Marc Sapir is a doctor in Berkeley. He lately sent out this email to friends (and Jeff Blankfort got Sapir's permission to pass it along, edited). It bears on the fact that the traditional left is "confounded" by the Israel/Palestine issue, what I call the Mark Green Factor: people who consider themselves big lefties, are identified as left, but change the subject when it comes to Gaza. Sapir also brings up the critical issue of Jewish power over this issue. His family story is in the last paragraph below:
This division between UPF and ANSWER on this issue alone set back the effort to unify the Left in a way that might have forced Congress to become somewhat more objective and critical of Israel. In part, the fruit we bore from our disunity on Israel was Gaza. And there will be more Gaza massacres until the Left in this country bites the bullet and makes clear that it has had enough of Zionist b******t about what is happening and to whom and by whom. If you notice the pro-Israel e-mails on [our list] (and elsewhere), they always conflate the “oppression of Israel” with the oppression of the Palestinian people by Israeli militarism, as if there's a magical equation, not dominance and occupation, not mass seizures and imprisonment and torture, no right to self-defense, no right to citizenship of some nation that has been abrogated, no colonialism, no apartheid, no racist Ashkenazi vs Sephardi divide within Israel, no effort to deny Israeli citizens who are Palestinian their rights, no 300,000 Russian non-Jews given citizenship to shore up the racist mantra against Palestinians (and Arabs in general). That blind perspective reflects the brutalization of many Jews, descendants of Holocaust survivors, who have lost their humanity.
I say this as a Jew, brought up in a religious family. Enough of these Zionists already. It’s time to move on and ignore them if they don’t care or can’t see or say that what Israel has done and is doing to the indigenous people of the land is wrong, terribly wrong, criminally wrong. We need to move the question and stop letting them play us for fools. The common class interests of politicians and other elites here with Israel’s elites has nothing to do with the independent course the Left has to take.
One last example: I have a cousin, also a physician, who lives in Berkeley. We have in the past had cordial, though not close family relations. My wife and I attended the bar mitzvahs of both of his sons. We have never discussed Israel, but some months ago my cousin attacked my views on Palestine in the Planet. I wasn’t impressed by his letter and so did not respond. Recently I ran into him in town and mentioned that I would be happy to put on my slide show based upon my visit to the West Bank last July for him and a group of his friends. I assured him that the 6 audiences who have seen it have always been surprised that it was so factual and without opinionated rhetoric. And of course we would leave time for debate and discussion so people could criticize. Instead of either accepting or rejecting my proposal, my cousin proceeded to try and engage me with a series of provocative e-mails (he later disclosed that he had been surreptitiously passing the communications along to other Zionists on a list of unknown size). Although I didn’t know that, I kept refusing to get into a big argument with him because I seriously hoped he would accept my offer of the slide show if he wanted to engage or even appear open minded. After several back and forths he accused me of not being forthcoming (“thanks for nothing,” he wrote). For a while my cousin desisted from the harassments. Last night he had the temerity to send me a link (which I did not open) to an article he said I should give to my audiences in order to balance my biased presentation, whose content he has no knowledge of. Whether he is afraid of the truths I might provide or simply doesn’t care about the truth of the matter, he assumes that he knows what I would present and suggests that I include what he wants. Is this not absurd? My cousin considers himself a liberal, is married to a Latina, and most certainly voted for Obama. His blindness and his closedness are not just an obstacle to his own understanding. The way that he asserts the right to use his certitude to confront and attack me is typical, and reveals how serious are the obstacle to our efforts to form a peaceful nation or a just world. We will not change my cousin untill he realizes that such behavior is not going to be allowed to have the impact that he desires. Because he is of a class with money and power and does exercise that power within this class society, we can not let him—or others—believe they can engage and confound the Left in the way they have up until now.
We have to disabuse ourselves of the view that protecting unity with people who think and act like this does not make us complicit in their agenda and the outcomes we saw in Gaza.
