A recent and acrimonious debate between American Jewish leaders regarding the Gaza strikes reflects a struggle over the meaning of “support for Israel.” Some progressives may react with kneejerk antipathy to that phrase, believing that like “I support the troops,” the possibility of any meaning other than a right-wing hawkishness has long ago been crowded out. But I believe that if we can reconfigure the notion of support for Israel, we can fundamentally change the dynamic of our domestic debate on the Arab-Israeli conflict. That, in turn, will allow our leaders to play a role in halting, instead of perpetuating, the conflict.
J Street, a progressive Jewish lobby whose positions and statements have often won my support, often comes under attack from extreme right-wing Jewish figures. The organization does not shrink from conflict, and in fact J Street needs to engage in conflicts with other Jewish and pro-Israel groups in order to move the debate on Israel/Palestine.
This week saw another conflict within the Jewish community, but one that causes more pain to the individuals at J Street because it comes from a mainstream figure and represents a more bitter split.
Rabbi Eric Yoffie, President of the Union for Reform Judaism, attempted to stake out a centrist position on the Gaza strikes. After first taking gleeful hawks to task, he turned his fire on J Street, blasting them at length. In Yoffie’s eyes, J Street’s statements on the strikes turned “dovishness” into an amoral idealism that recognizes no difference between Israel and Hamas.
Yoffie’s views were quickly taken up by right-wingers to call J Street “anti-Israel.”
J Street has fired back. After iterating the support the organization receives from thousands of American Jews and the overlap between its positions and the views of many Israelis, Jeremy Ben-Ami talks about a different kind of support for Israel than the one Yoffie envisions. By doing so, Ben-Ami breaks out of the narrow framework within which many pro-Israel voices exist.
J Street understands that Hamas is a terrorist organization and a harsh enemy. We are neither dovish nor pacifist, nor are we blindly opposed to the use of force. We support Israel in defending and protecting its citizens from attack, including through military action if necessary and appropriate to the threat. We believe, however, that force cannot be Israel’s only or preponderant response ”“ even to Hamas.
We are pragmatists grounded in the real world and the lessons it teaches. As such ”“ and as avid supporters of Israel ”“ we are asking whether the specific actions taken by Israel in Gaza actually do advance Israel’s and America’s interests. In this case, J Street believes they do not. We believe that the actions taken this week ”“ disproportionate to the threat and escalatory in nature ”“ will be seen, with time, as counterproductive. They will further isolate Israel and the US internationally, deepen hatred among the Palestinian and Israel peoples, foment extremism throughout the Arab world and undercut the position of more moderate Arab regimes.
This is a kind of support, unlike other strands, that allows for criticism at both a strategic and a moral level.
This concept, and the new frames J Street offers, are critical not only for public debates on the conflict, but also for the micro-struggles that take place around the country and will ultimately have a decisive impact on the larger debate. J Street’s debate with Yoffie mirrors generational conflicts in my own life. One of my great-grandfathers was Jewish, and in recent years my grandmother (his daughter) has come to identify increasingly with Israel, where one of her sisters has lived for a half-century. That side of my family, which is of predominately Polish descent, has a personal connection to the Holocaust, and through them I do too: a number of relatives, both Jewish and non-Jewish, lost their lives to the Nazis, and others survived the camps. My grandparents still have a cigarette case that my grandfather’s uncle carved in a POW camp. For years Holocaust survivors stayed in my grandparents’ house, and I grew up hearing stories about the bread rolls they would instinctively pocket at the dinner table.
Both my grandmother and I support Israel. But whereas she supports Israel in the same way that Yoffie does, or with even less tolerance for criticism of Israeli actions, I support Israel in the sense that J Street does: I hope to see Israel make pragmatic moves in the interest of a just peace. The circumstances of Israel’s founding were tragic, but even though my roommate (who is Jewish) and I occasionally muse about hypothetical situations in which Israel could have been founded in Uganda, Canada, or Germany, I believe Israel will be a permanent fixture of the geography of the Middle East. I believe, along with the government of Saudi Arabia, that Israel can have a positive role in a stable and peaceful Middle East. And I support steps that would lead to that outcome, because I believe peace is in my country’s interest, Israel’s interest, and the world’s interest.
