Meretz USA Weblog

Objectivity & Bias in study of Israeli-Palestinian Conflict*

2009-11-23T17:39:00.019-05:00

Making in-roads in the understanding of the human dimension of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not an easy task. In my book “Planting Hatred, Sowing Pain: The Psychology of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” I argue that psychological factors, such as mistrust, fear, hatred and prejudice, are more important than the political issues of borders and refugees in solving the conflict. This is, however, a concept that generates a lot of controversy and not a little disagreement.

Among several positive reviews, I encountered an interesting paradox: Some reviewers characterized the book alternatively as too objective (Fox, 2007), biased towards the Israeli-Western perspective (Elbedour & Ferguson, 2008), or biased against Israel (Salamon, 2007) because it “overlook[s] the issue of [Islamic] fundamentalism” as the major cause of the conflict. The fact that it has been criticized from all sides is, in fact, a welcoming fact that shows it belongs in what I call, "the radical center."

First, in his review, Fox argues, rather convincingly, that in order to understand this protracted conflict, we cannot avoid the politics behind it, and detach it from its historical perspective, and therefore the academic objectivity of the book is an obstacle to understanding of the conflict. Fox, however, misses the point of the book. The question is whether depoliticizing the conflict can help move towards a solution.

One of the main premises of the book is precisely that in order to solve the problem, there is no choice but to move away from the parallel, contradictory and irreconcilable political and historical contextual narratives, and into a human paradigm with an orientation to the future. Counseling psychologists have shown that you can only resolve a conflict when you are able to move beyond the past, and as long as we insist on focusing on who is to blame for the conflict, we will never be able to solve their problems.

Psychological phenomena such as self serving bias and cognitive distortions make it impossible to agree on past events, creating parallel narratives and an endless cycle of blaming the other. It is this fact, and not, as Dr. Fox argues, my own personal history as a progressive Zionist activist, that drives my deliberate attempt to separate the usually neglected social psychological dimension of the conflict from its historical and political contexts. Dr. Fox’s implication that the conflict must be seen as “an indication of injustice and oppression” is, in my opinion, an example of a “culpability orientation” that is focused on blame, and is precisely an obstacle to achieving peace.

Second, as Elbedour and Ferguson point out, the book is indeed skewed in its sources because it presents many more studies that analyze the conflict from a Western/Israeli perspective than from the Palestinian/Arab one. However, in this case, rather than it being the result of conscious or unconscious biases, it is the result of a methodology in which the content of the book was driven by the available literature, and a sad reality in which the majority of the research is done by Israeli or Western scholars. It would be great, for example, as Elbedour and Ferguson suggest, to use the more contemporary theories of prejudice, such as Stephan & Stephan "integrated threat theory." However, once again, there is no research available directly and, although it would be tempting to hypothesize, I believe it would be a mistake to include such speculation in an empirically driven literature review.

Elbedour and Ferguson also explain that occupation and security are the main issues you would need to analyze, which is true if you are making a socio-political analysis. However, the point of the book is precisely to move beyond the political realm, and more in terms of the subjective experience; for example, occupation might be a reality, but hatred is the subjective result. Security might be a real concern, but fear is the underlying emotion.

In conclusion, I believe that the question one must ask to move beyond the past and into a future orientation, is not what is the historical and political context of the conflict, but rather: what is currently preventing the Israelis and Palestinians from reaching an agreement? I believe, as is the main point of the book, that psychological factors such as mistrust, hatred, fear, stereotypes, and prejudice-- often overlooked-- are as important as disagreements over borders, refugees, and settlements. The historical narratives only serve to maintain a perception of injustice on both sides that is not conducive to dialogue and reconciliation.

Dr. Fox asks if “reconciliation requires acknowledging past injustice." And the psychological evidence would suggest it does. But as a process, it can come only after rapprochement, not as a precondition. Only after the sides stop hurting each other, agree to end the fighting, and begin to build trust, can violence and abuse be sincerely acknowledged, and only then can it be forgiven.

Dr. Fox’s contention that a substantial percentage of the population oppose "splitting the difference through decontextualized dialogue and then moving on” might in itself exemplify how both sides’ obsession over past atrocities, result in a culpability orientation because of a misguided quest for subjective justice. This is the main obstacle to a final and just solution to the conflict.

*This article is based on a version originally published at Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, Vol. 9, No. 1, 2009, pp. 341--343.

