[Peace-discuss] Article in Sunday Commentary

[David Green]

I distributed an earlier version of this article on the Peace-Discuss list recently; this revision was published this morning in the News-Gazette.
 
DG
 
Liberal and progressive Jewish-Americans increasingly
question the meaning of "support" for Israel
David Green
Since the 1960s—but not before then—support for Israel has
been a central aspect of cultural, religious, and political identification for Jewish-Americans,
including the vast majority of Jews who subscribe to liberal and progressive
perspectives. This fundamental identification has persisted during these
decades in spite of events that generated intense debate and disagreement; for
example, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the outbreak of the 2ndintifada and Israel’s repression of it in 2000, and Israel’s assault on Gaza in
2008-09.
Nevertheless, significant events in Israel, the Middle East,
and the United States during the past year have exposed and accelerated
long-developing fissures among liberal Jewish-Americans, as well as the
Jewish-American community at large. These divisions have until recently been
largely repressed by the overbearing dictates, pieties, and propaganda of Jewish
institutions in general and the Israel Lobby in particular, as well as by
assumptions and biases regarding Israel that are reflected in the mainstream
media.
This dissension is reflected in at least four general and
clearly inter-related areas. First, opposition to American military conduct in
the “Global War on Terror” has brought into question Israel’s historical role
as a “strategic asset” in the promotion of U.S. interests in the Middle East,
especially as they relate to control over oil. Second, the “Arab Spring” and
its ongoing effects in the Middle East have exposed the historical opposition
of both American and Israeli policies to popular and democratic movements in
the Arab world, an opposition manifested in military support for dictators.
Third, the ongoing Palestinian struggle for political rights
has continued to reveal the essentially reactionary nature of Israeli politics,
predicated on ongoing occupation and dispossession, with corollary expressions
of racism and religious fanaticism. Finally, the recent “tent movement” within
Israel has informed liberal Jewish-Americans of egregious economic inequality
among Jewish Israelis and the weakening of social welfare programs, long-term
developments emanating from policies that have been generally opposed
domestically by liberal Jewish-Americans from the Reagan era to that of the Tea
Party. Moreover, informed Jewish-Americans understand that Israeli society has
always rested on legalized discrimination against its second-class Palestinian
citizens.
In all of these political contexts, liberal and progressive
Jewish-Americans can hardly avoid questioning the unequivocal support for
Israeli policies that has come to be expected not only by Jewish leaders, but
by the political culture at large, a culture increasingly dominated by
right-wing Christian Zionists. The historical pretensions of Zionism as
reflecting not only the national aspirations of the Jewish people but the moral
foundations of Judaism cannot but strain the credulity of those who regard their
religious values as incorporating universalism and social justice.
In our own country, Zionism has become the ingratiating
ideological and fundraising tool of the privileged classes of all
Judeo-Christian backgrounds, including the most Islamophobic among them. In
Israel, it is the ideological basis for a militarized economy and state, and
for a pecking order not only among Jews, Muslims, and Palestinian Christians,
but between Jews of European and Arabic/African background. Beneath appeals to
Zionism that regularly evoke the Holocaust and emphasize threats to
hyper-militarized and nuclear-weaponized Israel from its alleged enemies, one
finds a cultural dynamic in which denigrating stereotypes of Jews are promoted
by Jews themselves. This is not a “vibrant” democracy but a dysfunctional one,
which has systematically impoverished a sizable plurality of Jews while
spectacularly enriching a tiny fraction.
In the current rhetorical climate, conscientious
Jewish-Americans are lost in a sea of nonsense. President Obama promotes
abhorrent foreign policies, consistently supports Israel’s abhorrent behavior,
but is accused of betrayal by Israel’s staunch supporters among both parties.
Nevertheless, an increasingly vocal minority of Jews opposes Obama for
justified and principled reasons that reflect political reality, both domestic
and international. Their views are consistent with those of Israeli Jews who
wish to live in a normal and sovereign country, one not subordinate to the
strategic and energy resource-related interests of the United States. My hope
is that liberal and progressive Jewish-Americans will continue or resume our
significant historical contributions to political sanity in our own country,
which will in turn encourage Israel's emergent if tenuous social justice
movement and its broader potential in a rapidly changing region.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20111106/e6f5099d/attachment.html>