The most disturbing thing about the landmark speech that Secretary of State John Kerry just delivered is that the American political system is so dysfunctional that the truth could be spoken only after – not before – a national election, in the short period between the end of one Administration and the beginning of another.
Kerry delivered his “candid thoughts” about the Israeli Palestinian conflict in response to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bitter and provocative criticism of the United States for not vetoing the UN resolution reaffirming the illegality of Israel’s settlement construction and expansion: “Friends don’t take friends to the Security Council.” Kerry’s rejoinder to the Israelis and the American people, publicly before the world, was that “friends need to tell each other the hard truths.”
These hard truths remained untold for eight years because of fear: fear by President Obama and the Administration that the Israeli lobby, big American Jewish donors, and the American Jewish community was not ready to hear them; fear that speaking the truth would endanger Obama’s re-election prospects, and then Hillary Clinton’s. As a result of such fear, candor could be heard only very late – when the Two State Solution (“2SS”) is already in the grave, and when the incoming Administration is apparently resolved not to hear the lessons Kerry took pains to articulate.
Nevertheless, the word must be heard and heeded by Israeli, American and World Jewry. We would be exceedingly unwise to ignore them. So Hear, O Israel, these parting truths – hard as they are for many of us — from the peacemakers who tried so hard to move it from its disastrous path:
You are running Israel and Judaism off the rails. Led by the most right wing leadership in history, you are taking them to a one-state reality — a Greater Israel, in the West Bank — for the sake of ideological and religious reasons utterly disconnected from Judaism’s values and Israel’s greater interests in security and its future peaceful integration into the Arab world. In your single-minded commitment to settlement construction and expansion, you have increasingly consolidated control over the West Bank for your own purposes, reversing the earlier goal of permitting Palestinians greater control over their own lives.
You have transferred into the West Bank, the future homeland of the Palestinian people, 270,000 Jewish settlers since the Oslo peace accords were signed on the White House lawn, 100,000 since the Obama Administration began in 2009. And you have located these settlers, deliberately and strategically, in places which have made it particularly difficult to envision separating the two peoples and transferring sovereignty to a new Palestinian state. Because you are not stupid, you must be doing this for a reason, and that is ultimately to prevent the establishment of a contiguous Palestinian state in which Palestinians could live in freedom and dignity, free of Israeli domination.
There is no use pretending that you are merely expanding settlement blocs because, not only are they in places that make a Palestinian state impossible, but you are legalizing more than 100 outposts and advancing legislation, sponsored by Jewish fundamentalists and the settler movement, which are leading inexorably toward annexation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (“OPT”). These settlers clearly do not intend to submit to Palestinian law and so they are a permanent obstacle to the 2 state solution. It is therefore obvious to any knowledgeable observer that you have embarked on a comprehensive effort to take West Bank lands for Israel and prevent any Palestinian development there. The entire Area C, constituting 60% of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, is off limits to Palestinian development. While Israeli farms flourish in the Jordan Valley and resorts line the Red Sea, while hundreds of Jewish settlement permits were approved, only one Palestinian building permit was approved in all of 2014 and 2015. Palestinian homes have been demolished at an historically high rate, displacing 1300 Palestinians (including 600 Palestinian children) in 2016 alone. The Israeli agenda is clear: putting in place a one-state reality over all of Israel-Palestine. The era of the 2SS is over.
What kind of Jewish vision is left, Kerry asks us. What kind of subjugation of Palestinians is consistent with Jewish religious and moral values? There are 2.75 million Palestinians living under Jewish military occupation, in the West Bank. They have limited autonomy. They cannot travel without approval. They are living in enclaves with no rights, under occupation that deprives them of basic freedoms. Palestinians live lives that are Separate But Unequal. While Kerry did not utter the word “apartheid,” the reference to American racial segregation was an unmistakable stand-in for it. Will Jewish military and police personnel police the streets of every Palestinian city and town? Will they administer the schools and hospitals? How will they deal with civil rights protests? Unspoken was the fact that Israeli troops and police have shot, killed and maimed Palestinians engaged in peaceful protests for years.
Because this one-state Greater Israel is not consonant with democratic ideals, Americans will not accept it, the world will not accept it, Kerry said. He is right, of course. This is the truth, obvious by the global consensus enunciated in resolutions like this one since 1967. The unspoken question to Jews the world over was, will the Jewish people accept it? Is that the legacy of the Holocaust? It was not enough for 6 million to have perished? We have to end up being oppressors of another people, millions of them, Arabs in an Arab world where we hope and expect to live for the next thousand years?
