As many of you know, the Simon Wiesenthal Center is building a museum of “tolerance” on a Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem. You can see the construction walls in this picture’s middle ground, amidst the gravestones.
Another branch of the LA-based Wiesenthal center is on 42d Street in New York; and last night demonstators from Jews Say No picketed the center for Islamophobia. They object to the construction as a “clear and gross violation of the human rights of all …whose families are buried there,” and also to the fact that the Simon Wiesenthal Center leadership has opposed the Islamic center in Lower Manhattan. Tolerance…
Inside the NY center, they were holding a panel on Iran and Turkey. They promoted the event with a scare poster: “Should Israel Bomb Natanz?” A friend gave me $20 to go inside, and I did.
The panel went on for an hour and a half or so and I did not hear one statement about the American people’s interest in bombing Iran or alienating Turkey. Not one. In a panel moderated by JJ Goldberg, the former editor of the Forward, with at least four Americans on stage, there was not one moment of reflection, in an American space, about what was good for the American people.
There was a lot of talk about what the U.S. must do for Israel. David Pollock of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy called on the US to sit down with Turkey to urge it to make up with Israel. David Menashri of Tel Aviv University said that Iran was a threat to the free world, and the U.S. had to talk to Iran (before stopping it from getting nuclear weapons). A staffer at Dor Chadash (whose name I didn’t get, Dahlia something) called on the U.S. to “do what it should do” and attack Iran. Goldberg made the joke that Americans were coming up on their Turkey day, but that was about it.
This is the narrowness of the Israel lobby. They are really concerned, all the time, with what’s best for Israel. Amid all the discussion at the event about making a deal with the Palestinians for the sake of regional peace, there was not one reference to Palestinian human rights. Not one comment about the 43-year-long occupation and what it does to Palestinians.
The organization behind the event, Dor Chadash, is dedicated to building ties between American Jews and Israel and well, you wonder why young American Jews are headed for the exits. Self-centeredness. Pollock said that the Israelis ought to apologize to the Turks for the “unwanted deaths” of nine people on the Mavi Marmara, one of whom was an American, by the way. Menashri jumped in to say that the Israelis shouldn’t apologize to the Turks, but “apologize to our own people for this unwise action.”
Kill eight Turks and one Turkish-American and apologize to yourself. Is that Jewish?
Oh and this. Someone asked Pollock from the audience what a peace with the Palestinians would achieve because then Israel was still 20 percent Palestinian and this was a recipe for “conflict inside Israel” because they are the “same family” as the other Palestinians.
A Palestinian state, Pollock said, arguably, “doesn’t solve the demographic problem, it reduces it, postpones the day of reckoning, puts it in a different context, but doesn’t eliminate the problem completely.” Because of the Palestinians’ contact with brothers and cousins and the nationalistic impulse that a Palestiinian state would create. Things could go in a “more difficult or even dangerous direction… there is some risk of that.” But “probably at least putting the bulk of this demographic problem across a border helps to reduce the temperature of the conflict.” The upside is that Arabs in Israel prefer to be citizens of Israel, and are willing to make the practical accommodations that that requires. And Pollock thinks it’s manageable for Israel to have even 30 percent Arab minority. “That’s OK, that’s quite manageable.”
And you wonder why young American Jews, growing up in a multicultural society, are headed for the exits. Postponing the day of reckoning, indeed.
