[Peace-discuss] Article in Sunday Commentary

[Brussel, Morton K]

Hello, David.

Seeing your Commentary in the N-G almost makes me excuse its general right wing scripts. Fine effort.

It is perhaps also useful to note that the social dissatisfactions (the the government) among Israelis as expressed in their demonstrations does not seem to translate to justice for Palestinians. It reminds one of the mindset among most American Jews—socially "liberal" but blind to Israel's injustices. Can both change?

--Mort

On Nov 6, 2011, at 1:31 PM, David Green wrote:

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.

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