Here is an editorial from my favorite newspaper decrying the disruption of the Palestinian olive harvest by violent settlers during the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. Thus spake Haaretz:
They have been stealing the land of powerless farmers for decades [my emphasis] and do not recoil from stealing the fruit of these farmers' humble land. A society that declares its longing for peace cannot accept such malicious Jewish terror against innocent Palestinian civilians.
I agree; and I have a strong reaction to this. These Jewish guys have been "stealing the land of powerless farmers for decades" and Haaretz says that the society they're from, Israel, does nothing about it really. Nothing. And Diaspora Jewry encourages the theft and abuse. Diaspora Jewry explains away these pogroms and racisms again and again, and will not permit them to be argued in the media or our political campaigns, even as we give more money to Israel than all of sub-Saharan Africa combined.
I'm back to American Jewry, and our great negative achievement, which I mentioned days ago: "In a country that is so tuned to human rights abuses in
other places, politicians
are simply not allowed to talk about Palestinian suffering. Never. And this is our achievement." It's really astonishing. And my former professor Michael Walzer has himself said something of the same thing, at Yivo, here, a quote I am going to keep quoting unto the last day:
"It may be that the talents honed by exile don't fit the circumstances of statehood." Jews were trained in the circumstances of "kehal," he said (as I heard it), their own legal/religious community. "We governed only ourselves, as best we could… Sometimes [we were] semi-autonomous… responsible only for ourselves. In the state of Israel, we have accepted responsibility for other people. That is something we have never had in all the years of exile, and we have not done terribly well."
No we sure haven't. Let's go back to the noble Haaretz editorial:
The security forces know the identity
of the leaders of the rioters and know where the clashes take place –
in the southern Hebron Hills, Tel Rumeida and central Samaria. The
timing of the harvest isn't exactly a military secret, either.
Nonetheless, this year, too – as every year – fairly small groups
manage to reach the olive groves, where they beat, steal and then
return home safely. There's no need to guess how the security forces
would have dealt with Palestinians or peace activists who dared raise a
hand against a settler; just visit the anti-fence protests in Bil'in or
Na'alin.
So what we have is a society that has licensed the abuse of a minority's human and property rights for decades (I am not even going back to the Nakba). And then good liberals like Gershom Gorenberg try to rationalize this business as an "accidental empire," when the degree of human agency in it is considerable and farreaching. It has gone on for decades, and is tolerated not just by the self-styled European society that sends these people out, but by the great body of Jewry in the U.S., so that when Jimmy Carter speaks out against it, he is smeared. This really is a Jewish thing; I don't understand why this is not a crisis for Jewishness itself. And the fact that it's not provoking a crisis in Jewry will provoke a crisis in Jewry in the next generation, I'm sure of it, when ethnocentrism will come under keen scrutiny in a modern, postracial age, when people like David Bloom and Anna Baltzer will be revered for shouting down the question, Is it good for the Jews? Because Jewish ethnocentrism is what both the late Israel Shahak, an anti-Zionist, and Michael Walzer, a Zionist, are coming at from very different points. That's the problem.
P.S. Here is a piece from Dana Ammous in Palestine about a woman who used to have 8 acres,
now she only has 4, and on every side: the wall. “Here my children uttered their first words and made their first steps to the world.” Would we ever let that happen to us, here? To see our property rights trashed, for one second, let alone decades?
