Last weekend I joined my wife’s extended family on a mountain lake; and every time Gaza came up, my ears pricked up.
For instance, someone grabbed The New York Times business section with Bloomberg’s picture on the front and said “What’s Bloomberg up to?” and someone else said snarkily, “Going to Israel.” The article was about Bloomberg trying to become “mayor of the world” by going to Turkey and Indonesia to stop people from smoking. There was not a word in the article about the “mayor of the world” rushing out to embrace Netanyahu when Netanyahu was being criticized for the Gaza massacre. The Times left that out. But not my in-law.
Later the next-door cabin’s argument about Gaza spilled into our cabin. The neighbor said that Israel was justified in firing missiles because of the rockets, and his sister took sharp exception. I listened and nodded. Then an older relative of my wife pulled me aside, a rockribbed conservative, to offer me advice. “When they start up about the rockets, you have to talk about the siege. The siege. The siege. The siege. Those people are in a prison. How big is it? 140 square miles? Don’t give me that— square miles means nothing to people. Six miles by 25 miles? Say that! Say 2 million people are under siege inside 6 by 25 miles.”
I was surprised. I’ve never heard her speak so forcefully or knowledgeably on this subject.
Gaza has hit home for non-Jews in a way that nothing before has. They’re upset and they’re going to say something at last. My wife’s clan are privileged but civic-minded people, and what’s stopped them in the past is the Don’t-criticize-someone-else’s-family taboo, plus the anti-Semite label. It’s not going to work anymore. Maybe because they see so many Jews like myself engaged in the issue; maybe because they’re sick of the repeating wanton violence. But they’re going to break loose, and it’s an important trend. The church divestment measures are going to pass. The politicians are going to start feeling the heat from non-Jews who are tired of the well-worn loop they’ve walked: I hate this/I can’t say anything because my Jewish friends will be upset/I’ll wait till it goes away.
I remember when the divestment measure at Harvard and MIT in 2002 failed after Harvard President Lawrence Summers declared it anti-semitic. I talked to a professor who’d signed it who said he wanted to hide under the desk. He didn’t want to be accused of anti-Semitism; Jews were part of the fabric of elite academic settings, he didn’t want to be alienated from his Jewish colleagues. I remember when Steve Walt and John Mearsheimer spoke out as establishment non-Jews in 2006. I thought they were going to open the floodgates. But they didn’t; they were pioneers, the territory was still too dangerous. They were willing to get hit by the anti-semitic smear, but others weren’t. That was eight years ago, and there have been two Gaza massacres in between. As Mearsheimer said back in July, “How can any person with a shred of decency support what Israel is doing in Gaza?” As Jim Fallows said at the same time, this is like napalming kids in Vietnam. Some of my wife’s extended family feel the same way, and they want the freedom to say so.
Again I quote Andrew Sullivan, rejecting the old terms of debate:
[T]he thing that happens to me in this debate in America is that many of my Jewish friends cannot debate this, it seems to me, without extreme emotional investment in it, and that’s a very hard thing to deal with. It seems as if when you criticize Israel, every Jewish American takes it personally. That, I think, makes debate about this very tough.
That is of course emotional blackmail, and I don’t think it’s working anymore. There are too many prominent Jewish dissenters breaking up the Jewish unity on the issue and giving folks cover to criticize Israel. IfNotNow are young Jews dedicated to confronting Jewish establishment organizations for their moral deadness. Many liberal Zionists are embarrassed or in crisis: “I fear Israel has no idea how thoroughly it has lost international support,” says one. There are showbiz faces in Jewish Voice for Peace’s great video of Gaza names. And Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem are going to get away with calling it genocide.
When I was growing up I thought Protestants were boring because they didn’t have feelings. Then I married one and she explained to me that (while it was a generalization) they were boring because they repress their feelings– but they have the feelings. Well now they’re not going to repress them. And it won’t be boring.
you’re so right, of course it is emotional blackmail. i am so ready for this, so ready. i’ve been arguing for years the break will come when the masses speak out. and those masses in this country, for the most part, are not jewish.
and i had a very similar experience/conversation last saturday night. maybe i should write about that. wow.
