Yesterday I got a letter from Leonard Fein on behalf of the liberal Zionist organization, Americans for Peace Now. The legendary journalist who has called Israel “the most important project of the Jewish people in our time” now seems to understand that there was some element of fantasy in that embrace.
The letter’s tone is one of despair in the face of Israel’s unrelenting racism, which “unimpeded” by authorities, “finds increasing expression in behavior.” True, Fein’s chief concern is the effect of that racism on Jews; but as Barack Obama’s mentors explained, when you organize a community, you go to its self-interest. And as Jewish Voice for Peace insists, it is through steps like Fein’s that ultimately Jews come out against supremacist politics. Yes he insists here on his undying Zionist attachment, but it seems like a cover for an awakening: the two-state solution is a dead letter.
The full letter is here. Key excerpts:
[C]onsider the deeper corruption that comes of ruling another people…. It is sometimes proposed that Israel’s strength is represented by the normalcy of everyday life within the Green Line, and there is some truth in that. But the price of that normalcy plainly involves a closing of the eyes to the insult and injury visited upon the Palestinians, whether explicitly or simply by the fact of occupation. So it is that Israel fails in its promise of equality even to its own Palestinian citizens; so it is that racist habits are formed and develop unimpeded; so it is that “price tag” attacks multiply, as do vigilante assaults, as do mean-spirited attacks on olive trees, now and then on mosques, and above all on people…
Forty-six years and counting. A resolution of the conflict becomes more remote with the passage of time. Earlier hopes come to seem naïve. The status quo governs, and few ask whether it is sustainable… Nor is there sufficient recognition of the fact that the status quo is not stable, not at all, that it generates a coarsening of attitudes that gathers momentum and finds increasing expression in behavior…
That is the heart of the corruption. And that is the heart of the ongoing threat, the threat not merely to the Israel of our dreams and sometimes fantasies, but to the quotidian Israel, the everyday Israel to which we are so resolutely attached.
Thanks, Philip. His despair is evident. It’s hard to watch a dream die, and it’s hard to admit that it was a rotten, ugly dream to begin with, much less to admit that the ideology that produced the dream is inherently racist, rotten and ugly to the core (and corps as well as coeur!). Because to even begin to confront any of those things would necessarily require a level of self-reflection and honest examination of the group and group-think that one bought into, as well as the horrific atrocities that many of one’s own group perpetrated to bring that dream into reality. And of course, that it continues to perpetrate to this day.
True. And Israel and Zionists have used this little linguistic trick to their advantage for many years.
It’s all down to how Zionism sees the world. The holocaust around the corner.
And that justifies the occupation.
In fact, it justifies everything.
Israel is like a neighbor barricaded inside his house who answers knocks on the door with a gun stuck through the letterbox. He has 2 slaves in the basement. And a direct debit from DC that pays for his food.
I feel people who describe the two-state solution as dead want it to be dead, rather than evaluate it on its merits. Where can you find support for the dreamy one-state solution? International law, human rights organizations, ICJ advisory opinion, the world’s populations? Are the people who actually live in the Israel and Palestine ready for that kind of change or want it? These questions have to be addressed before anyone starts touting the one-state solution.
Phil,
I have to take issue with this statement:
” True, Fein’s chief concern is the effect of that racism on Jews; but as Barack Obama’s mentors explained, when you organize a community, you go to its self-interest. ”
This is undoubtedly true when organizing groups that are oppressed or disempowered. It is not the case for those who are already organized and empowered and it is most certainly not the case for empowered groups that have an interest in maintaining the disempowered status of another group. If anything, self interest has run amok for those kinds of empowered groups.
What’s happening to Palestinians has to stop simply because it is a horrendous crime against humanity. Framing it as an issue of self interest for Zionists is just one more way of ignoring Palestinians.
I agree with Fein’s basic point – that the Occupation has had a big effect on Israeli Jews as well as on the Palestinians. Most Israeli Jews think that killing Palestinians is no big deal. At least no big deal to the Israeli Jews. I think of the slogans spray-painted by Israeli soldiers on rocks in Gaza: slogans like DEATH TO THE ARABS and ARABS TO THE GAS CHAMBERS. (source: video on electronic intifada somewhere). This puts the blather about “Israel’s soul” in perspective.
Leonard Fein previously headed up an effort to end hunger. Great idea! Why doesn’t he do it again, ending hunger in Gaza? According to The Nation a couple of years ago, large numbers of children in Gaza are going hungry, many suffering from anemia and many from stunted growth.
Today’s Mondoweiss has an article from the Forward, about a foodie’s guide to West Bank settlements. Very few of the hungry Palestinian children from Gaza will be going on the foodie tour. The Palestinians are being deliberately starved by Israel, while the foodies are touring the Jews-only settlements in the Israel-Occupied West Bank.
If Leonard Fein connects Israel’s deliberate production of hunger in Gaza to the foodie tour of West Bank settlements, will he have a “Marie Antoinette moment”?
(In case somebody doesn’t know: French queen Marie Antoinette, told that the French poor did not have enough bread to eat, replied “let them eat cake”. )