On Friday the American Jewish Committee held a debate between Yossi Klein Halevi and Peter Beinart on the question, Is Liberal Zionism an oxymoron? And are young American Jews becoming estranged from Israel, and what can we do about it?
The AJC must be thanked for pitting Zionists– and Beinart must be congratulated for his bracing acknowledgments of Jewish political power and Jewish murderousness as reflected in the genocidal Purim story, which you will find near the end of the remarks I transcribe below.
It turned out the debate wasn’t about Jews being turned off by Zionism, it was the fretful eternal question now in Jewish circles: Can the two-state solution be achieved/do we even want such a solution? And from there, to the seven circles of emotional hell, with Halevi leading the way: Don’t you understand why we are afraid of a Palestinian state? You must honor our fears!! Thus he challenges Beinart to express “your most basic Jewish intuitive sense of where we are today in terms of our vulnerability…”
And god knows that Beinart, even while injecting the note that Israel is about to be an apartheid state (no these folks never acknowledge the actual reality), does his best to honor the fears, telling a story about his college friend who he used to run with who was blown up in Israel.
Emotionalism on emotionalism, dignified as a discussion of human rights. And all this in the face of a population of 4-5 million under occupation, with no rights. As Beinart acknowledged, were a Palestinian on the dais, the whole conversation would be laughable.
But there was no Palestinian in the discussion. There is never one. And I would note, these emotional claims are powerful. They have held American policy for over 60 years. As Halevi said repeatedly, and Beinart acknowledged, it is the sacred responsibility of Diaspora Jewry to defend the Jewish state; and so let us be clear: Palestinian statelessness (over 7 decades in which Pakistanis, Kosovars, Uzbekistanis, Papuans and East Timorese have gotten their states), is an American Jewish achievement.
The frankness about the importance of the Israel lobby is for me the most surprising aspect of this conversation. Now that Israeli occupation is under assault by the boycotters and the Turks and the Arab spring, supporters of Israel are so fretful that they have abandoned their denial of the lobby’s power and are openly calling on American Jews to preserve the state. Throughout his comments, Halevi addresses the obligation of American Jews to support Israel no matter what, and Beinart agrees. He says that Israel is continuous with the Diaspora, and the liberal American Jewish relationship with Israel preserves Israeli democracy (such as it is). Indeed, he has now indoctrinated his son with Israeli flags in his room so that he will understand that Israel is his “patrimony and birthright” and he must defend it.
Israel is continuous with the Israel lobby, in this conversation.
By the way, “patrimony.” When I used this word to describe an artistic inheritance in an Art in America article back in the 90s, my friend Maud Lavin, a feminist writer, busted me for sexism. Justly. But the Israel lobby is a patriarchal thing, just like colonialism. And you wonder why young Jews want elbow room? Beinart is a throwback.
Before my notes on the conversation, one more point. Halevi’s fears about the two-state solution are not Jerusalem but the right of return. He doesn’t want those Palestinian refugees coming back to the villages from which they or their grandparents were cleansed because of course it will threaten the Jewish majority. And Beinart honors these fears– just 100,000 refugees, he says, will make the medicine go down– and meantime is indoctrinating his privileged American child to believe that this country in the Middle East is his “birthright.” I don’t understand this, it is essentially a religious construction like the white salamander and the red heifer and the holy ghost and Muhammed’s steed… and it is the basis of policy?
My notes.
Settlements.
Beinart: “The settlement of Ariel makes functional Palestinian contiguity extremely difficult…” And failing to give it up with “move the Palestinians to demand a one state solution, in which case we will all be in worse shape than we are today.”
Halevi says that settlements are not an issue. Beinart: “There are no Palestinians on the dais, virtually no Palestinians in the room. That statement to Palestinian public opinion is laughable.”
Right of return.
Beinart insists on a recognition of “my right of return to greater Israel in exchange for Palestinian right of return to greater Palestine.. this is the goal and this is the vision.” And in order to achieve that goal, Israel must “declare an open and unequivocal settlement freeze…. to take the issue of settlements off the table…” and thereby deal with “the real obstacle to peace… the continued Paletinian insistence on refugee return to greater Palestine, which means the state of Israel.” 100,000 refugees returning to Israel over 10 years is “a price worth paying. When the alternative is either apartheid or a non-Jewish state.”
“I would absolutely oppose any refugee return that I believe would threaten Israel’s character as a Jewish state. I believe that history shows that we have a right to a Jewish and a democratic state.”
