I’m in a great mood today because I spent the day yesterday at Jewish Voice for Peace’s membership meeting, and there was an incredible sense of esprit de corps. It was a giant organizing meeting. Everywhere I went I saw people who are hard at work on the issue, from Rabbi Alissa Wise to Rebecca Vilkomerson to Nadia Hijab to Adam Horowitz to Jerry Haber to Jesse Bacon to Cecilie Surasky to Jack Ross to Josh Ruebner in the halls of Congress to Rae Abileah at the doors of AIPAC to Lev Hirschhorn of Brandeis, along with four other Brandeis students.
The Brandeis students were excluded from their school’s Hillel last week, and it was exciting just to meet them, they are so young and engaged. The one thing everyone agrees on at the JVP conference is the understanding of the oppression of Palestinians that has been done in our name, as Jews, and the central importance, spiritual, political, psychological, of answering for these crimes. This is not a dialogue group, it is an action group; we are going to to take a role in Jewish history.
I am someone who used to write pieces under the title, The Assimilationist. I was happy to walk away from Jewish life rather than hold the bag for Israel. I felt alone. I see now there were many others like me, and this was a kind of wounding. We rejected the injunctions of our community to stand by it. The American Jewish community was damaged by this process, and given our centrality in American establishment life,, other communities were too. But now to speak up as Jews and claim a universalist Palestinian-oriented mindset, to insist on values of human rights and equality, it is thrilling and healing, and offers great hope to the American discourse generally– when Jews speak out for the simple idea of equal rights and against the idea of chosenness and elite-influence-peddling.
It is no coincidence that many of the JVP leaders are women and that many are veterans of the queer rights movement. There is nothing top-down or statusy about this work, it could only come from the ocean floor. That culture is very different from my background, it’s a marvel to me to be here. Myself, I kept knocking on the door of the mainstream media and of the elite networks that I was schooled in, and they turned me away and I sulked in the alley, a waste of spirit. These organizers have a different focus. They have burst in from the margins and the grassroots with confidence. They are positive and unapologetic and have great political imagination, inspired by Palestinian popular committee members in Bil’in and Egyptian students in Tahrir.
We are going to influence the conversation. Everywhere I went yesterday, people said that the discourse is changing, and changing fast. That ideas that we could not discuss in the mainstream a year ago are being discussed now. Ruebner said that the aid package is actually being debated, finally. Of course that is all to do with the collapse of the Obama administration under the pressure of Netanyahu and the lobby, and the Egyptian revolution, and the Mavi Marmara. All these events have worked their way into American Jewish consciousness and disturbed aware Jews, and JVP is the vanguard of that awareness.
I know that there are divisions within JVP but those divisions don’t interest me, I run the other way from ideological discussions; and am only excited by the positive and healing message the group brings to this discussion, and the potential to build coalitions with American realist types and disillusioned Zionists and of course the Palestinian solidarity movement. Surasky gave a great speech I will reprise later this week, about messaging. She said, How many of you have changed on this issue in the last few years? How many of you are still changing? We are all in process, she said, and when you speak to others do you want to win or do you want to connect to bring them in? It was a piece of feminist new age wisdom that will allow us to open doors on the right and welcome people who love the good ole American values of freedom and equality. We used to fight on their defensive wounded ground, Surasky said. One of the first JVP slogans was Jews will only have security when Palestinians get justice. Well the other side could say, Yes we are glad you see, we need security, that is why we are putting troops in the Jordan Valley. So we had lost the game. When the real game is to say that Palestinians need security as much as anyone else; the real game is to lift the wounded Jewish community out of the belief that there are only victimizers and victimized in the world and so we would rather be the victimizers with F-16s raining white phosphorus on children. There is no security in victimizing people.
People in a cage will always try to get out, my friend Lynn Gottlieb said to me, when I told her about the settler murders. She had not heard the news. The Jewish community built this cage of historical materials. The Palestinians are in it and we are in it too. The glory of the Philadelphia meeting was the sense, looking around the hall, that a large core group had come together to liberate itself from these false old beliefs, using a very modern tool, the awareness that Jews have great agency in history. So the Jews who believe in freedom, democracy, equal rights, and international law, we are going to play our part and play it urgently, according to that ancient Jewish teaching, If not now, when?
