On Tuesday night in the basement of the Advent Lutheran Church on the Upper West Side in NY, an ad hoc group of Jews sponsored a forum about "Jewish perspectives" on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign (BDS), with a panel of four Jews, two for and two against, and about 200 people jammed into the sweaty basement.
The event soon morphed into a spirited discussion about Zionism, and is there such a thing as a Jewish democratic state; and the most obvious question came up halfway through, Why is this happening in a church? Gail Miller of Jews Say No answered, "A number of us approached every synagogue and every Jewish center in the city" and were turned down repeatedly– later Miller specified that they had gone to six synagogues and two Jewish centers.
So much for free debate inside the Jewish community.
The crowd was largely in favor of BDS, that was my impression anyway, but that didn’t stop JJ Goldberg of the Forward and Kathleen Peratis, a board member of J Street, from showing up and participating. Goldberg, who expressed shame that the Jewish community couldn’t take this on in one of its hallowed rooms, was dead set against BDS and Peratis, a lawyer, said she personally was against buying things from the occupied territories but the J Street board is not for BDS. They both objected to the Palestinian call on which BDS is based, because it includes recognition of the right of return of Palestinian refugees, millions of them. "I believe with my deepest heart and soul that Israel has the possibility of manifesting all the deepest aspects of Judaism," Peratis said, and JJ Goldberg said that BDS’s goal is to "unmake Israel as a Jewish state" and this will "scare the shit out of the Israelis" and that won’t bring peace.
Hannah Mermelstein, arguing for BDS, said BDS was about "rights not goals," and if granting these rights "requires the dismantling of the state, what kind of state is it that you’re protecting, and why?" Later Palestinian-American Andrew Kadi, from the audience, said that his grandmother lived alongside Jewish neighbors in Mandate Palestine and would never have imposed a religious state on them. Now, surrounded by progressive Jews, "I’m surprised to hear that her neighbors would do that to her." Yes, bit of a problem, in the 21st century…
The most powerful impression of the evening was how spirited the debate was. One woman stood up and said that she had been waiting to have this conversation inside the Jewish community since she was born, it had been stifled by the Israel lobby groups. Or as Donna Nevel said, in introducing the discussion, "We created this panel because we believe it is a conversation that has not been had within the Jewish community in the thoughtful and informed way it deserves." Given the occupation and Israel’s failure to honor Palestinian rights to self-determination, "the timeliness, and even urgency of this discussion couldn’t be more evident." Amen.
The other powerful impression was of Mermelstein’s co-pilot, Yonatan Shapira, the Israeli flying ace. Standing next to me, James North murmured, "People will be reading things that this man said 100 years from now." In the next few days I hope to transcribe his remarks and pass them along so you may judge the truth of North’s comment. But three Shapira statements struck me in particular.
1, When asked for specifics about the problems with a "Jewish democracy," he said that since 1948 hundreds of new Jewish communities and even cities had been founded inside Israel. "Not one Palestinian town has been founded since 1948." Oh my. (I sometimes say that the right of return might redeem ghetto-Switzerland Israeli culture; Shapira gave me grist for that mill).
2, Shapira said that the United States is the problem here (the lobby) and he challenged Peratis and Goldberg’s religiosity: You want to live in a democracy; why don’t you let me do so too? "Don’t doom me to live in a place you don’t want to live in. You don’t want to live in an ethnocratic state."
3, Most tellingly, Shapira said for Israel to have peace, it was vital to have Palestinians leading. He said it was hard for Jews to understand this, and he invoked the tradition of Jewish elitism. He said that he was born on a military base and bred for command in Israeli society, but he has heeded the Palestinian call; and he said that it goes against the Jewish grain not to claim intellectual authority; but on this issue, the future of that society, it is time that Palestinians lead, or there will be no solution. I found this incredibly moving. For me it was all about the Jewish superiority-exceptionalism complex and our history of elite influence–and the awareness that we need help now. It touches on the fact that Truman was influenced in his critical decisions of ’47 and ’48 by David Niles and Max Lowenthal and other highly-placed White House Jews in ways that echo today in the key placement of Axelrod and Emanuel and Dennis Ross all around the goal face; and there has never been peace.
I will give Shapira’s argument in his own words in a day or so.
The night went off without anyone screaming (though I beat my breast) and everyone was civil. Consider for a moment that the next night at the Ethical Culture society, a policed discussion was held about criticizing Israel, between two liberal Zionists, and was prefaced with a lot of concerned statements by the hosts about what a sensitive discussion was about to take place and how they wanted everyone to behave. Well, they ain’t seen nothin yet. The Jewish street is restless, and it’s only a matter of time before the Lutheran chrysalis is broken and this event is on stage at the 92d Street Y with calm, capable Esther Kaplan moderating once again. The forum’s sponsoring group, by the way, included people on both sides of the BDS question, among them Rabbi Arthur Waskow, Alisa Solomon, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, Rabbi Alissa Wise, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, and a couple of women I know from Jews Say No.
Let me leave you with J.J. Goldberg’s parting speech. I believe that J.J. Goldberg believes the Jewish state is needed– even though we happily toil in the U.S., wealthy and influential– because of the history of persecution of Jews. And it was my sense that he was flabbergasted by the intensity of the discussion and the number of Jews in the room who do not regard the Jewish state as a personal necessity– the Jews who would swap the Jewishness of the state tomorrow if that would bring peace. And so he made the statement below before he left, which was sincere and a little staggering.
Goldberg’s statement came in response to a challenge from Shapira. Shapira said that at a BDS debate in Vermont a year back between Omar Barghouti and Steven Scheinberg (of Canadian Friends of Peace Now), Scheinberg came up to him afterward and said, If Obama hasn’t done anything in a year, I will join you… So Shapira challenged Goldberg, what will it take for you to join us, what if Israel commits more war crimes, launches another war and kills not 1400, including hundreds of children, but 14,000. "Do you think that you might reconsider joining us. If in 10 years you see that nothing has changed, the peace process is the same, just like now, more and more horrific things, will you?"
Goldberg said:
I’m beginning to feel like Amos Kenan…[who in 1969 wrote] a Letter to all good people, in which he said I have been rejected by the left that I belonged to all my life. I love Cuba, I believe in Fidel Castro, but I am not allowed to love Cuba because I’m an Israeli and a Zionist. I’m frozen out of the left because I believe in supporting my own people.
And I will begin to feel like that. No I won’t support dismantling the Israeli state. Again, your goal is to have Israel stop being a Jewish state. Israel aspired, originally aspired, to be as Jewish as France is French. That is, it should have a culture that reflects its majority–aspirationally the majority will remain Jewish–[and] that all citizens should be full citizens. And again it has not lived up to that. It’s gone better and it’s gone worse. But the goal is not to deprivilege the people who aren’t Jewish but to make a state that adheres by what we regard as traditional Jewish values in which all citizens are equal.
If it doesn’t go there, then I will be very very sad, and I will feel my life’s work essentially to have been a failure. But I don’t think it will get that far. Because if Israel launches another operation and kills 5,000 or 10,000 people, the pressure in the world community will be so great that it will be forced, it will be forced to sit down and negotiate to withdraw to the 67 borders. That’s what the world wants, the European union wants, the Arab League wants.
Goldberg then recounted all he has done to try and bring about the two-state solution over 40 years, I didn’t transcribe that part.
