Today is a great day. Everywhere around us there are signs that the old power arrangements with respect to Israel/Palestine are ending.
French President Sarkozy has convened a Mediterranean union that is focusing on ending the greatest contributor to disorder: Israel/Palestine. There is a shot here of Olmert and Abbas with their arms around one another hoping for peace. This is the Sarkozy who bluntly told the Knesset that the settlements must go! Saying what Bush could only mumble and that Obama is powerless to say here, for a simple reason, because of the Israel lobby in American politics.
In Abu Dhabi, meanwhile, there is a new English language newspaper called The National, which is wildly hopeful about changing the old narrative of the Middle East. Here its New York correspondent Sharmila Devi writes a positive piece about the formation of J Street that includes this statement from a Palestinian:
“The Palestinian leadership has grossly overlooked an influential
and interested sector in American society: American Jews who don’t
support Israel’s occupation,” said a former adviser to the Palestine
Liberation Organisation in Ramallah, who requested his name not be used. “Such
American Jews are not a fringe minority. Instead, they are mainstream
Americans who are conscientious and who could be empowered by, in part,
outreach from a Palestinian leadership who understood that allies need
guidance and support to be effective.”
Isn’t that amazing? It is a hint of the power that lies in a coalition of Arabs and American Jews. Meanwhile in New York, precisely that alliance, Adalah, a Jewish-Palestinian group, continues to lead a boycott of Leviev, the bankroller of colonization, and tries to extend that boycott to Dubai, and the same Abu Dhabi newspaper is quoting Richard Silverstein, the Seattle activist with the influential site Tikun Olam, and also JATO, Jews Against the Occupation.
The old alliances have failed. They are discredited everywhere in the world except in New York and Washington–the alliance of the traditional Jewish leadership and the Christian right and the Israeli right, wagging the dog. That old alliance held its sway through Never-againism, the fear of the Holocaust happening again. Of course this narrative continues to have huge power in the American Jewish community, which feels it is holding the breathing tube for the state of Israel, but that power is fading by the minute. Note that Douglas Feith is utterly disavowing his old ideology in order to rehabilitate himself, and no one is listening, they are talking about Joe Klein’s charge that the neocons have “divided loyalties.” Feith’s faith was shaped by the Holocaust, and understandably: it claimed his father’s entire family. But it led Feith down the wrong path, to call for One Jerusalem and other neocon dreams of Jewish redemption. These narratives are hopeless. The clash of civilizations and Podhoretz’s World War IV are hysterias bred of the Holocaust.
We too are escaping the Holocaust, in our own way, 60 years later. The old order is crumbling around us. Remember that Sharon told French Jews that they should move to Israel, France was unsafe, but that also was hysteria; and now it is Sarkozy taking the lead in peace talks that Dennis Ross and others with connections to AIPAC turned into a farce in the U.S. from 92 on, when, mindful of George Bush I’s fateful confrontation with the lobby, our presidential campaigns first began to underwrite the illegal and hateful colonization process in order to gain Jewish support. I believe Obama will step coldly out of these entanglements with the help of Europe. His adviser Dan Kurtzer has said that the U.S. peace negotiators must be diverse–there must be Arabs–just as that unnamed Palestinian is telling the National, We must reach out to liberal Jews.
I’m full of hope. And lest anyone fails to understand why this is happening, why this has urgency, here is a simple story that my friend Saifedean Ammous relates this weekend. His sister Dana lives in Ramallah, in the Occupied Territories. Last week her best friend got married in Amman. Dana Ammous went to the Allenby Bridge on Wednesday or Thursday to go through to Jordan for the wedding. But the Israelis had decided that day to cut back on border crossing guards, and so they arbitrarily shut down the crossing in the afternoon, turning hundreds of Palestinians away. Dana Ammous missed her best friend’s wedding.
This is no gross outrage–like Mohammed Omer’s torture at the same crossing ten days before–, it is a small one, an ordinary one. One that none of us would tolerate in our lives without kicking and screaming and maybe a federal case. And it speaks to the constant and countless human toll that this occupation has caused, which the Arab world has known about for decades now, and which the rest of the world is waking up to.