This piece really resonated with me. Nicely done. I have been surprised by the reaction of family members when I broached this subject; surprised in a good way. One sibling amazed me with her knowledge of the issues.
Great and bracing article, Phil.
So true, and becoming more true every single day. Some of my friends don’t even wince when I bring it up.
I linked to an article earlier about a film that is coming out:
“Drama about Holocaust survivors’ illegal voyage to Palestine sets sail
Chris Columbus is to co-produce the drama, centered around the 1947 voyage of the SS Exodus from France to Palestine that was intercepted by the British navy”
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/aug/26/ss-exodus-holocaust-survivors-palestine-drama?commentpage=1
So many pro- Israelis are there expressing their allegiance that it truly smells like desperation in the comments section! One example:
“26 August 2014 3:33pm
I holiday with Palestinians (Israeli Arabs) in Eilat and Tiberias. Palestinians are helping me put my house together. If I want a pharmacist invariably its a Palestinian. Christian Palestinins are the single most educated group in Israel – more than Jews.
Our future is together. The problem is Arab society is very patriarchal and tribal and therefore very backward. It will take time for Arabs to reject these defects and realise that the Israeli way is the best way.
If you can speak to Palestinians anonymously they will tell you the same. It is telling that no Israeli Arab city wants to be included in a Palestinian state, they all want to remain part of Israel.”
(They’ve even brought up Zuheir Mohsen.)
Robert Naiman
Policy Director, Just Foreign Policy
If Liberal Zionism Were Dead, What Actions Would That Imply?
Posted: 08/26/2014 12:54 pm EDT
On Sunday, the New York Times ran an opinion piece by Antony Lerman, a former director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, with the provocative title, “The End of Liberal Zionism,” which raised the question of whether “Liberal Zionism” — broadly speaking, the ideology that has animated such “pro-Israel, pro-peace” groups as J Street and Americans for Peace Now — went from moribund to clinically dead during the recent (ongoing) Israeli assault on Gaza.
It’s an important, well-meaning, thoughtful piece that Americans who care about these issues should read. But in suggesting that we should abandon pursuit of the “two-state solution” to the conflict in favor of a “one state solution” that ensures equal rights for Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs in a single state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, the article fell into a common fallacy of left discussions about this issue.
The fallacy goes like this: there are two possible solutions to the Israel-Palestine conflict that would meet minimal standards of justice for the Palestinians: the two-state solution based on the 1967 borders, or a single binational state with equal rights for all. The main argument, from the point of view of justice for the Palestinians, for preferring the two-state solution over the equal-rights one state solution has been that the two-state solution appeared to be much more politically realistic: it was plausible that the Israeli government would agree under international pressure to implement the two-state solution. The two-state solution has clearly failed, the argument goes: therefore, the only remaining option is the equal-rights one-state solution.
This argument is like saying: I have two choices for a career. I could be a lawyer or I could be an astronaut. I thought that being a lawyer was more realistic, so I went for that. But I failed the bar exam repeatedly because I didn’t study hard enough. Since the strategy of becoming a lawyer failed, I should now try to be an astronaut instead, since that is the only other choice.
The problem with this argument is: becoming an astronaut is much harder than becoming a lawyer. If you don’t have the discipline to become a lawyer, you probably don’t have the discipline to become an astronaut.
The problem that this argument never seriously engages is: What is the process that will compel the Israeli government, which is already enjoying a “one state solution” in which it does not have to grant equal rights to Palestinians, to accept a one state solution in which it does have to grant equal rights to Palestinians?