J Street's Ben-Ami meets with Meretz USA

2009-11-23T13:36:00.009-05:00

The head of J Street, Jeremy Ben-Ami, was the guest speaker at Meretz USA's semi-annual board meeting, Sunday, Nov. 22. I found him a very engaging speaker and quite approachable on an individual level.

As you would know from reading this Weblog, Meretz USA was a partner in J Street's very successful first annual conference last month in Washington, DC, and we enthusiastically see ourselves as allies. As Ben-Ami put it: "We share an agenda in what it means to be pro-Israel."

Ben-Ami says that the passage of national health care is vital for progress on the peace front because Barack Obama's entire presidency will likely fail without it. He sees no new energy from the Obama administration until health care passes; he does not see the "mind space" from Obama to renew work on Middle East peace until next February or March. What he hopes to see from the United States is not a new push for negotiations-- which he sees as "talks about talks" and endless "process" without peace-- but work to shape "bridging proposals," by meeting separately with the parties to the conflict.

In the meantime, he told us about J Street's absorption of Brit Tzedek v'Shalom. BTvS will be renamed, possibly "J Roots" (for grassroots), and he's hiring a half dozen new organizers for this operation. Similarly, about a half a year ago, the Union of Progressive Zionists, a student group which Meretz USA founded and nurtured in cooperation with Ameinu, Habonim-Dror and Hashomer Hatzair, was reorganized as J Street U under the rubric of the J Street Education Fund. (UPZ's dynamic young executive director, Tammy Shapiro, remains in place as director in her office at Beit Shalom in Manhattan.)

This same fund will also now conduct trips for Congressmen to Israel, something that AIPAC does with a less dovish agenda in mind. And Ben-Ami indicates that J Street now has six lobbyists working Congress; AIPAC has nine, so he sees J Street approaching parity with AIPAC in this important arena.

The value that he and we see in J Street is that it functions as the "political arm" of the same pro-Israel, pro-peace movement that Meretz USA is part of. J Street is a registered lobbying organization and has an allied PAC (political action committee) that legally raises money for political campaigns. This gives it special clout with politicians. But he affirmed that J Street will support Meretz USA's joint slate with Ameinu, Hashomer Hatzair and Habonim-Dror, if there are new elections in the coming year for the World Zionist Congress.

Success of a 'dancing Arab'

2009-11-18T13:20:00.003-05:00

Meretz USA was the sponsoring partner with The Other Israel Film Festival in last Sunday's screening of "Forever Scared," a documentary film about Sayed Kashua, an Israeli Arab writer whose work has brought him fame and success. His book, "Dancing Arabs," is a best seller in Israel and his sitcom television series, "Arab Labor," is very popular among Israeli Jews. But he also suffers the slings and arrows of his fellow Arabs who see his honest and comedic portrayal of Israeli Arabs as something of a betrayal and a kind of "collaboration" with the Jews.

The documentary is painful in relating his discomfort with both Jews and Arabs in Israel. Hebrew is his writing medium and an object of "love" for him. But he also relates how difficult it was to adapt as a lone Arab child in a Jewish school and how problematic it is for Israeli Arabs to find housing outside of Arab towns and neighborhoods; Israel has no anti-discrimination laws. But today he lives in West Jerusalem, even as he tries to minimize the Arab profile of his young family (for example, he contemplates a visit by his typically Arab-garbed grandmother with great anxiety).

So he illustrates in his very being how Arabs can reach material success in Israeli society, but also how difficult it is even for him to live comfortably as an Arab citizen. The riff he comes back to in the film is that he is "forever scared" of the trucks that may come one day to forcibly transport him, his family and other Arabs beyond Israel's borders. This fear has to come as a surprise to most of us as Jews, many of whom of a certain age have long had a similar and even more horrifying nightmare, that of being collected for transport to a death camp.

I am saddened by the ongoing difficulty of even a successful Arab like Kashua to feel at home in Israel. Discrimination in housing and other aspects of Israeli life is scandalous. But the fact that he is a success, and feels free enough to share his discomfort and dissatisfaction in living in the Jewish state (it can even be seen as a kind of shtick for him), is also a source of hope. Something that did not come up in the film is that if and when (God willing) there is a peaceful resolution to the external conflict with the Arab world, relations between Jews and Arabs within Israel should evolve in a dramatically more positive direction.