I am not the only progressive, and not the only person with Jewish ancestry, who holds those views. J Street is an emblem of the widespread support for a just peace that exists within the American Jewish community, but I can also see evidence of a changing generational picture in my own life, where many Jewish friends hold my views.
Ben-Ami, quoting Anshel Pfeffer of Ha’aretz, hopes to move the American debate between a polarized field where “pro-Israel” hawks and leftist Jews who feel “compelled to atone for Israel’s manifold sins and join its enemies in the demonstrations and sign petitions accusing the Zionist entity of war crimes” shout at each other in vain. Reclaiming the idea of support for Israel is one way out of this box, especially if prominent American politicians can condemn specific Israeli actions within a context of support. If we can move the debate in the public sphere, and in our own lives, with our own friends and families, we can make a powerful contribution to peace.
J Street has one hell of a balancing act on its hands, and I can feel some of that pressure even as I write this. Proclaim support for Israel and you will be attacked from the left. Criticize Israel and you will be vilified by Americans of all stripes – even progressives, as many diarists on Kos have recently learned. But I encourage leftists, even those for whom the phrase “support for Israel” leaves a bitter taste in the mouth, to support J Street’s efforts to advance the debate. Many will disagree with me, and perhaps even J Street would, but I don’t see a critical difference between the outcome J Street hopes for and the outcome that many on the left hope for, namely a two-state solution. The main difference between traditional leftist protests against Israel and J Street’s approach is tactical and rhetorical, not ideological.
America and Israel have been allies for sixty years, and will be for some time to come. Everyone in this debate invokes notions of pragmatism, so let’s be pragmatic. The main question for Americans, Jewish and non-Jewish, is not whether that alliance will continue to exist, but the shape we want it to take. After sixty years of bloodshed, in which America has often played a supporting role, let’s push for a type of alliance that encourages peace.
And there lie the bodies
By Gideon Levy, Ha Aretz
January 2, 2009
The legend, lest it be a true story, tells of how the late mathematician, Professor Haim Hanani, asked his students at the Technion to draw up a plan for constructing a pipe to transport blood from Haifa to Eilat. The obedient students did as they were told. Using logarithmic rulers, they sketched the design for a sophisticated pipeline. They meticulously planned its route, taking into account the landscape’s topography, the possibility of corrosion, the pipe’s diameter and the flow calibration. When they presented their final product, the professor rendered his judgment: You failed. None of you asked why we need such a pipe, whose blood will fill it, and why it is flowing in the first place.
Regardless of whether this story is legend or true, Israel is now failing its own blood pipeline test. As Israel has been preoccupied with Gaza throughout the entire week, nobody has asked whose blood is being spilled and why. Everything is permitted, legitimate and just. The moral voice of restraint, if it ever existed, has been left behind. Even if Israel wiped Gaza off the face of the earth, killing tens of thousands in the process, as a Chechnyan laborer working in Sderot proposed to me, one can assume that there would be no protest.
They liquidated Nizar Ghayan? Nobody counts the 20 women and children who lost their lives in the same attack. There was a massacre of dozens of officers during their graduation ceremony from the police academy? Acceptable. Five little sisters? Allowed. Palestinians are dying in hospitals that lack medical equipment? Peanuts. Whatever happened to the not-so-good old days of Salah Shahadeh? When we liquidated him in July 2002, we also killed 15 women and children. At least back then, moral qualms were raised for a moment.
Here lie their bodies, row upon row, some of them tiny. Our hearts have turned hard and our eyes have become dull. All of Israel has worn military fatigues, uniforms that are opaque and stained with blood and which enable us to carry out any crime. Even our leading intellectuals fail to speak out on what havoc we have wreaked. Amos Oz urges: “Cease-fire now.” David Grossman writes: “Hold your fire. Stop.” Meir Shalev wants “a punitive operation.” And not one word about our moral image, which has been horribly distorted.
