My wife and I went to a family gathering yesterday in the neighborhood she grew up in, Chestnut Hill. The Nebraska game was on and a few of us talked about international politics. We talked about human rights in China, the oppression of the Muslim minority in the west and the crushing of the Tibetans in 1950. We moved on to the Middle East. I said, "Well Obama scared people when he said that Jerusalem should be undivided." My wife's cousin said, "I don't think it should be divided. It's one city." He has spent more time in Israel than I have, three weeks to my 10 days, and he was expressing impatience with the idea of partition. Why should we encourage ethnic and religious separation? "They have lived together in centuries past," my wife's cousin said. "It will happen again."
Middle East politics shadow my life. They come up in every social setting I'm in, quietly or not. Yesterday my wife and I saw a friend who's dating a Palestinian who is related to a leading figure of Palestinian resistance. None of our conversation was about politics or The Issue. But it was a shadow to the conversation.
Yesterday, too–I had a full day–I had tea with a friend who was involved in the formation of Jews Against the Occupation, eight years ago, soon after the second intifadah began. He told me that JATO had begun with a simple principle: We support the right of return. A lot of people left the organization over this principle, but it was a very clear line at a time when the Jewish community was still completely invested in the Exodus story. I found his statement staggering. One, the right of return is regularly described by good liberal Zionists (Lilly Rivlin, just 6 days ago at the Workmen's Circle/Shalom Center event) as "Israel's worst nightmare." Yet these young Jews organized on that very basis– a simple principle of justice. Deeply moving.
Also, I reflected that JATO will some day be commemorated in Jewish history. The whole anti-Zionist movement in the U.S. today will some day be written about as historic and, I wager, important. So I was stirred by a premonition of history between two guys sitting in a coffeehouse in Philadelphia, at a time when the media would never say a word about this stuff.
Mideast politics was the shadow side of the presidential campaign. David Axelrod versus the neoconservatives was an unspoken battle over the two-state question; my JATO friend pointed out that the leftmost position in Washington is the J Street position. Two states, and do it in a hurry; those are the lefties in Washington. But in world opinion, that is a very conventional opinion. And out there in privileged living rooms in the States, the conversation is ahead of Washington. Again, because I am reading Lincoln, I think of the days of abolition. When William Lloyd Garrison started the Liberator in 1831, his was a radical position. There were many northern radicals against slavery. Some lost their jobs for their opposition; Lincoln says so. The accommodation of slavery had the general effect to "blow out the moral lights around us," as Lincoln says beautifully. And just like JATO, Garrison was emphatic, 30 years before Emancipation. "I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. . . . I am
in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not
retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD."
Sometimes I think that my shadow life, my shadow conversation, is becoming the shadow life of the country visavis the Middle East. Why should there be partition? Isn't that a form of apartheid? Will such an arrangement last? What is fair? And did you hear about the Nakba? Watching the football game, my wife's cousin said to me that he was surprised to read about the Nakba on this blog. So we've helped move the ball down the field, right here.
In some ways it's an alienated spot to be, the shadow side of the official conversation. But we have confidence that we will be heard. Another friend quoted Hannah Arendt the other day. "We are conscious pariahs."