A Response to Thomas Friedman

2009-11-16T14:44:00.003-05:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/opinion/08friedman.html?hp

Dear Mr. Friedman-
I am disappointed, I truly am. I agree with you that it is time for the Obama administration to make certain changes to their approach on bringing peace to the Middle East, but to give up? In your opinion, we are watching the rerun of the same tired story, wasting efforts on two peoples so obsessed with conflict that our struggle is bound to be futile. Mr. Friedman, I hope you will forgive me when I say that you are wrong. This is not the same tired story: this is the beginning of a new story.

When in history has an American president made the amelioration of the Israeli-Arab conflict a priority within the first months of his presidency? Granted, it has been a rough few months, but it has opened the forum for groups like J Street, and other moderate voices stifled during the years of Bush and Intifada. And it has only been a few months. The Israelis and Palestinians are indeed defensive and distrustful, but they are above all tired of conflict, and moreover unable to free themselves from its grasp without American help.

Your approach, Mr. Friedman, strikes me not only as off the mark in terms of analysis, but also as dangerous in terms of implications. If you disagree with the premise that ending this conflict is important not only for the sake of the people of Israel and Palestine but also for the sake of world peace, security and American interests, then so be it. But having read your work in the past, I do not think that you would disagree with such a premise. Thus it is truly disappointing, and surprising, hearing you tell Obama and his administration to give up, to go home.

Do I believe that Obama's push for peace is going perfectly? Of course not, but that should lead to a rethinking of strategy, perhaps a decision to shift focus from the settlements, or to push forward with Syrian-Israeli peace talks as a first step. It should not lead to giving up. Things are not going well now, Mr. Friedman, but what we need, as thinkers, human beings, and American constituents, is not cynicism, but hope, and creative, thoughtful alternatives.

Are West Bank settlements actually waning?

2009-11-16T09:58:00.004-05:00

I attended Ameinu's lunch meeting with Israel's minister of social welfare, Isaac Herzog, on November 6, when he shared his social democratic vision for Israel. Herzog is a Labor minister in Netanyahu's cabinet and he lamented the kind of bitter split that exists today within Labor's ranks as a result of the decision of their party leader, Ehud Barak, to be part of this Likud-led government.

It was interesting to hear the perspective of a Labor centrist on Israel's situation today. He views Israel's posture under Netanyahu as more moderate and open to negotiating peace with the Palestinians than we doves are inclined to see; he characterizes the Palestinian Authority nowadays as being recalcitrant in not understanding that Netanyahu is being relatively flexible.

This may not be completely wrong. We actually heard something along these lines from our longtime friend from Meretz, Avshalom (Abu) Vilan, who lost his Knesset seat in the elections early this year. And we know that the harsh system of roadblocks and checkpoints has significantly eased, allowing for a renaissance of economic activity on the West Bank.

And Herzog indicates that the West Bank settlements are weaker than widely thought. He sees only two Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) settlements as growing substantially in population. He claims that Ariel, the West Bank's largest Jewish town, is down to 18,000 and (most significantly) has 50% fewer children there than there were ten years ago. As for Kiryat Arba, the militant community next door to Hebron (where mass murderer Baruch Goldstein had lived), he says that most of its original leadership no longer resides there and that it's largely populated now by two mutually antagonistic groups of Jews from India.

But the Palestinians' rigidity, if that's what it is, reflects Mahmoud Abbas/Abu Mazen's weakness as head of the PA, with Hamas pushing him toward more militant stands. Herzog mentioned former Prime Minister Olmert's effort to make a deal with Abbas last year; I will add the details of Olmert's offers of territory to the PA, if I find my notes. The bottom line is that Olmert was offering somewhere in the range of 95% of the West Bank with a transfer of about 2-3% of Israeli territory to compensate for incorporating most of the settlement blocs into Israel. Olmert is also said to have been fairly forthcoming in offering Palestinian control in much or most of East Jerusalem, with a special status for the various religious sites in the "Holy Basin," in the middle of the city.

The latest we know about Abbas's future is that his departure is not imminent, as new presidential elections have been postponed. This is what former Meretz leader, Yossi Beilin, wrote recently about Abbas in The Forward:

When Ehud Olmert became prime minister, he conducted negotiations with Abu Mazen in his own living room in Jerusalem, meeting him once every few weeks, without any note takers and without enjoying support from within his own Cabinet. Olmert was surprised that Abu Mazen did not fall head over heels for what the Israeli prime minister thought was a very generous peace offer. But we should remember that this offer included Israel’s annexation of Ariel, a large settlement in the heart of the West Bank, along with other bitter pills that would be difficult for any Palestinian leader to swallow. ...

