Today good liberal Brian Lehrer dedicated a lot of his show on WNYC, the New York public radio station, to dialogue about Gaza. All was undertaken in an earnest manner, and yet I found myself bridling.
The dialogue consisted of three Jews, including the host, and one Palestinian-American, Linda Sarsour. Two of the Jews have lived in Israel: Rami Efal, who I bet is still an Israeli, and Marcia Kannry of the Dialogue Project, who went over there for 6 years. Both were Zionists; and I have long sensed that Lehrer is highly sympathetic to Zionism in that way that so many New York Jews are– imbued with a belief in Israel's inherent democratic goodness because of family and friends. When Lehrer dismissed Rachel Corrie as being anti-Israel, he revealed his prejudice. In fact, she was pro-human-rights, and no different from the boys who died in Philadelphia, Mississippi.
And while it was nice to hear Kannry speak of "ethnic cleansing" in 1948, the problem with the show is what it always is here: framing the debate. Who is at the table? Where is the anti-Zionist American who doesn't think that a religious state should be sanctified? Where is the realist plague-on-both-their houses American? Where is the Christian who despairs about the apartheid wall around Bethlehem? These people are all paying for Israel's weapons, and taxation without representation is tyranny.
Lehrer can justly counter that he is trying to promote dialogue between two parties to turn down the violence over there. But the problem with dialogue is that it is almost invariably at the auspices of Jewish groups and turns into group therapy in which the powerful party atones for being powerful and nothing happens. Rami Efal feels bad, but he doesn't feel that bad; he justifies the slaughter. Kannry can still move back there tomorrow, while there is no justice for those ethnically-cleansed, and Israel just keeps doing what it's always done, occupying land. Palestinians get no state– eternally disqualified because of their armed resistance. Dialogue hasn't changed that, one whit.
The real value Americans can bring journalistically is to look at the overall picture in the light of the Gaza slaughter; and that picture has been militarism and dispossession from one side, murderous resistance on the other side. Dialogue suggests that the two sides can work it out on their own. They can't. It's like asking a fox and a chicken to work out their differences. The great Henry Siegman is as sick of the process as I am, and says a solution must be imposed.
