Going to Israel for a third time has made me more focused than ever on Jewish life– because I am planted in it, and because I see changing Jewish attitudes as crucial to changing the dynamics of the conflict. The other night at an event in NYC about this new book, I said that the simple problem in the Jewish discourse on Israel/Palestine is racism, the Jewish failure to grant Palestinians humanity. After citing Erica Jong’s chapter title in the bestseller Fear of Flying, “Arabs and Other Animals” as a generational example, I noted that the New Yorker (which yes reflects the Jewish presence in the establishment) has run two very big pieces in the last year on the conflict that derived their standing from the suffering of Israeli Jews. The magazine’s Gaza piece, by Lawrence Wright, was basically all about Gilad Shalit’s imprisonment; and its recent profile of David Grossman, which conventionally and mistakenly describes Grossman as a moral leader against the Israeli grain (just compare him to Gideon Levy or Amira Hass or Yonatan Shapira), took its moral authority from the fact that Grossman’s son Uri was killed during the 2006 Lebanon war. Let’s be clear about the double standard: There are about 10,000 Palestinians in Israeli jails whose fate and families are never the subject of New Yorker pieces, and hundreds and hundreds of Lebanese and Palestinian youths have been killed in conflict with Israel in recent years, some of them nonviolently resisting occupation, as we would resist occupation, and they and their families are also not the subject of big pieces in the New Yorker. As I said this the other night, Rashid Khalidi, who was also speaking, broke in to point out that Uri Grossman was killed in a war of aggression on Lebanon. I am sure the New Yorker piece didn’t get into that. And of course Khalidi is a one-time friend of Barack Obama’s whose insights the president could actually use now but who was mugged during the election campaign of 2008 on a largely-racial basis…
I do believe, prayerfully, that young Jews look at this discriminatory system, which is based on fear, and want nothing to do with it, but seek a more respectful and hopeful engagement with the Arab world.