None of this is to say that the Palestinians did not make their own contributions to the lack of progress toward peace. Palestinian hesitancy and clumsy political conduct and, perhaps most of all, the ongoing split between the West Bank and Gaza Strip — that is, between Fatah and Hamas — have all been detrimental to peace prospects.

Now, we face the consequences of our collective failures. With Abu Mazen seemingly on his way out, it is increasingly clear that we may have missed a rare chance to reach a peace agreement. Abu Mazen may not be terribly charismatic or a great orator, but he is a responsible leader who believes that the Palestinian national interest lies in the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, with both states enjoying peaceful relations and economic cooperation with one another.

South African lessons for Labor & Meretz?

2009-11-12T13:00:00.008-05:00

This is another comparative analysis by Thomas Mitchell, Ph.D., an independent scholar who often contributes to this Weblog. He draws on historical parallels in other conflicted societies for lessons bearing on today's Israel. As always, these views are his own:

Like the Abba song "Waterloo," history seems to be repeating itself “like the book on the shelf.” This past Sunday evening, a group of Labor Party rebels met with about 300 supporters in Tel Aviv. Four of the rebels seemed to want to organize a new party immediately, but the fifth, former Labor faction chairman Daniel Ben-Simon, wanted to give Labor one last chance. He said that in two or three months, if things hadn’t improved, he would join his four colleagues as the fifth MK needed to declare a new faction in the Knesset with state funding (at least one third of an existing faction must split away to be recognized as an official new parliamentary party).

This two to three months would give Meretz a chance to prepare its reaction to the launch of the new party. Meretz might begin by studying a similar situation that began about 35 years ago in South Africa:

The United Party formed the government for the majority of years between 1910 and 1948. It was a moderate party (in white-ruled South African terms), tied to its foreign patron, Great Britain, and led by a trio of former Boer War generals who provided electoral charisma. The last of these generals lost the election in 1948. Two years later, Jan Smuts, admired around the world, retired due to ill health and old age and soon died. The United Party in opposition was short of dynamic leaders and a viable alternative policy to the catchy apartheid slogan of the opposition. Their final leader of note was a distinguished lawyer from an established German family in the Cape Town area, Sir De Villiers Graaff.

Div, as he was known to friends, remained head of the party until its dissolution 21 years later. The United Party represented English-speaking whites who were pro-Empire and despised the Afrikaner nationalism of the rival National Party. But this did not make them true racial moderates or liberals. The United Party attacked the National Party in parliament but was a very loyal opposition. In fact, when "grand apartheid" or the bantustans policy was first proposed, the United Party was opposed to buying up agricultural land to transfer to the blacks in an attempt to make the homelands viable. This led to a revolt of the liberal wing of the UP to form the Progressive Party in 1959.

In 1975, the leader of the UP’s caucus in the Transvaal Provincial Council led a splinter group of Young Turks to form the Reform Party. Because both the Progs and the Reform Party knew that two left-of-center opposition parties were one too many, Reform Party leader Harry Schwarz quickly agreed to accept the Progressive Party platform and leadership in exchange for a new name that reflected both parties and some role in the leadership of the new party.

In late 1976, Div attempted to organize a new opposition party out of the existing three parties. Yet he was unwilling to meet the demands of the Progs for a liberal racial policy and insisted on one that was closer to apartheid than to majority rule. This led to the UP's fatal decline and its demise in the 1980s, beginning with a disastrous election result in 1977, running as the New Republic Party (NRP).

The Progressive Reform Party changed its name to the Progressive Federal Party in 1977 as it took on a new group of former UP defectors. With 17 seats to the NRP’s ten, it became the official opposition. The Federal Reform Party spent the next decade gradually taking over the English-speaking electorate so that it could eventually take on the South African right wing.

Israel is too small for two parties to the left of the Labor Party. It should quickly organize a merger. But if the new party is not to go the way of the New Movement [the grouping of doves and progressives who allied with Meretz with a disappointing result in the recent elections--ed.], it must have a coherent program in line with at least part of the Israeli electorate. It should emphasize domestic economic and social policy over security, as Amir Peretz tried to do in 2006. It should also favor the Syrian track over the Palestinian track in the peace process.

