Dan Fleshler has a good account of our evening at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue on his blog (realistic dove). He says that progress was made among progressive Jews, though he also faults me for my own comments about the night, suggesting I was going in for Israel-bashing. And Ralph Seliger has blasted me in my comment thread, saying I’ve distorted the views of the progressive Zionist community.
I have to take some responsibility for this anger; I should have written up the night in a less adversarial manner. It was a night aimed at building understanding and maybe consensus, and in the consensus goal it partly failed. I feel bad about that, and I’m sorry I wasn’t more positive in my notes on the night. I think that my own confusions of identity confuse others. I’m Jewish, but both in and out of the Jewish community. Some of my harsh comments about the Jewish community’s solidarity with Israel have pleased antisemites, it’s obvious from some comments on my blog. And that in turn has scared the Dan Fleshlers of the world: the progressives who have been fighting the occupation for years. (I’m not regretting my confusions of identity; they are fascinating and important to me; they echo a long history of tensions at the fringe of the Jewish community, notably the modernizers vs. the traditionalists in the late 1700s in Germany, when Jews were leaving the ghettoes, per Jacob Katz.)
Politically the Dan Fleshlers of the world are way more sophisticated than I am. They’re engaged with real politicians, they have a clear goal: a two-state solution. They’ve worked for that, often nobly, for years. My own confusions about a binational state or a two-state solution make it hard for Dan to engage me politically. He wants the support of the left, he knows there are a lot of alienated-from-Israel Jews like myself. But he’s afraid of the corrosive attitudes, the anti-Zionism. For my part, I feel that the progressives have at times joined forces with the Likudnik bloc, or offered cover to the neocons for their anti-Muslim agenda.
It’s Sunday morning and I’m trying to speak about these things gently, not make stuff worse. The word community is important. These are scary times, politically, because a big realignment is taking place among political communities, and the peace camp is right in the middle of it all. They’re scared, as they should be, when rightwing evangelical Christians are honored at AIPAC for their support of Israel. Scared, I imagine, as well, when in the latest Commentary, Norman Podhoretz, who I used to think of as a secular Jew, says, in essence, "Hey we’re the chosen people, God gave us Jerusalem." This kind of messianism has always appalled the peace camp. And meantime, of course, they’re as frightened as anyone by Ahmadinejad. And in turn frightened by me, questioning the roots of Zionism, and dwelling on the Nakba, the expulsion of the Arabs in ’48. Dan called on me to temper some of my language. He doesn’t want me talking about dual loyalty, for instance.
Dan and I are going to have to agree to disagree on that. He doesn’t think that Israel’s security played a role in the policymakers’ minds. I think it did: that Israel’s view of the Arab world has become America’s in good measure because so many American policymakers and intellectuals confuse American and Israeli interests (and that this thinking must be anatomized because Iraq is one of the gravest disasters in American history).
On other issues, though, Dan and I agree: the horror of the occupation, the spiritual crisis Israel faces, the blind alley that violence represents for both Israeli and Palestinian society, the often-negative impact of the Israel lobby. In a sense it’s important that he and I find agreement, for we each represent components of the American lib/left that are going to have to work together if there is going to be justice in the Middle East. Maybe most importantly, Dan and I, and Meretz/USA too, agree on an idea of community: that this is not just a conversation among Jews (or among Zionists and the religious right), but among all Americans…
