[Peace-discuss] Recognize Israel?

[David Green]

Since Rosh Hashanah evening service has traditionally been an occasion for political sermonizing, I've submitted this implicit sermon to the local newspaper:
 
Liberal and progressive Jewish-Americans increasingly question knee-jerk 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 2nd intifada 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 manifestations 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 manifestations 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 knee-jerk support for Israel that has come to be expected not only by their 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, however uneven the political manifestation of these values.
In our own country, Zionism has become the ingratiating ideological and fundraising tool of the privileged classes of all religious 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 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 freely 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, and is accused of betrayal by Israel’s staunch supporters among both parties. Nevertheless, an increasingly vocal minority of Jews opposes Obama for principled reasons that reflect political reality. Their views are consistent with those of Israeli Jews who wish to live in a normal country, one not subordinate to the strategic interests of the United States. My hope is that liberal and progressive Jewish-Americans will continue or resume our 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.


>________________________________
>From: C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu>
>To: peace-discuss at anti-war.net
>Sent: Wednesday, September 28, 2011 11:46 AM
>Subject: [Peace-discuss] Recognize Israel?
>
>
>At a dinner party the other evening a senior member of the local faculty observed, "There would be no problem at the UN if the Palestinians would simply recognize Israel. But the Hamas charter calls for the destruction of the Jewish state."
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>Noam Chomsky comments as follows (Counterpunch, June 6, 2008):
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>"Hamas cannot recognize Israel any more than Kadima can recognize Palestine, or than the Democratic Party in the US can recognize England. One could ask whether a government led by Hamas should recognize Israel, or whether a government led by Kadima or the Democratic Party should recognize Palestine. So far they have all refused to do so, though Hamas has at least called for a two-state settlement in accord with the long-standing international consensus, while Kadima and the Democratic Party refuse to go that far, keeping to the rejectionist stance that the US and Israel have maintained for over 30 years in international isolation. As for words, when Prime Minister Olmert declares to a joint session of the US Congress that he believes 'in our people's eternal and historic right to this entire land,' to rousing applause, he is presumably referring not only to Palestine from the Jordan to the sea, but also to the other side of the Jordan river, the
 historic claim of the Likud Party that was his political home, a claim never formally abandoned, to my knowledge. On Hamas, I think it should abandon those provisions of its charter, and should move from acceptance of a two-state settlement to mutual recognition, though we must bear in mind that its positions are more forthcoming than those of the US and Israel."
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>And on the  "one-state vs. two-states solution":
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>"We have to make a distinction between proposal and advocacy. We can propose that everyone should live in peace. It becomes advocacy when we sketch out a realistic path from here to there. A one-state solution makes little sense, in my opinion, but a bi-national state does. It was possible to advocate such a settlement from 1967 to the mid-1970s, and in fact I did, in many writings and talks, including a book. The reaction was mostly fury. After Palestinian national rights entered the international agenda in the mid-1970s, it has remained possible to advocate bi-nationalism (and I continue to do so), but only as a process passing through intermediate stages, the first being a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus. That outcome, probably the best that can be envisioned in the short term, was almost reached in negotiations in Taba in January 2001, and according to participants, could have been reached had the negotiations not
 been prematurely terminated by Israeli Prime Minister Barak. That was the one moment in the past 30 years when the two leading rejectionist states did briefly consider joining the international consensus, and the one time when a diplomatic settlement seemed within sight. Much has changed since 2001, but I do not see any reason to believe that what was apparently within reach then is impossible today. It is of some interest, and I think instructive, that proposals for a 'one-state solution' are tolerated within the mainstream today, unlike the period when advocacy was indeed feasible and they were anathema. Today they are published in the New York Times, New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. One can only conclude that they are considered acceptable today because they are completely unfeasible -- they remain proposal, not advocacy. In practice, the proposals lend support to US-Israeli rejectionism, and undermine the only feasible advocacy of a
 bi-national solution, in stages."
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>
>--CGE
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