The new party will have to target the electoral base of the existing Labor Party as the Progressive Federal Party once targeted the New Republic Party. Once Labor is eliminated, Kadima might be ripe for a negotiated merger or at least having the new party as the junior partner, as Kadima had Labor from 2006 to 2009.

Nothing serious will happen in the peace process as long as Obama has to worry about managing two wars, health care reform, and economic recovery. So the center-left can worry about its internal battle while Obama takes care of his higher priorities. The goal of the left should be to be prepared for Obama’s second term.

Peace process stalled, but US can't walk away

2009-11-11T12:34:00.002-05:00

David Halperin, assistant director of Israel Policy Forum, has written an effective response to Thomas Friedman's recent note of frustration in suggesting that the US should walk away in a snit from its efforts to renew negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. Halperin begins:

When President Obama appointed former Senator George Mitchell as his Special Envoy for the Middle East Peace Process on only his second day in office, one cannot imagine he envisioned the region being mired in a painful stalemate less than a year later. On the contrary, his early engagement was designed to keep such an impasse from occurring.  

Unfortunately, mistakes were made. The U.S. went too far in demanding nothing less than a complete settlement freeze, ensuring that the Palestinians could demand no less. The popular right-wing government in Israel remained obstinate on the freeze; the U.S. then backtracked, causing the Palestinians to cry foul and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to threaten not to run in the next election. In the process, Israelis have lost trust in Obama (if they ever had any to begin with is debatable), and the Palestinians have lost their once high hopes.

Read this entire piece at IPF's Website. And consider reading my article, "Jews on J Street," at the 'In These Times' Website. The connecting thread here is that J Street is all about the United States doing whatever it can to forge agreement for a two-state solution.

Reflections on conflict and intolerance

2009-11-10T14:52:00.005-05:00

(from the Meretz USA electronic newsletter of November 6)

Quick quiz - who said the following last week: "If hundreds of thousands of migrant workers come here now, they will bring with them a profusion of diseases: hepatitis, measles, tuberculosis, AIDS and drugs."

If you guessed Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, you're way off the mark. It wasn't Rush Limbaugh either.

To answer correctly, you need to pan 5,800 miles eastward to Jerusalem where the man in charge of Israel's borders and immigration, Interior Minister Eli Yishai of the Shas party, said precisely those words on Israeli TV's widely viewed "Meet the Press" program.

For those who follow developments in Israel closely, these remarks should not come as a surprise: Shas officials, led by spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, have made a career of comparing women to donkeys, and homosexuality to the plague, and of blaming assimilated Jews for the Holocaust.

What is disappointing, therefore, is not Mr. Yishai himself, but the fact that his party continues to be courted by Israel's mainstream leadership. Indeed, even before this year's elections, Prime Minister Netanyahu made sure to name Shas the linchpin of his future coalition, and later awarded Mr. Yishai the honorific of "Deputy Premier" in addition to his weighty ministerial portfolio.

Preview Autumn issue of ISRAEL HORIZONS

2009-11-09T08:19:00.008-05:00

Published four times a year in hard copy, ISRAEL HORIZONS magazine is the periodical of Meretz USA. Previously associated with Americans for Progressive Israel, IH has been published more or less continuously since 1952.

A detailed preview of the Autumn 2009 issue is now online. Learn with a click of your mouse how to enjoy its entire contents by receiving it regularly.

Contents of Autumn 2009 issue:

Column Left
Albert Einstein's Zionism
By Ralph Seliger

Peace vs. Justice
By Michael Lame

‘They’ Teach Hate
By Stephen Scheinberg, Ph.D.

Youth Essay Winners for Peace
By Hillel Schenker

Book Review
Striving for Democracy in Mideast
By Ziad Asali, M.D.

Book Review
Two Nations Into One Don’t Go
By Philip Mendes, Ph.D.

Book Review
Are Mizrahim Still Marginal in Israel?
Lyn Julius

Book Review
A Progressive Zionist Examines AIPAC
By Thomas Mitchell, Ph.D.

Director's Column
On Goldstone Report;
Against Boycotting Israel
By Ron Skolnik

Movement Matters
Visitors from Meretz Party
Talk by Leah Shakdiel
and more...

Editor's Odds & Ends
Israel Is Not South Africa
Uri Avnery

Again, see more details by clicking here.

