Last night I heard Steven Krubiner, a J Street director for its Israel program, speak at a church in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. I’ll have a lot more to say about the appearance, and my turbulent response to it, later, but one quick cool take:
Krubiner’s message during the talk was very different from his comments to people who came up to him after the talk. Specifically, in his talk, Krubiner did not once mention the occupation, did not mention the humiliations of the Palestinian people, said nothing about the creeping fascism inside Israeli political life. No: the talk was all about the existential threat to the Jewish state posed by the failure of the American government to pressure Israel to make a deal with the Palestinians so that a Jewish majority would be preserved in Israel.
In short, the talk was pitched to American Jews. It was aimed at creating urgency in their minds about getting the U.S. on the ball before the Jewish state goes into the dustbin of history.
Now Krubiner is an amiable, highly-presentable young man who is comfortable in the company of Israeli generals (he’s welcoming a group of them today! o welcome to the dock, Gaza planner!) and congressmen (he brought a bunch to the holy land not long ago), and he knows the story. Though he loves Israel, lives there half the time, he knows the place is no picnic, and when people went up to him afterward, he acknowledged that there is a “McCarthyist” trend in some of the Israeli Knesset initiatives, and he spoke movingly of the occupation. He said: “People are tired of occupation….” Palestinians can’t have a real economy “in the context of occupation. [In Ramallah] some of them call it a five-star occupation.” Then he spoke of Palestinians waiting two hours at a checkpoint to go to a Jerusalem hospital. And a little girl “watching her father lose his integrity in front of an 18 year old soldier.” Yes, Krubiner!
The question is: Why doesn’t Krubiner highlight these Patent and Widespread Horrors in his actual talk, and the answer is, American Jewish opinion. His audience is Jews. The non-Jews in the crowd were chopped liver. He is concerned about changing Jewish opinion, and he is working on the conservative Jews in the crowd, the ones who give money to the Democratic Party and maybe give to J Street and transform the lobby. So he took care to say a couple nice things about AIPAC (!) and not to breathe a word about the occupation, and he was a little defensive about J Street’s stance last winter when it opposed Obama’s shameful veto of the anti-settlements resolution in the U.N. Security Council. Krubiner said in effect, I know many Jews don’t support us on this stance, but we wanted Obama to stick by his policy. Krubiner had trouble getting the word “settlements” out of his mouth.
This is the essence of my difference with J Street. An appeal that rests inside the Jewish community will be spavined by the fears and conservatism of that community. You can’t even mention the occupation! The Jewish community will only leave the desert of collective blindness on Jim Crow in Israel and Palestine with the help of non-Jews. Keep the conversation inside our community, and we’re lost.