Friends do not let friends drive drunk. Israel is intoxicated by its military might, its economic success, and its historic American insulation from the pressures of the global consensus that what it is doing is dead wrong. This insulation threatens to continue for at least another four years. The proponents of such insulation are no friends of Israel’s, no friends of the Jews. I think Kerry is wrong about the continued viability of the two state solution, but he is clearly right that the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world will not make a secure and lasting peace with us until we give up the irredentist dream of “all Israel-Palestine for Jews” and agree to accommodate the legitimate national aspirations of the Palestinians.
Judaism is broken. Netanyahu is one of the great enemies of Judaism. He belongs with the tyrants remembered during Jewish holidays. And he broke Judaism from the inside.
In the first stage, Leibowitz said, “we shall see euphoria, upon our return to our ancient sites. Next, we shall see the emergence of messianic, radical and dangerous nationalism. In the third stage, we shall see Israeli society becoming more brutal and the emergence of a police state.”
“..the artificial essence of Zionism – the grounding of its rhetoric in the notion of ‘negation’, ‘inversion’ ‘synthesis or ‘combination’: its self definition as a constrained, corrective, redemptive (ben Gurion even used the word Messianic ) intervention in historical time and geographical space ” Zvi Efrat from “A civilian occupation” by Segal and Weizman.
, the project to set up the first Zionist outposts in Palestine. It’s a tower surrounded by a wall. “…the seclusion within the wall separates the settlement from the new environment and defines the new community not only as those who choose to live inside but also as those who are under potential threat from outside”. Sharon Rotbard, also from “a civilian occupation”
They never wanted to integrate. They always wanted to dominate.
“Kohn in particular was deeply troubled by the ways in which Palestinian settlement put Jews in the position of dominating others by power alone, rather than cultural renewal and a dialogical exchange. He was especially unimpressed with arguments based on “historic right” (just as he would be in his writings on nationalism years later). “With the term ‘historic right,” he suggested, “one can rationalize every kind of injustice.” As he wrote to Buber in 1929: “We have been in Palestine for 12 years now and have not once seriously tried to secure the acceptance of the people or to negotiate with the people that live in the country. We have relied exclusively on the military power of Great Britain. We have set goals that inevitably and in themselves had to lead to conflicts with the Arabs and about which we should say that they are reason–and justified reason–for a national uprising against us.”
In response to the 1982 Israeli siege of Beruit, Schwarzschild published an open letter announcing his resignation from Sh’ma, and stating that “I now renounce the State of Israel, disavow any political connection or emotional obligation to it, and declare myself its enemy. I retain, of course, the same deep concern for its inhabitants, Jewish, Arab, and other, that I hold for all humankind.” He continued:
the War on Lebanon has now made clear to me that the resumption of political power by the Jewish people after two thousand years of diaspora has been a tragedy of historical dimensions…I now conclude and avow that the price of a Jewish state is, to me, Jewishly unacceptable and that the existence of this (or any similar) Jewish ethnic religious nation state is a Jewish, i.e. a human and moral, disaster and violates every remaining value for which Judaism and Jews might exist in history. The lethal military triumphalism and corrosive racism that inheres in the State and in its supporters (both there and here) are profoundly abhorrent to me. So is the message that now goes forth to the nations of the world that the Jewish people claim the right to impose a holocaust on others in order to preserve its State.
Some settlement building is being put on hold, I see. It does make you wonder what might have been achieved without this pathetic waiting for a moment when Obama was neither seeking re-election nor promoting the election of a successor whose plans depended on massive Zionist support. The stage is set for Trump to come roaring into office as Israel’s friend and rescuer amid another round of US Europhobia.
“Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world will not make a secure and lasting peace with us until we give up the irredentist dream of ‘all Israel-Palestine for Jews'”
That is the point of pitting the unrelenting force against the immovable object – conflict. Let’s face it, the clearly extremist, nuts, vicious so-called “settler” bloc could not afford to drag the world’s only superpower around by the nose. That takes BIG money, the kind that can buy media, and politicians, and have many front groups. For instance, war can be extremely profitable for a select few, e.g. “War Profiteers and the Roots of the War on Terror”.