Halevi: “[In the Palestine papers, you will see a] deep Palestinian commitment to right of return.” It must be made clear to them: “Not one refugee to return to Israel, not one descendant of a refugee to return to Israel, as a matter of principle…. even as we pull our settlers out from our right to greater Israel.” And diminish “the right of Jewish people to sovereignty” in their own land.
Beinart: Refugees is the Palestinians’ “most neuralgic issue.” The only way Abbas can sell a deal in the refugee camps of Syria and Lebanon is to say, the right of return has been extinguished but “look what I’m giving you, I’m giving you a viable Palestinian state, we will finally have a state of our own.”
Halevi challenges Beinart to be more fearful:
“I wish we could hear from you some sense of the anxieties and fears that we’re going through in Israel [over the prospect of a Palestinian state].”
Directing Beinart, he adds, you cannot “abandon Israel in an arena (the UN) in which Israel is condemned more than any other country…” Yes you can tell us when we’re wrong. But gently. “Tell us in a way where I see some reflection of the reality that I see day to day.”
Beinart responds to the emotional blackmail.
“When I dropped my son off at pre-K, he was making an Israeli flag.” This will be the third Israeli flag to adorn his room, two provided by Beinart. “That’s why I do things like this. Because I believe that the miracle of Israeli democracy is his patrimony and his birthright and I want him to defend it.”
And if there is no citizenship granted to non-Jews, he wont be able to defend it.
Nakba.
Beinart says that “in the marrow of their soul,” Palestinians “need a recognition of the horror of what happened to them in 1948. And for them it was a horror, even though for us it was an enormous enormous blessing” leading to an “extraordinary accomplishment, I would say miracle that is the creation of Israeli democracy.”
Halevi refers to the 1948 “trauma” then later the “Nakba.” “One of the crucial psychological barriers to peace is the Arab world’s refusal to accept even partial responsibility for what happened in 1948… They led what Azzam Pasha [head of the Arab League] declared as a war of extermination….
“I agree there is partial Jewish responsibility. we need to own up to it, but by no means to take exclusive blame…”
Two-state tango.
Beinart: We have an Israeli prime minister whose entire career has been opposed to a Palestinian state. And whose recent statement in favor is by “virtue of American pressure.” Only about a third of Israelis are willing to divide Jerusalem. So American pressure is essential.
Halevi: We need an Israeli troop presence in the Jordan valley, “especially when the Arab world is seething and we don’t know whether the Muslim Brotherhood will take over Jordan.”
Assimilation
Beinart: Assimilation is “a terrible problem in the american jewish community, one we’ve responded to abysmally.” We have the “worst and weakest Jewish school system in the world.” And still there is in fact a lot of evidence, that even among young American Jews who are not assimilating, “they are deeply alienated by Israel’s policies and the face of Israel…”
The only Israel they have known is an Israel that has 100,000s of people living outside its democratic borders. We have to show them “that Israel has the capacity to be a true democracy in all the land that it controls…. a lived [democratic] reality in which we can take enormous pride.”
More fear.
Halevi says that only a minority of Palestinians believe that Israel “deserves its corner of the Middle East.” When we face the Palestinians, “we are goliath.” But when we face the Arab world, “then we are David.”
Then: Imagine the day when Netanyahu will have to pull out the settlers in Hebron. He will send the army into Hebron and extract not just settlers but children and grandchildren of original settlers who were born there.
Beinart: “God forbid, we’ll have another israeli prime minister assassinated for trying to give land to peace.”
Audience member asks, what about the so-called one state solution?
Beinart: “I am deeply opposed to a 1 state solution, whether it’s one state with democracy, meaning that Israel’s future as a Jewish state will be deeply threatened… or one state with large numbers of people barred from citizenship. That is the day that it gives me chills just to think about, the day we will have to face that reality….
“I believe in the possibility of liberal Zionism. i believe in the possibility of democratic liberal Zionism.”
Halevi says that the two state solution is regarded by Palestinians as a “preliminary agreement, the first step toward an eventual beautiful one state solution.” This is “very much the thinking of the Palestinian leadership.” If you leave Salam Fayyad out of it, and Sari Nusseibeh. “It is the normative thinking within the Palestinian national movement… [two states is an] interim agreement, and then as we say in the Middle East, god is great.”
More fear. Beinart is challenged by the moderator to show some empathy for Jewish victims of terror.