In memory of Art D'Lugoff

2009-11-06T11:38:00.007-05:00

Lilly Rivlin is grateful for Charney Bromberg's editorial comments (at bottom of this post).

Art D'Lugoff was one of a kind that could only probably have happened in America. There are very few left of his ilk: a universalist/Yiddishist/Zionist.

Our connection harked back to Jerusalem. He came from the Mandelbaum family as in Mandelbaum Gate, which was a border crossing after 1948. I'm not sure whether we were actually related but he called me his cousin and I liked that. Art served on the Meretz USA Board for a full term.

Art's connection to Israel was lifelong, through his family and by marriage to Avital, a vivacious sabra who proved to be an excellent match for Art, known to the world as the owner of the The Village Gate nightclub, located in the heart of the Village near the corner of Bleecker and Thompson Streets. He booked such jazz performers as Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington. The club also featured comedy, and among the famous comedians who performed there, way before they became famous, were Bill Cosby, Woody Allen and Mort Sahl.

In 1994 Art sold the club, but in the next few years he tried to start another Village Gate on the Upper Westside but it didn't take. Times had changed. Art threw his ever burning passion into building a jazz museum, but he couldn't raise the funds. Art was approached by a documentary filmmaker to be the subject of a biography. He was excited about this. I spoke to him at the beginning of the week, the funding was in place. Art was elated. We planned to attend Theo Bikel's Shalom Aleichem performance next week. On Wednesday he died.

Art was a man for all seasons. -- Lilly Rivlin

Charney Bromberg (the immediate past executive director of Meretz USA) adds:
Art was a passionate member of the Meretz USA Board. Truth be told, lending us his good name was one of his major contributions to our organization - he had many, many commitments - but his heart was with our camp always. As in all things, Art was on the cutting edge in his beliefs about what Israel could and should be. He found the sweet spot at the intersection between culture and politics - Israeli and American - and gave it life.

Goldstone: Flawed but on point in call for investigation

2009-11-05T01:24:00.003-05:00

I recently wrote a piece criticizing the Goldstone report, and, in the spirit of academic openness and growth, I would like to critique my own critique. I maintain that the Goldstone report had many flaws, indeed Goldstone himself has stated that many of the findings in the report "would not hold up in a court of law." I maintain that the UN, and especially the UN Human Rights Council, has a deep bias against Israel, and singles it out far more than other states that carry out worse violations.

However, the fact that the Goldstone report has many flaws, that its mandate was skewed, that the UN does not press Libya the way that it presses Israel, does not give the Israeli government the right to write off the report in its entirety and to refuse to cooperate and conduct an in-depth investigation, as the report recommends. Goldstone stated in an op-ed in the Jerusalem Post that he would be happy if some of the findings were proven wrong; so would I and all supporters of Israel. But there is no way to prove the findings wrong without an investigation. And if, after investigation, some of the findings prove to be accurate, that is something that Israel and the Israeli people, and supporters of Israel must reckon with, just as the United States had to reckon with Abu Ghraib. So, were I to rewrite my op-ed, I would maintain a criticism of the UN's bias, the report's flawed mandate and execution, but would emphasize that the onus is now on the Israeli government to address the report, and to conduct an investigation.

The case for Israel as a 'Jewish state'

2009-11-04T11:21:00.007-05:00

My thanks to Lilly Rivlin for bringing this to my attention. An important scholarly tome on the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state is reviewed in the current issue of Middle East Quarterly. "Israel and the Family of Nations: The Jewish Nation-State and Human Rights" is written by Alexander Yakobson and Amnon Rubinstein. Both authors, especially Rubinstein, have had connections with Meretz. Rubinstein headed the pro-market dovish Shinui ("change") party.

Shinui was part of the parliamentary alliance with Mapam and Ratz that emerged as Meretz in '92. In 1997, Rubinstein led half of that party to merge into Meretz as a unified entity -- as opposed to the half of Shinui led by the late Tommy Lapid, that briefly became Israel's third largest party and a partner in Sharon's coalition before crashing and burning. Both writers, while defending the concept of a Jewish state, are doves and human rights-oriented liberals who are sensitive to Arab and other minority rights.

Last year, this Weblog posted part of a lengthy article in The Jerusalem Post, based on an enlightening interview with co-author Alexander Yakobson. That piece is more detailed than the review mentioned here in MEQ.

