The ice floe

Almost invariably when I go into an organized Jewish space consisting of people my generation and older I run away with despair. I see that the critique of Jewish nationalism-and-return that is gaining urgency among Jewish youth is not taking place here. The American awakening to Palestinian rights that I follow with such breathless anticipation isn’t registering here. The organized Jewish community is reactionary on a central human rights issue of our time, they might as well be leading white southerners in the 1950s. Criticism of Israel is a criticism of their decisions and life work, so they dismiss it.

That was my experience on Sunday when I went to a screening hosted by two local bodies, the Beacon Hebrew Alliance and the Philipstown Reform Synagogue in the Hudson valley, of a documentary called My So-Called Enemy about a dialogue project between Palestinian and Israeli Jewish girls that unfolds over 7 or 8 years beginning in 2002.

The best thing about the film is that it demonstrates the pointlessness of dialogue projects. The Israeli girls get to emote a lot about the wrongness of the separation wall but sure enough they are in uniform at the end and one is smiling at her adolescent career as “radical leftist.” The Palestinian girls are still under occupation and watching Cast Lead in fear or standing at checkpoints or emigrating to Jordan or the U.S. Nothing has changed. The only thing the dialogue does is make the dialogue project leader Melodye Feldman and the Israelis feel that they’ve done something to end the conflict when they’ve done nothing. Though the Israeli girls do have the exquisite sensitivity to take off their uniforms when they are having a reunion with the good Palestinian girls. (The bad ones aren’t interested in the charade; and the film portrays one of them as hateful and religiously fundamentalist).

After the film, we had a chiefly inter-Jewish dialogue led by Rabbi Brent Spodek, who is formerly of B’nai Jeshurun and is active in Encounter, an American Zionist group that seeks to educate American Jews about Palestine so that they can “absorb” the Palestinian narrative. Spodek had us read aloud a sheet called a “covenant for communicating” that urged us not to interrupt or slander but respect difference of opinion and that surely reflects apprehension about battles that have raged inside Jewish congregations over the conflict. But at our little Hudson River gathering there was no division to speak of, beside my rising upset. Everyone seemed to agree this is the answer, dialogue. One woman said she had had a dream 50 years ago that everyone really didn’t hate each other over there! Someone said she really didn’t understand what a Palestinian was till she had seen the film, now she knows that they “feel” the land was theirs. One man said the girls were courageous and someone else said that Gal and Rezam and Rayan are in our hearts now and the rabbi said that it was like a misunderstanding between a married couple. Two older men said the film demonstrated the importance of having a Jewish state because of the anti-Semitism out there, because Jews in France feel unsafe and are leaving. There was one statement I found moving. A man who said he was the chief health officer for the county and whose parents were in concentration camps said that his son in the US Embassy in Israel had married a Palestinian and he’d been against it, “emphatically,” but now he recognized how wrong he was, as his daughter-in-law stroked his back affectionately. The only way to end the conflict is for the two sides to mingle, he said.

But no one made a political statement about Israel and Palestine, because politics involves assessments of power and ours was an entitled group that does not want to see itself as responsible for suffering. Spodek prodded the group to say why the conflict matters in the lovely place we live; but no one pointed out that the Palestinians regard a Jewish state as obnoxious to exactly the degree that every Jew in the room would oppose a Christian state here. No one said a word about an occupation in which millions of Palestinians have no rights. No one mentioned Jewish and Arab “nationality” on i.d. cards. The man whose son married a Palestinian didn’t say that two people from different religions cannot marry in Israel. No one pointed out that as the film ends with Cast Lead, when hundreds of Palestinian children were killed so that Israel could mow the lawn in Gaza, we just emerged from Operation Protective Edge, when hundreds of Palestinians children were killed so that Israel could mow the lawn in Gaza.

At the end Rabbi Spodek described leading frightening tours of Hebron with Melissa Weintraub of Encounter, but he did not say that there’s apartheid in Hebron. He only said that maybe Jews need to let go of some of our security concerns, and the trust will be returned. I was going to shout about apartheid at that moment, or about the laws against civil marriage, or the religious “nationality” that we would find so offensive; but it would have violated the rule against interruption.

Also I found that I did not respect the group. Our country is now well into an education process on the issue; but the organized Jewish community cut a deal with Zionism long ago and is stuck in that understanding. This group I’d visited was a liberal one. They’re not rightwing Zionists. But really what is the difference? They know nothing about the conflict except that we Jews have the right to a just-in-case state halfway round the world. They insulate themselves from criticism with cultural mechanisms of self-validation that verge on paranoia. They are generally incurious about Palestinian experience. They have hardened themselves to the killings of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in Gaza through empty political slogans about Islam and security that if Christians were mouthing them they would brand as fascist.

It is a waste of time to organize in that community. A Jew who cares about these things must stand on the street with Jews Say No or stand with the critical Jews of JVP and Open Hillel. These folks are on an ice floe that is wandering into the mists of delusion and emptiness and the best you can hope is that some jump back into history while they can. They reflect the Israeli paralysis. As Nathan Thrall showed in his piece on Ari Shavit in the London Review of Books, there’s not really much diversity inside the Israeli establishment, it has turned right and hardline and finds a “liberal” explainer in Shavit. Once you say that you are for Israel as a Jewish state you find yourself in a coalition with people who defend ethnic cleansing and are unsure about the wisdom of withdrawing from the territories. That’s the broad center of Israeli society now. You can take that on but you have to oppositional. You can’t do it from the heart of Israeli society and you can’t do it from the heart of Jewish life. They’re not interested.