Nearly two weeks ago Larry Derfner wrote a landmark blogpost called “The awful, necessary truth about Palestinian terror,” which said Palestinians had a right to violently resist occupation. Then there was an uproar and he apologized for the post and removed it from his website, but the damage was done, and he lost his job at the Jerusalem Post for it. The Forward has printed his latest mea culpa. Amazingly, it says nothing about his losing his job. It has a very whipped feeling about it. Contrast this hang-dog sentiment with, say, Juan Williams bashing NPR for firing him and you get a sense of how little actual discourse there is in Israel on this fundamental question, Does oppression breed violent resistance? (Yes.)
When the eight Israelis were killed near Eilat, I was in Sweden on vacation with my family. I came back a couple of days after and wanted to write a strong blog post. I have a lot of thoughts about the use of terrorism in a good cause — Palestinian independence, Jewish independence, anti-colonialism, anti-apartheid — but I always told myself not to treat this subject in a column because I wouldn’t have the space to fully explain myself, to put in all the caveats, to make a point that covered all the pros and cons and conditions in the right proportions. If I tried to write about something so big and so raw as terrorism in the abbreviated, narrow way a column demands, a lot of people could get the wrong idea, and in Israel that could be a real problem.
God, I wish I hadn’t forgotten that resolution. When I came back from vacation after the Eilat attack, the strongest blog post I thought I could write was to challenge the taboo against suggesting that Israel bore any responsibility at all for Palestinian terrorism.
But how could I make my point in a way I hadn’t before? What could I write that would be new and thought provoking? I was sitting in my workroom at home. I didn’t want to spend too long on it. And I jumped right into the post by taking an extremely large, easily-misunderstood idea — that the stifling of freedom breeds rebellion, which I believe — and expressed it in a way that was so crude that it conveyed something I don’t believe at all. It took me a few days to realize, but what I wrote in that August 21 blog, “The awful, necessary truth about Palestinian terror,” grossly oversimplified what I think of Palestinian terror in a way that was, as some critics said, “obscene.” It also stood in head-on opposition to my allegiance to Israel…..
The blog post was a disaster in every possible way. It deeply offended and outraged many people. The apology I published last Friday, however, softened many people’s feelings, convinced them that I’d at least meant well. To my own reading and that of many other readers, my decent intentions were apparent in the original post. But in Israel and the Diaspora, this view has been drowned out in the uproar.
I’ve read that some of my fellow leftists think this affair may actually help make it easier to talk with Israelis about the connection between the occupation and terror. Maybe. I don’t know. I’ve been talking to Israelis about that connection for many years, and what this affair teaches me is how not to do it. I’ve been taking the argument further and further and further, and now I’ve crashed into the wall. I don’t think my opinions have changed, but I have to find new ways to articulate them, ways that reconcile my principles of justice with my allegiance to Israel, instead of sacrificing one or both out of recklessness.
I have some thinking to do.
I find the most crushing moment here Derfner stating that he wrote something he doesn’t “believe at all.” You see a man afflicted by his conscience, which is the voice of his community. Moving and sad reflection on how the Zionist community is constituted in and out of Israel.
The piece does call Palestinian independence a “good cause” and seems to equate Jewish terrorism with Palestinian terrorism, but it is interesting to me that the Forward, seeking to serve an old liberal friend, has deferred to the reactionary feeling inside that society that has so shamed Derfner. And when Derfner says that the reaction came from the Diaspora too– i.e, the readers of the Forward– well, what does that tell you?
Derfner continues to have my deep sympathy. He is in the midst of a spiritual crisis, he wrote a very important piece that he will one day go into the history books for. My question to Derfner: Did the support and sympathy you got from the left, including anti-Zionists, cut any emotional ice with you?