The answer given to this question, to the extent that an answer is given to this question, is that “boycott, divestment, and sanctions” on the Israeli government will eventually bring about sufficient pressure on the Israeli government to compel the Israeli government to accept an equal rights one state solution, “just like it did to apartheid South Africa.” Some people seem to think that is sufficient argument that the equal rights one state advocates have a plausible political strategy to reach their goal.
But even if you and I and everyone we know could agree to the proposition that the experience of Palestinians under Israeli rule is very similar to the experience of black South Africans under apartheid, that would only matter to the degree that the world would agree that faced with the same situation from the point of view of the victims, they should advocate for the same political solution, and, crucially, apply a similar amount of pressure to achieve the same political solution.
In other words: in order for the BDS-South Africa equal rights one state story to work, the same actors — the same governments and political groups — who have failed to compel the Israeli government to accept the two-state solution would have to use the same tools of pressure on the Israeli government that they have so far refused to use to bring about the two-state solution — a solution that they officially endorse — in order to bring about the equal rights one state solution, a solution that they are very far away from officially endorsing.
In other words: the core problem is not one state or two states. The core problem is the failure to organize effective pressure on the Israeli government to force it to change its policies. Why would we think that “abandoning the two-state solution” is a solution to the problem of the failure to organize effective pressure on the Israeli government to force it to change its policies?
The most crucial failing of the Liberal Zionists has not been that they have a morally contradictory ideology that cannot manage the tension between the liberal value of equality and the Zionist assumption of Jewish supremacy in Palestine. The most crucial failing of the Liberal Zionists has been that they have been politically passive, unwilling to fight politically for their stated beliefs, using the same nonviolent political pressure tactics that a labor union or an environmental group or a women’s group would use to force the changes in government policy that they want.
There is a boycott of SodaStream, an Israeli company that is based in an Israeli settlement in the West Bank. Liberal Zionists claim that they oppose Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Many Liberal Zionists personally support the boycott of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Why aren’t Liberal Zionists leading the campaign in the United States to boycott SodaStream? Why are so many content with merely personally supporting a boycott, instead of engaging in organizing that would have much broader political impact?
There is a divestment campaign against Caterpillar, which supplies bulldozers to the Israeli military to destroy Palestinian homes in the West Bank. The Presbyterian Church supports this divestment campaign. Liberal Zionists claim that they oppose destroying Palestinian homes in the West Bank. Why aren’t Liberal Zionists leading the campaign to divest from Caterpillar?
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas went to the United Nations seeking recognition for a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, in a diplomatic bid to save the two-state solution. For this peaceful diplomatic move President Abbas was viciously attacked by the Zionist right and the “one state” left. Why didn’t Liberal Zionists forcefully defend President Abbas when he was taking heavy fire for peacefully advocating the position that they claim to support?
Liberal Zionists claim that they care about Congress. Why don’t Liberal Zionist groups ever send their members an alert asking them to contact their representatives in Congress in support of any form of pressure whatsoever on the Israeli government to bring about the policies that the Liberal Zionists claim to support?
The core problem with the Liberal Zionists, the key reason that they are politically moribund, is not that they believe in Zionism, but that they do not believe in organizing effective pressure on the Israeli government to bring about the policies that the Liberal Zionists claim to support. The problem is not that they support two states; the problem is that they are “two-state fakers,” people who claim to support the two-state solution but oppose the pressure on the Israeli government necessary to bring it about.
“Abandoning the two-state solution” doesn’t address this problem at all. And, until now, the “abandon the two-state solution” people have no realistic strategy at all for trying to engage and move the U.S. government, or any other government. For people who care about changing government policies, the problem of the failure to organize effective pressure on the Israeli government to change its policies is what should dominate our attention, rather than academic and philosophical debates on ideology.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/if-liberal-zionism-were-d_b_5711671.html
The real revolution will occur when someday, soon I hope, Americans will get fed up with this whole business and realize that, in the end, it’s Israel’s problem and the Arab world’s problem. Neither liberal American Jews nor boring American WASPS can change that.