Dear liberal Zionist friends,
We’ve been friends for a while in a cordial but wary way, and as this tumultuous year ends, I wanted to appeal to you to change your stance. While your attitudes are well-meaning and and even idealistic, you have done nothing to change Israel’s conduct in some 40 years now; and the fact that you have not altered your messaging beyond Frustrated Wheedling with some Anger thrown in now and then is deeply disappointing to me.
The sad truth is that: You have no program at all for ending the occupation, you just hope Israel will change.
The absence of any vision tells me that all your liberal messaging is just lip service to Palestinian human rights. In the end what you really care about is “the right of the Jewish people to a state” in historic Palestine; and you’ve got that, and nothing must be done that would risk that project one iota.
Your claims are completely contradictory. You can’t be an idealist and Not Want to Do Something about Palestinian rights. You have to do something. I assert that This is the Jewish problem of our time: Palestinian rightslessness. And that’s what this appeal is about, exposing that contradiction as fully as I can in an effort to shame you in the eyes of your own stakeholders and cause you to change.
I approach you as a friend because I’ve worked with you folks on several occasions, lately on Trump. And as you know, I have a deep understanding of the Jewish historical experience of persecution; I have often said that had I lived in Poland I might have become a Zionist; even today I nod when Zionists say, “Where were they supposed to go?” We share that background.
More than that, we share a romantic view of the Jewish presence in western civilization, and a hopeful view of history. We believe that the American project is improvable, and so is the Israeli one.
Trump put the Israeli effort on hold. I understood that. So long as Trump was sitting there, you could be excused for not focusing on Israel. We’re American progressives; and it seemed like our nation was at stake in his continued tenancy at the White House. And leftwingers and liberals collaborated together on the Biden victory.
That victory has cost you your fig leaf. You can no longer assert that the United States and Israel are in the same boat. No. The United States has taken a step in the right direction, and Israel just keeps blundering wrong. Israel’s Trump — your bugaboo Netanyahu– has been elected five times.
Now it appears that if Netanyahu is defeated in March, an even more right-wing government will replace him. This is the Physics of your Jewish state: Israeli governments keep going right, keep upping the ante on “exclusive… Jewish settlement” of the land. Even when Israeli governments weren’t right-wing, they were poison to Palestinian rights. Your hero Yitzhak Rabin said that he wanted to give Palestinians “less than a state,” and there were more settlements under Rabin than under his hardline predecessor Yitzhak Shamir, according to Jerry Slater’s magisterial new history, “Mythologies Without End“.
And 30 years of “peace process” later, aimed at creating a Palestinian state, the settlements continue to propagate, more than ever, engulfing Palestinian neighborhoods around Jerusalem. It’s a joke.
The pattern is absolutely clear. “The Jewish state” keeps taking more land for privileged “Jewish settlement,” without any U.S. pressure to stop taking that land.
You have completely failed to stop it. Everything you have done in the last 40 years has failed to pull Israel back one inch from occupation and oppression– and coldblooded murder too.
The astonishing thing is that you pour out inspiring fundraising appeals that pretend that you have had an effect. Mandy Patinkin just put up a letter on Americans for Peace Now talking about how much worse things got in apartheid Hebron over the 38 years between his two visits there– but he wants to do Nothing about it.
And while America is perhaps finally grappling with a past based on racism that has been baked into our society and is emerging today as the fight of the century, Israel continues to ignore the moral bankruptcy that a 50-year Occupation has wrought and rejects the notion that its Palestinian neighbors deserve to survive and thrive.
We are better than this….
We must step into the road and stare it down. We must speak up, even when speaking up, places us in danger. And we must continue to fight for peace so that Israelis and Palestinians can live, with freedom, justice, and dignity, on the same land, in the same place.
I have no idea what Patinkin is saying. We need to “speak up” even if that puts us “in danger”? Who the **** is in danger?! Every day I get messages from Badee Dwaik who lives in Hebron and therefore doesn’t have Patinkin’s luxury of getting to visit every 38 years. Settlers and soldiers harass him and arrest him and steal his property. Palestinian boys are murdered by Israeli forces and you are talking about Jewish danger? And what does speaking up mean? It doesn’t mean actually calling for the end of military funding to Israel! It doesn’t mean heeding what the Palestinian protesters are saying, and calling for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions.
BDS is a lot like the Montgomery bus boycott in our history; but liberal Zionist organizations pour their efforts into opposing BDS because it undermines “the right of the Jewish people to a state” in Palestine.
American progressives know that reform only takes place when you heed what the oppressed group is saying. Just look at this pro-BDS promotion from the boycott committee. It is obvious that BDS has broad appeal in many segments of Palestinian life.
