So far everything I’ve quoted from the conference in NY yesterday on Jews uniting to end the war (six years after the war started) has been positive. Very forward statements from Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, Elizabeth Holtzman, and MJ Rosenberg. These people are saving the Jews from neoconservatism.
Now’s when I get into the problematic stuff: the ways that progressive Jewish organizations were basically coopted by neocons on Iraq because the two groups share Zionist feeling. Jewish communal organizations will be dealing with this question for decades to come, you saw the first signs of it yesterday– because one of the great foreign policy disasters in American history, the Iraq war, resulted in some measure from this Jewish collapse. Indeed, the neocons’ support for the wicked occupation influenced liberal Jews to be indifferent to it.
This is of course one of the central concerns of this blog, and I thought to mention a couple incidents at the conference that show the problem in a petri dish.
Diane Balser is the head of Brit Tzedek. She spoke on a panel about Middle East policy and basically said, I’m more comfortable with the right than the left.
She said, “I have right wing relatives. Some voted for McCain even.”
But when we discuss the issue of Israel/Palestine—“They are for the two state
solution.” So that’s a good thing. She has many differences with them. “They may have anti-Arab racist feelings….. And most of them
supported the war in Iraq.”
And we have to make it clear that we are different from them on
Israel/Palestine when we talk to congressmen. “This is very confusing to us.”
It was a sincere statement of confusion about who she’s in bed with politically. I went up to Balser afterward and said, it interests me that
you are engaged with these neocons. But there’s also a tradition in Jewish life of anti-Zionist Jews and non-Zionist Jews–none of whom were included in the conference. None of whom you’re engaged with. She said, somewhat dismissively, “They’re not for the two state solution.” Well some of them
actually are, I said; I am–just to end the cycle of violence (so long as it is
a fair solution in the eyes of Palestinians).
Later I ran into Jane Toby, a non-Zionist. She told me she went up to
Balser and said that she was for a one-state solution and Balser basically said she
wanted nothing to do with her.
So: Brit Tzedek will talk uncomfortably with the neocons, or the ones who are for a two state solution, but not talk to the left. Because they and the neocons are joined in doing everything to preserve the Jewish state, even if it means overlooking or softpedalling apartheid.
Lilly Rivlin, the former head of Meretz USA, spoke openly of the dual loyalty issue, though she did not call it that. She said that Jews were largely silent on the Iraq war because “we don’t want to look at the fact that Israel has a different
self-interest than America has.” This seemed to me a straight
declaration of dual loyalty. I.e., a war is not in the US interest, and we know it, but we support it
anyway or, are on the sideline, because of Israel…
THIS IS PRECISELY WHY I BEGAN THIS BLOG: because my own relative said to me 6 years ago, “I demonstrated against the Vietnam war, but my Jewish newspaper says this war could be good for Israel.” A war, I’d add, in which none of his children will serve.
Rivlin understands the ruination brought on by the neocons and their friends. She said, “I think the greatest threat to Israel are rightwing American Jews.”
The settlements are the biggest
problem Israel has to deal with, and “the loud ones are American Jews. Until we deal with that,
then there’s no movement.” And “the threat is a civil war.” And so Rivlin is saying exactly what John Mearsheimer has said, that the threat to Israel’s future now is not from the Arabs so much as it is from within. Zionism must overcome the Zionist vision, as it is experienced by vision-quest ethnocentric American Jews who want to hold M-16s in Judea and Samaria.
I see Rivlin’s understanding as progress. But not enough. When will progressive blue state American Jews, members of
the richest group in American society, beneficiaries of the greatest minority freedoms in the world, understand that
their true partners in Israel/Palestine are the Arabs. Arabs who want justice.
Arabs who seek education and reform. Reach out to them. We can break down any
wall together. Get over the fucking racism against Arabs. They
are people too. And we will need them to overcome our religious fringe, as they will need us to overcome theirs. We
can’t fight them on our own.
But imagine an Obama coalition of Arabs and Jews,
modern people, wanting equal rights and self-government for all people in the
spirit of Lincoln.
It would be transformative. And it’s the only way. Jews cannot do this on their
own.
What will the progressive Zionists lose? In the end, yes: they may lose the idea of a Jewish state. It’s true, that is the understanding that the Jewish left has already come to, and that the prog-Zios aren’t willing to make. But as the two-state solution fails to happen and fails to happen, and as apartheid happens and happens and happens for Palestinians, what is there to say for a Jewish state?
A year or so back at a panel I did with progressive Zionist Annie Roiphe, she scoffed at me over this, and said, if you are going to take a step back from the Jewish state, in a sea of hostile Arabs, then I can’t be with you. I know why Roiphe said this, because she has a belief in antisemitism as a major factor in western life (as Doug Feith does). In fact Roiphe said in this Danny Pearl book, that she remembers Kristallnacht, “like yesterday.” Well, I don’t remember it like yesterday; that in the end is the real division here. Between Jews who believe that antisemitism in the west makes the Jewish state a necessity, and those who don’t.
If you believe that the Jewish state is a necessity for Jews in the west, then you will always find yourself in bed with the neocons, and they will tell you that the Arabs are essentially Nazis and Israel is always in existential crisis. And if you don’t believe these things, then you: were out on the barricades opposing the Iraq war, and now you: are willing to imagine Israel as a state of its citizens. Diane Balser’s confusion is a profound one in American Jewish life today. And in the end it reminds us what the anti-Zionists warned us about 60 years ago: With the law of return (what counterpunch aptly calls the “iniquitous law of return”) you are setting up a structure for dual loyalty in Jewish citizens of the U.S.