He tells a story. “When I was at Yale I used to go running late at night, at midnight.” Crazy guys came by his room. And as they ran, they did “divrei Torah,” commentary on that week’s reading from the Torah. One of the crazy guys wanted to be a rabbi. He went to the Jewish Theological Seminary and married a woman he met there. Then in 1996 he was blown up by a Hamas bus bomber in Jerusalem. Beinart had wanted him to be the rabbi at his wedding….
Halevi keeps his foot on the pedal.
One moment here, Peter, when you’re analyzing European Jews’ connection to Israel, how can you leave out their vulnerability? How can you leave out the European threat. It’s telling.. of what you’re not analyzing, the Jewish reality. I agree with you about the end to end the occupation. But where is your most basic Jewish intuitive sense of where we are today in terms of our vulnerability. You wrote one line in your piece in the New York Review of Books that was so deeply deeply troublilng to me, the notion of Jewish victimimization strikes young American Jews as I forget if you said, ludicrous or pathetic. I thought, who is speaking about victimization?”
Now Beinart was quoting Netanyahu saying, it’s 1938 again, but Halevi said, “I personally would not evoke 1938 in talking about Iran. But what we are talking about in Israel is not victimization, it’s vulnerability. And that’s a big difference, Peter. We don’t see ourselves as victims, we see ourselves as profoundly threatened, and that vice is tightening, and dont confuse that with self pity and a sense of victimization.”
Beinart rallies. This is where I’m with him all the way.
We are “radically more accepted” today than we were in the 1930s. The former president wants his daughter to marry a Jew wearing a kipa. Robert Putnam calls Jews “the most esteemed Jewish group in America.” [From this review: “Jews are the most accepted of any [religious] group.”]
The Labor Party in Britain has a “proudly Jewish leader, Sarkozy proudly acknowledges his own Jewish heritage… we have to have some historical context.”
The obligations of the Israel lobby.
Halevi:
“The great post Holocaust achievement of the Jewish people, specifically the state of Israel and of American Jewry, was to rejoin the international community as a self-defining Jewish collective. That historic achievement is now under profound assault from without and from within.”
From without, the effort to “reghettoize the Jewish state” by the boycott movement.
From within– rightwing extremism, fundamentalist groups, who almost welcome ghettoization and isolation among the nations.
“What this moment requires of Jews I believe is to fight for the preservation of that historical acheivement of Israel and the American Jewish community and that achievement was based on an alliance between the state of Israel and American Jewry.”
In assessing where we are as a people, Halevi says, there are two basic camps, Passover Jews and Purim Jews. Passover Jews remember that they were a stranger in the land of Egypt, so they have a universalist orientation. While Purim Jews remember Amalek– “remember that you live in a world with genocide as a potential threat.”
“Dont be brutal,” says the Passover Jews. “Don’t be naive,” says the Purim Jew.
We need a Jewish persona able to reconcile remember you are a stranger in Egypt and remember you live with genocidal threats. And any effort to separate those strands produces “profound distortions in the Jewish personality… Think of Judge Goldstone.”
Beinart’s response also emphasizes the power of American Jews:
Yes, there’s a multidimensional Jewish personality, but it is lost in organizational American Jewish life today, where leaders “focus only on Israel’s threats on without.”
“The struggle of how to wield Jewish power is at the center of our existence today.” Look at what we were enjoined to do with Amalek– and Beinart doesn’t say it, but he means the murders, licensed by the state, of more than 75,000 Persians to revenge a plot against the Jews: “That is something we should be deeply disturbed about.. [there is] no level of public reflection and coming to terms with that.”
He blasts the “unZionist passivity,” of allowing Israeli democracy to fall apart, we need to abandon.
“As Ehud Olmert said, very wisely, The link between American Jews and Israel runs through Israeli democracy. That’s why Louis Brandeis loved Israel, that’s what… has always been central to American Zionism, our ability to see our ideals expressed in a liberal democratic Israel. Not exactly our political system, but the same basic ideals. But if Israeli democracy falls, we will have a crisis in American Jewish Israeli relations like none we have ever seen, the relationship, the alliance the closeness, runs through the preservation of Israeli democracy.”
This is denial. There is no democracy in the lands that Israel controls, except for Jews. American Jews don’t really care about democracy, they care about ethnocentrism. [Update, as Hophmi points out below, this is too glib. I should have said “by and large don’t care”; there are great exceptions.] And the failure of that democracy and the implication of American Jews in that failure, is yes, sadly, corrupting our spiritual life in this country. Which I also care deeply about, even if I didn’t go jogging at midnight with other parochial Jews at my Ivy League college.
