jewish community. The Zionists set about to create these connections for both idealistic and political reasons 60 years ago, and despite some tussle over the Law of Return and whether Ben-Gurion was urging American Jews to emigrate, the Zionists succeeded: They created a tightknit emotional bond between the American Jewish community and Israel built with personal connections. Neocons and fellow travelers like Michael Oren, Max Singer (who lost a son in Israel's fighting), Jeffrey Goldberg, John Podhoretz, Elliott Abrams, and Paul Wolfowitz all demonstrate the meaning of this idea: they have all either lived in Israel or have close relatives living there.
And that's just scratching the surface. My friend's comment to me yesterday underlines this. Myself, I have one close connection to Israel. My mother's best friend, a Holocaust survivor, moved there with her family in 1968. Everything I write on this site is subject to an Inner Dread on my part, that some day I must go see this person, whom I love, and say: I'm an anti-Zionist, or a non-Zionist, let's talk about what went wrong here. I'm afraid of having that conversation. I still feel that she is somehow superior to me, in her kinship values, because she is a Holocaust survivor and made aliyah. I feel guilty– and that she has greater standing than I do. Slowly that's changing. But some day I have to talk to her. And by the way, when I do see her, it's in the context of a community of American Jews and Israelis interacting, mingling, almost borderless.
I am saying that countless American Jews have these connections, and they are the sinews of dual loyalty. If you think that many American Jews don't look on their guardian-relationship to Israelis as a "sacred mission" and "secular religion," to quote Dershowitz, you're nuts.
The only way out of this mess, as I say again and again, is for American Jews to begin to interrogate those commitments, and to understand that We have the aliyah here, literally the higher position, because We live in a country that has elected a black man president while our friends and family live in a country that oppresses Palestinians and does everything to separate Jewish society from Palestinian society. Jim Crow, in my name.
Now the bloodshed. I think of my guru Lincoln. In 1858 he said that the union was a "house divided against itself" and could not survive half-slave and half-free. NY Senator William Seward said the same thing when he said that the battle over slavery was an "irrepressible conflict." Lincoln surely lived to regret his statement. He denied that it was a threat of war in many subsequent speeches, but his determination on the issue won him the presidency, and the war came three years later and it was terrible. 600,000 killed. I read Lincoln's second inaugural as a grief-stricken statement.
Is the Civil War analogous and if so how do we prevent it? Yes it's analogous. The north was implicated economically/politically/socially in a moral tragedy of savage proportion. Today the U.S. is implicated in the Israeli occupation, which Rashid Khalidi and Mustafa Barghouti have likened to slavery and that surely exceeds the injustices of Jim Crow. Separate roadways, pogroms, Gaza slaughter. Lincoln stated his belief that northern politicians were corrupted by or were conspiring with the slave power. The same holds for the power of the Israel lobby in our public life. It has corrupted American political values in this policy realm, distorted the information we get about the two-state solution and other lullabyes (another Lincoln word), and played a crucial part in the Iraq disaster, which was supported by our family/friends in Israel, who told us again and again that we were naive about radical Islam and their war was our war.
Americans are waking up to the fact that Israel's war is not our war– that our image has been wrecked by our support for Jim Crow for 5 million Palestinians, and that we made things a lot worse for ourselves by buying the idea that radical Islam was the new Nazism.
When Americans do wake up fully to being hornswoggled, there is likely to be some political convulsion. Yes I fear antisemitism. And of course the Israel lobby is dug in against this awakening because it fears that the consequence will be that Americans will abandon Israel; and the Israel lobby believes that a second Holocaust will happen. Certainly there are a lot of scenarios of war in the Middle East, don't let's dwell on them.
I want America to wake up and I don't want bloodshed. I don't go around talking about irrepressible conflict, but even Alan Dershowitz in Chutzpah imagined a time when American and Israeli interests were so at odds that there might be war. Well, those interests are truly at odds. Netanyahu/Lieberman are likely to make this even more starkly clear.
What is the answer? How do we avert the terrible war that a similar moral agitation produced in 1861? We need political imagination, leadership. Obama has a nonconfrontational way; I like it. And within the Jewish community, where the connection and the power lie, we need a conversation like the one at Kolot Chayeinu, asking about our emotional investments in a state that practices Jim Crow. Being an optimist, an Obama American, I think this conversation can happen: that progressives can imagine a democratic future for the people of Israel/Palestine.
