[Peace-discuss] Commentary on Gaza, etc.

[Marti Wilkinson]

Your commentary is very well thought out and written. If it's submitted to
the N-G as a 'letter to the editor' it will be rejected on the grounds that
it is over 250 words. That is the limit the News-Gazette places on
correspondence....Marti

On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 11:47 AM, David Green <davegreen84 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> This Commentary was submitted to the N-G, and thus has little or no chance
> of being published. Despite the tone of the end of this article, I do not
> support the thinking and tactics of JStreet and Brit Tzedek, which represent
> Zionism lite. But their presence does at least make explicit the myth of
> monolithic support for Israel among Jews, for whatever that is worth. A
> successful and sustainable movement against Israeli/American criminality
> will still have to be from a principled position that traces Israeli
> behavior to American behavior in the Middle East and elsewere.
>
> Rhetoric and Reality in the Israel/Palestine Conflict
>
> Israel's invasion of Gaza has exposed as never before the distance between
> rhetoric and reality. Israel's claim of retaliation is belied by its
> previous incursions during the ceasefire, its long-term strangulation of
> Gaza's economy—including throughout the ceasefire and in violation of that
> ceasefire—and its overwhelming military might.
>
> Hamas rockets can only go so far in rationalizing bombs dropped in crowded
> neighborhoods. Palestinians' crime was to vote for Hamas after they were
> betrayed by the Palestinian Authority, correctly viewed as collaborators
> with Israeli occupiers. American neoconservatives dictate to Arabs that they
> become democratic. But a free and fair election in 2006, making Palestine
> the only democracy in the Middle East, was followed by Israel's arrest of
> elected Hamas legislators.
>
>
> At the local level, it's interesting to note the patterns of coverage and
> comment. News from Israel/Palestine was absent from the News-Gazette for
> several weeks in November and December, during which Jewish settlers in
> Hebron (West Bank) carried out openly racist pogroms against Palestinians,
> often recorded by cell phone cameras. There is no way to square these events
> with the portrayal of Jews as victims. There were no rockets fired by
> Palestinian children walking to school. Thus there was no coverage and no
> large photos, because there were no Jewish funerals.
>
> But Gaza can't be ignored, and only a lack of context can present Israeli
> Jews as victims. History according to the Associated Press reports in the
> News-Gazette begins with a Hamas rocket fired into southern Israel on
> December 27th, not one minute before. The essential narrative of terrorist
> Arab religious fanatics attacking innocent and democratic Jews must be
> maintained. This can only be done through selective memory and chronology,
> reinforced cultural stereotypes, and an unquestioned definition of terrorism
> that excludes state-sponsored terror.
>
> Local Jewish institutions and leadership, responsible for maintaining the
> myth of Jewish innocence and Israeli righteousness, have been predictably
> silent. Official Jewish perspectives are dictated by national-level
> organizations, invariably supportive of Israeli (and American) wars. They
> hope that with the help of the mainstream media that this will suffice,
> without the annoyance of locally-generated rhetoric that might reveal
> factually-based alternative perspectives. The job of local Jewish
> institutions—religious and secular—is to selectively focus on historical
> Jewish victimization and alleged current examples of anti-Semitism, such as
> hate speech on Urbana Public Television. The moral high ground must be
> maintained and political complexity must be ignored. Self-examination and
> criticism is forbidden.
>
> Nevertheless, at this moment there is a vital and ongoing debate among
> various dissenting Jewish-identified organizations that constitute an aspect
> of the broad peace and social justice movement. Participants promote
> alternative perspectives critical of Israel's actions as judged in relation
> to human rights and international law. They question the benefits that a
> hyper-militarized Jewish state offer to Jewish-American identity, and
> challenge the unconditional support and blank check that our own government
> has offered Israel for the past four decades. Debate—honest, complex,
> contentious, sometimes flawed and sectarian—has been generated from the
> local level with grassroots organizations and the internet, and is now
> reflected in the formation of national-level organizations such as JStreet,
> Jewish Voice for Peace, and Brit Tzedek.
>
> These perspectives increasingly test the suffocating party line of
> established Jewish institutions and leaders that have with no exceptions
> supported both Israeli and American military invasions and occupations for
> decades. Dissenters will be studiously ignored or suppressed by Jewish
> establishments at all levels for as long as possible. But dissent will
> eventually—and sooner rather than later—become so pervasive and relevant
> that it will have to be treated with seriousness rather than condescension,
> especially in the face of Israeli policies that are starkly contradictory to
> the liberal values supported by the vast majority of American Jews, and
> indeed alienate most young Jews from dogmatic Jewish institutions.
>
> Local Jewish leaders will no longer be able to carelessly play the
> anti-Semitism card and exploit the implicit assumption of Jewish moral
> superiority in order to silence their critics, Jewish or otherwise. An
> international consensus for a legal resolution of the Israel/Palestine
> conflict has been in place for three decades. At some point Israel and the
> United States will be compelled to accept rather than reject it.
>
>
>
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