Yesterday Richard Silverstein offered a criticism of Times reporter Ethan Bronner’s comments on the Nakba:
[Ethan] Bronner has done a good job of channeling a certain Israeli
nationalist perspective on the necessity of retaining Jewish dominance
within the State of Israel. But what he hasn’t done is allow for the
transformation of such attitudes over time. Look at the racial
attitudes of white America toward African-Americans before 1954...Can anyone now imagine an Arab running for president or prime
minister of Israel? Perhaps not. But it will happen as surely as Barack
Obama is now running for president. Time heals wounds as long as people
really attempt to grapple with the issues that divide them. In my heart
of hearts, I believe that they, and Israel, will find a way to realize
the deepest aspirations of Arab and Jew within Israel.…[F]or Israel
to realize the full meaning of its democratic nature and its
Declaration of Independence, developments must gradually move toward
Israel becoming a state of all its citizens. Otherwise, Israel will be
an ethnocracy with truncated rights for its Arab minority. [All emphases mine]
Prophetic. Now flash back nearly 20 years, the most important moment in the making of Barack Obama, the Harvard Law Review’s presidential election of 1990. From the Boston Globe:
In the fall of 1989, when Obama returned to campus for his second year,
students were protesting the lack of minority law school faculty. They
staged sit-ins in the law library, camped outside the office of Dean
Robert C. Clark, and carried signs that read "Diversity Now" and
"Homogeneity Feeds Hatred."[In February 1990, the election lasted] until just after midnight, when only Obama and a 24-year-old Harvard graduate named David Goldberg remained contenders .
At
about 12:30 a.m., the editors called Obama into the room, told him he
had won, and broke into applause. [Kenneth] Mack, another black editor, pulled
Obama in for a hug."It was a hard hug, and it lasted a while,"
Obama told the Harvard Law Record, the school newspaper, at the time.
"At that point, I realized this was not just an individual thing. . .
but something much bigger."
A few additions to this important parable of American life: Obama’s presidency put him on front pages around the country and led to his book deal. The Globe’s fine reporting was done by Michael Levenson and Jonathan Saltzman, who I assume are like myself, upper-middle-class Jews drawn to journalism. David Goldberg is, I believe, a progressive lawyer specializing in public law in New York, working for poor women denied health care.
The Declaration of independence that Silverstein cites promised that Israel would " ensure complete equality
of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of
religion, race or sex…"
The lesson of this story is a simple one. After World War II, Jews in America and Israel set out to guarantee civil rights to all, even in the wake of horrors like the Holocaust and slavery/segregation. In America, we also were a minority, and Jewish activists in the David Goldberg tradition succeeded beyond the world’s wildest dreams. In Israel we have utterly failed. Homogeneity breeds hatred. Diversity now.
