[Peace-discuss] Recognize Israel?

Wed Sep 28 14:21:59 CDT 2011

Shanah Tovah, David. I trust you're available to discuss this on News  
form Neptune this Friday (cablecast on ch. 6/99 at 7pm).  --CGE

On Sep 28, 2011, at 12:39 PM, David Green wrote:

> 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."
>
> Noam Chomsky comments as follows (Counterpunch, June 6, 2008):
>
> "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."
>
> And on the  "one-state vs. two-states solution":
>
> "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."
>
> --CGE
>
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