Micha Kurz of the Israeli soldiers’ group Breaking the Silence is touring the country and we met up at a coffee shop in Manhattan Friday. He looks Israeli to me: compact and animated, rugged and unpretentious. He wore a gray sweatshirt over a t-shirt and drank three cups of coffee.
Here’s what he had to say:
There is no such thing as the left in Israel right now. No one believes in politics, they are an abstraction, the politicians have delivered nothing. So Avigdor Lieberman’s rightwing party gets more votes than the old Labor Party. Five years ago if you had said that Lieberman would be Foreign Minister, Kurz would have said you are crazy.
The only hopeful sign in Israel are the NGOs. They are the grass roots. They don’t call themselves left or right, they are trying to build a civil society, along with Palestinian NGOs. The people in the NGOs don’t want to talk politics.
I didn’t believe that Kurz doesn’t have politics. When I pressed him he said he does not want to live in Israel if his children are going to have to serve as he did in an army of occupation, defending a border that does not even exist. And as for the two-state-solution, it was probably a joke 8 years ago and now people are coming to awareness. BDS? It is a good tool. Obama. "He has managed to bring our public discussion down to freezing the settlements or not, and even then the answer is No."
Kurz is raising money for his group
It aims to coordinate all the groups working for justice in Jerusalem. Activists can go to the site and figure out where to go. He is trying to get support from Americans the way the illegal colonies get support.
He was amazed and appalled that the Mets are helping the occupation by hosting the Hebron Fund dinner. (There will be a protest outside the baseball commissioner’s office Wednesday, 12:30-1:30, 245 Park Avenue near 47th St.) The settlers are building at a frenzied pace right now. Houses are going up everywhere. "Settlers know exactly what Jerusalem is going to look like in five years. They have the funding, the families and the guns to make it happen." The other side has to answer that.
"They say we are undermining the legitimacy of the Jewish state. Well the occupation is undermining the legitimacy of the Jewish state. I don’t know about a Jewish state, I know about not standing by and watching as human-rights atrocities happen 20 minutes from where I live."
Kurz finished his coffee and walked me to Grand Central Station. Night was falling. The Jewish sabbath. He might go on to a friend’s house for Sabbath dinner.
"I am optimistic," he said. Something has stirred since Gaza, in Jewish identity. Recently he saw two young American Jews at a Palestinian refugee camp. They had come over on birthright and realized they were being brainwashed. They are waking up. He had the same experience as a soldier.
A war in the soul of Israel parallels the civil war in American Jewish life. "It will take the American Jewish community to wake up for things to change over there. To realize what is actually the case there. It’s not about terrorism. It’s not about the Palestinians. It’s about the Israelis and the ultra-right-wing settler movement and their funding." Kurz is optimistic because that awareness is growing. I told him about a statement by Michael Walzer earlier this year, that the Jewish community must act to "defeat the settler movement." He agreed.
How Jewish are you? I said.
"I’m much more Jewish than I have ever been. I feel much stronger in my identity as a Jew. What’s that mean? As far as I’m concerned, what’s going on in Israel and the occupation is completely against what I was brought up believing. I always heard of Jerusalem as the city of light. It makes more and more sense. This is where we must learn to live with our neighbors."
He went to a synagogue in Summit New Jersey. It was weird. They looked at the flag of Israel and sang the Israeli national anthem. Then he had a respectful conversation and tried to tell them what was happening in Palestine and Israel. They didn’t deny what he was saying. A man said to him, "We have our boot on the Palestinians’ face. But how do we get our boot off their face, when they have a knife that they are going to kill us with?"
The answer to the man’s mindset is from Micha Kurz’s own life. He served in the occupation in Bethlehem. Years later he went back to Bethlehem as a member of Breaking the Silence. He was terrified. Everyone there wanted to kill him. But he was not wearing a uniform, and the people opened their doors to him, one family after another.
Imagine.