I am a Zionist and therefore I am pro peace

2009-11-03T10:26:00.012-05:00

I am posting this on behalf of Moriel Rothman, a junior at Middlebury College in Vermont whom I was pleased to meet at the J Street U and J Street conferences last week. Moriel's full bio is below these reflections following those meetings.-- Ron

Having just returned from the J Street conference, I want to add my voice to the media controversy surrounding the new Pro Israel Pro Peace organization and its first conference in DC. I am writing from the perspective of a student, a connected Jew, a liberal, an Israeli citizen, and an American citizen when I say "finally." Finally, a Pro Israel organization that does not deny or turn a blind eye to the immense suffering of the Palestinian people and the deep legitimacy of their narrative. Finally, a Pro Peace organization that does not demonize Israel and grossly oversimplify the situation with labels like colonialism and apartheid. Finally, an organization that proudly declares its support for Israel as a Jewish State, and that proudly emphasizes the need for the creation of a viable Palestinian State. Finally.

J Street, through its programming, platforms and sheer energy, has shown its ability to provide an organizational voice to people like myself, people who love and are deeply connected to Israel, and who are immensely frustrated with and critical of many Israeli policies. Moreover, J Street represents a chance for people like myself to reclaim Zionism. The word Zionism has taken on such a pejorative connotation in the liberal world that many have been hesitant to use it to self-describe. This hesitance has been compounded by the fact that many of those loudly proclaiming to be "Zionist" are from the expansionist, extremist settler movement, which cares nothing about the plight or rights of the Palestinian people. I vehemently disagree with the latter group, but I am a Zionist. I believe in Israel, and I believe in Israel as a Jewish state. I believe in a Jewish state based on the best ideals Judaism has to offer, ideals of justice and repairing the world, ideals of tolerance and equality, ideals of hope. I believe in a Jewish state that acts as a "light unto the nations."

Do I see the Israel of today as embodying the best ideals of Judaism, as acting a light unto the nations? No, I do not. But that does not mean that I should abandon my ideals, my goals and my dreams as to what the Jewish State should and indeed could be.

Does the fact that the American system has left so many disenfranchised and suffering mean that we should give up on America and American democracy, or that we should work to change and better America, bringing it closer to its foundational ideals?

Returning to the subject of what Zionism means, the spirit of the J Street conference reemphasized something that I have always believed: Zionism, while clearly a Jewish movement, has profoundly universalist implications. Zionism was a movement formed from communal longing, from religious and cultural dedication, from historical roots and from the desire that Jewish people be safe, secure and able to flourish. Thus, it is in fact through the very lens of Zionism that I am best able to understand the Palestinians’ desire for independence, for national self-determination and for freedom from the oppression and repression they have suffered throughout history. As such, it is through this reclaimed paradigm of Zionism that I aim to struggle for two viable and independent states, for the sake of the Jewish state and the Jewish people, and for the sake of Palestine and the Palestinians.

Finally, the J Street conference reaffirmed that the struggle to make Israel the type of Jewish state that I --and many others-- long for cannot be through silence nor reactionary defensiveness. As a Jew, a liberal, a student, an American, an Israeli and a Zionist it is crucial that I actively support Israel when it does what I see as right, and speak out, loudly, strongly and with conviction when the Israeli state carries out unjust and immoral policies and actions. For indeed, such policies (the continuation of the Occupation, for example) are, in a sense, anti-Zionist, both in their negative effects on the possibility of a democratic, Jewish state and in their inconsistency with core Jewish and Zionist values.

Moriel Rothman is a junior at Middlebury College, in Vermont. He was born in Jerusalem, Israel, studies political science and Arabic, and is co-president of Middlebury’s Hillel.

T. Mitchell: Jewish 'abolitionists' (J Street)

2009-11-02T09:33:00.004-05:00

Inspired by his attendance at the J Street conference last week, this posting from independent scholar, Dr. Thomas Mitchell, draws parallels between the historical development of Jewish/Zionist peace groups and the evolution of the anti-slavery cause in the United States:

The progress of the Jewish peace movement, which began here in the 1980s, can be compared with an earlier American political movement—the antislavery movement. The antislavery movement went through three distinct phases characterized by different political parties. For purposes of alliteration I shall dub these the "pioneer," "pragmatic," and "power" stages.

