Adam sent me this photo today from a doctor’s waiting room. The article is all about wine from the Judean Hills around Jerusalem. At least one of the vineyards is in the West Bank, in the illegal settlement of Psagot (and others vaguely alluded to are in the Golan); but the article doesn’t refer to settlements. And that’s the point, there is no Green Line. Israel is on both sides. So this is an article celebrating settlement products, from B’nai B’rith, the 170-year-old voice of the global Jewish community and a champion of “human rights.” The settlement project, now approaching its jubilee year, is embraced by the American Jewish establishment.
At Huffington Post, Robert Naiman of Just Foreign Policy argues that liberal Zionists could force our government to pressure Israel to accept a two-state solution if they only engaged:
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.
Right. They haven’t done that because a policy of official Jewish cohesion — B’nai B’rith’s program — means sticking by the settlers. So they never grabbed the opportunity for a two-state solution offered by the Palestinians and the Arab League because they didn’t want to sell out a large portion of their community. J Street never really took a hard line against settlements. I remember asking a J Street official how he felt about settlement wine I was served at a bar mitzvah. I wouldn’t drink it, he said. But the organization refused to boycott it.
Now it’s one state, and Naiman says the most effective course of political action is to engage liberal Zionists; because the two-state solution is more realistic than a one-state solution because there is “official” acceptance of the two-state solution, and even if we all want equal rights for all citizens of Israel and Palestine, there is no realistic program to force western governments to force Israel to accept equal rights. (I’m not convinced. The movement inside Jewish life is for equal rights, BDS is for equal rights and gains more traction every month, and the most contested territory in the Middle East is between American Jews’ ears. What if they reflected their own political reality and abandoned the belief in the need for a Jewish state? B’nai B’rith would have to accept that, the same way they bought Zionism as an expression of Jewish consensus.)
“B’nai B’rith would have to accept that, the same way they bought Zionism as an expression of Jewish consensus.)”
Do they? Have to accept it? Couldn’t they simply dissolve the organization, if it comes to that? Re-emerge under another name. Or are they obligated in some way to reflect changing ideas in the ‘Jewish community’? I’m not sure they are, but I’d love to be wrong.
Anyway, I think we will see parallel, or even competing organizations assuming the non-Zionist functions of Jewish organizations, and Jewish religious functions, before we see the established Jewish- Zionist organizations change in a substantial way.