What program do you offer? All you do is affirm the desirability of a two-state solution and say, More American money should go to Israel. Some of your groups support legislation that calls BDS antisemitic. J Street says it opposes settlements, but it cannot even come out for boycotting settlement goods. Jeremy Ben-Ami’s latest appeal says that we can’t continue to “simply echo talking points in support of peace… we must demand real action…. In the years ahead, we must pursue a bold new values-driven approach to the conflict, and overcome those urging a return to the familiar, failed policies of the past.”
Again, I have no idea what this means. There’s no mention of any real pressure on the Villain here: Israel.
When George Floyd was murdered you were clearly on the side of people of color in this country. J Street decried the “never-ending string of assaults on the lives of African-Americans and other people of color.”
As Jews, we can recognize a society pervaded by fundamental and structural racism… As an organization dedicated to peace, justice, equality and democracy, we take it as a sacred obligation to stand in partnership with communities of color under attack in this country…”
That is your moral problem. You are willing to challenge racism in the United States, but you support it, or look the other way, in Israel. Where is the solidarity with Palestinians who are literally under assault every day in Palestine? It’s negligible. You refuse to defund those soldiers, and support legislation that calls BDS antisemitic! Frankly it’s hard to distinguish the “liberal” Zionist position from the center-right position: that a managed conflict is the desirable status quo. A status quo that suffocates Palestinian dreams even as it enables Israelis to be cultural and business stars in the U.S.
We all know there is only one way forward that offers a whisper of a hope of a non-violent outcome: American pressure on Israel to change. Israel has not changed its policies because over 40 years the U.S. Zionist organizations in the U.S. have done all that they could to prevent the U.S. from punishing Israel at all for its actions. You liberal Zionists have been a key bloc among those organizations. You have helped establish the line in the Democratic Party that aid to Israel must never be “conditioned” — i.e., Israel can never be sanctioned.
So there should be sweeping consequences for the U.S. in the wake of the George Floyd murder but we should keep sending U.S. guns to Israel when it kills Palestinian boys.
This is no moral stance at all. You should be ashamed of it. As the year ends, I urge you to take stock and make a commitment to real action in 2021.
I say to the “liberal Zionists”? If Nazi Germany, instead of exterminating Jews (Vernichtung), had been content with forcing them out (Vertreibung), taking or destroying everything they owned, preventing them from earning a living, going to school, getting medical treatment, moving around their cities or anywhere else – would that have been OK?
No?
Then why is it OK for Jews to do it to Paletsinians?
Thanks for mentioning the book “Mythologies Without End: The US, Israel, and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1917-2020” by Jerome Slater, Phil – it’s so new it doesn’t have any Amazon reviews yet. But I opened the preview of the book on Amazon and here’s an excerpt –
For the past fifty years I have been studying, teaching and writing about Israel…and have many close connections to that country. I’ve been there many times, served as a Fulbright lecturer at Haifa University…I continue to have many dear Israeli friends. During this time I’ve become convinced that Israel – with blind US Jewish and government support – is well along the road to both a moral and security disaster. The first step Israel must take to prevent matters from getting even worse is to come to terms with the historical truth.
“So there should be sweeping consequences for the U.S. in the wake of the George Floyd murder but we should keep sending U.S. guns to Israel when it kills Palestinian boys.”
So something, even if tentative, should be done to stop imperial oppression and war of aggression but we should keep maintaining and reinforcing imperial oppression and war of aggression, and even glorify the prevailing of a more efficient war machine by calling it “victory”, as you did.
This is no moral stance at all. You should be ashamed of it.
Phil, you have no program or vision either. You know what you are against, yet you do not know what you are for. Your appeal that you would have been a Zionist in 19th Century Poland to me is disingenuous. You might have been a non-Zionist Bundist as well. You are a very assimilated Jew trying to play catch up while writing editorials. You have no idea of what it is like to be a Holocaust Survivor or a child of Holocaust Survivors. So you really don’t know how disappointed those like myself are with the so-called Jewish State. The first thing we all need to do is get rid of the word Zionism, for or against. The next thing is to tell US Jews and the Jewish Community of geographic Palestine not only to stop behaving so abominably towards Arab Palestinians. As well the Jewish Community within Palestine must be encouraged to reconstitute itself from within and without as a non-nationalist entity. From that we might hope the Jewish Community of geographic Palestine would negotiate with Arab Palestinians a solution of mutual integrity. In any case I cannot play the Zionist came on either side. I cannot be locked in the 19th Century where ideas clearly failed in the 20th century. Alas intersectionalism illustrates a larger human problem, but it does not give details on how each situation gets resolved. Even if there are problems in articulating a way forward, it is better to be shouting about constructive ways forward, rather than shouting one is against all the time. In terms of the conflict on the Eastern Mediterranean I rather be attacked for being a “bi-communalist” instead of an anti-Zionist.
In response to those who envision exiling Zionists, but not nonzionist jews: i find that i have already thought in that direction: a screenplay idea already concocted: zionists hiding out among the ultra orthodox.