The suffering in the south renders everything kosher, as if the horrible suffering in Gaza pales in comparison. Everyone is hungry for revenge, and that hunger is excused by the need for “deterrence,” after it was already proved that the killing and the destruction in Lebanon did not achieve it.
Yes, I know, war is war. After all, they brought this on themselves. They are a terrorist organization and we are not. They want to destroy us and we seek peace. Still, is there nothing here that will stop this blood pipeline? Even those whose hearts are hardened by “moral righteousness” will have to momentarily halt the bombing machine and ask: Which Israel do we have before us? What will become of its standing in the world, which is now watching the events in Gaza? What are we inflicting on the moderate Arab regimes? And what of the simmering popular hatred we are sowing throughout the world? What good will emerge from this killing and destruction?
It is doubtful whether Hamas will be cut down to size as a result of this wretched war. Yet, the face of the state has been cut down to size, as have civilian elites who are apathetic and scared. The “peace camp,” if it ever existed, has been cut down to size. Attorney General Menachem Mazuz authorized the Ghayan killing, regardless of the cost. Haim Oron, the leader of the “new left-wing movement,” supported the launch of this foolish war.
Nobody is coming to the rescue – of Gaza or even of the remnants of humanity and Israeli democracy. The statesmen, the jurists, the poets, the authors, academe, and the news media – pitch black over the abyss. When the time comes for reckoning, we will need to remember the damage this war did to Israel: The blood pipeline it laid has been completed.
…going to post that most excellent article. Personally, I’m beyond the ability to understand the lack of outrage coming from the world; the whole world! What does this portend for the future of us?
stammering and stuttering like usual. On target, like usual.
I did inhale.
And we’re getting louder.
“The best-informed man is not necessarily the wisest. Indeed there is a danger that precisely in the multiplicity of his knowledge he will lose sight of what is essential.”
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer
…I meant us humans, everywhere. Louder? Please give me an example. I don’t see any evidence of it.
It is profoundly existential. The logical flaw of monotheism is the assumption that the absolute is an ideal from which we fell and seek to return. The reality is that the absolute is basis, not apex. So the spiritual absolute is the essence of being from which we rise, not a moral paragon guiding our way. When we knock down those houses of cards which are society, we don’t float off into the heavens. Those left pick themselves up and start over again. So now we have a war between various peoples who think they are God’s chosen? Don’t hold your breath for a compromise. Just because we have modern communications to beam the blood into everyones living rooms isn’t going to stop it from flowing.
I’ve read the Israeli neo-con plan is to apply such pressure on Gaza that large numbers of civilians leave, as a repeat of ’48. Long term thinking seems to be in short supply.
Eventually it is top down theism which will have to go, when the fundamentalists have fully discredited it.
War doesn’t decide who is right, only who is left.
by the hysterical pro Israeli lobby that keeps a tight grip on the message. In Canada the Asper family (Jewish) control newspapers in every big city. Their reports and opinions of the events in Gaza should be required reading for students taking a course in “Biased Journalism”.
Tolerating prostitution is tolerating abuse and torture of women and children.
named Bloomberg on TeeVee today. I have to meditate and soul cleanse after 30 seconds of this torture yet I did so anyway just to see how humanity is sold Satanic ideals. The complaint that the Palestinians are lobbing Estes rockets into Israel
http://www.estesrockets.com/
and Israel can respond with the full high tech might of US weapons including the infamous depleted uranium just strikes me as another perversion.
Oh, I see, Hamas is a “terrorist” organization. Why. Because they have a belief system that doesn’t include a lust for 60 inch TeeVees?
Really I want to see far more mainstream media coverage on the future financial capitals of the new world, like Dubai. I would like full disclosure on who financed what, when and why. Ha, what is that popular blogger term fuggettaboudit.