The pioneer stage was the longest, lasting from the creation of the abolitionist movement in the early 1830s to the creation of the Free Soil Party in August 1848. Tired of being lied to by professional politicians from the two main parties, the abolitionists created their own political party, the Liberty Party, in 1840. But because they were Evangelical Protestants rather than professional politicians they tended to be self-righteous and overtly religious rather than pragmatic. The Liberty Party presidential candidate received about two percent of the vote in the 1844 election.

In the Jewish peace movement, the pioneer stage began with the creation of Americans for Peace Now in the early 1980s and also with input from predecessors of Meretz USA, especially Americans for Progressive Israel/Hashomer Hatzair. But the equivalent of the Liberty Party was Brit Tzedek V'Shalom.

In the next phase, the pragmatic stage, a figure from the Liberty Party, Salmon P. Chase, frustrated by the lack of political instinct among the Liberty men, started corresponding with antislavery figures from the two main parties. In August 1848, he effected a merger of the antislavery wings of the Massachusetts Whig Party and the New York Democratic Party with the Liberty Party and individuals across the North. Three months later, the Free Soil Party nominee, former President Martin Van Buren, received 14 percent of the vote in the North (10 percent nationally). The party also elected eight members of Congress and helped to elect four others from the Whigs.

But two years later, the Compromise of 1850, a compromise settlement on slavery issues between the two geographic sections, seemed to put an end to slavery. The Free Soilers atrophied and were reduced to four and then three congressmen, although they also managed to elect two senators. The New York Democrats, over half of the Free Soil Party, returned to their former party. The Free Soilers were little more than the core of former Liberty men by the next presidential election.

The power stage began in May 1854 with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which nullified the Missouri Compromise of 1820. This led to an upsurge of antislavery and anti-Southern sentiment in the North. This sentiment led to the merger of the Free Soilers and antislavery Northern Whigs to form the Republican Party in July 1854. The Whig Party disappeared over the next two years as its members joined either the Republicans or the nativist anti-Catholic Know Nothings in the Northeast. In 1856, by astute maneuvering that split the Know Nothing party in two, the Republicans became the natural successor to the Whigs and the opposition party.

Six years later, the Republicans were in the White House and controlled the Congress. Because of the foolishness of the Southern secessionists, the antislavery movement finally had a legal justification to seek an end to slavery in the South rather than merely an end to its expansion.

J Street’s successful conference was the equivalent of the 1848 election, in that the Jewish/Zionist peace movement is embarking upon its "pragmatic" stage. It is now dependent on outside factors to determine if it will be able to reach the third stage ("power"). These factors depend largely on developments in the Middle East—among the Palestinians and Israelis: Can the Palestinians develop a united pragmatic leadership? Can the Israeli center-left recover? Can Obama win a second term? These factors will determine the length of the second phase and if it moves into the power stage.

J Street: Much more than a "safe space"

2009-10-30T10:24:00.007-04:00

On Day 2 of the J Street conference, a student who had attended my panel on the Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions movement, engaged me in conversation. He told me how wonderful he felt at the conference, which he called a "safe space" in which he could talk about Israel in a way that wasn't tolerated in other Jewish communal frameworks, such as his synagogue or family table.

But for J Street to fulfill its mission, it needs to be more than a "safe space".

As I imagine it, a "safe space" is where a minority of non-conformists gather together for solace, and to take a breath of fresh air. A "safe space" is a refuge - a shelter from the storm, a place for mutual support.

More importantly, a "safe space" is an inward-looking locale, whose denizens are primarily seeking the camaraderie of the like-minded.

A "safe space" is an attitude of self-defense, of self-preservation, of respite. The connotation of "safe space" is a desire to ward off - not take on - the world.

The pro-Israel pro-peace movement has had an abundance of "safe spaces" for dozens of years. What it hasn't had - and what J Street has brought us, and what J Street needs to be if it is to succeed - is not a new and bigger "safe space", but a political movement that confidently and assertively looks outward into the wider community, not inward towards the "already converted".

Success will therefore require not only time, energy, creativity and other resources. Success will require that we, J Street's supporters, recalibrate our expectations.

J Street is not only a place to take comfort. It is a coalition for creating real change.

Often the reaction of those shunned by what's perceived as the mainstream is to shun that mainstream in return. J Street's challenge is to avoid that trap: To make it work, its supporters must slowly wean themselves of the psychology of the underdog, the outcast, the pariah, and take on a new attitude that seeks to build bridges with those who might have feared us in the past.

Clearly, there will be a need for smaller, more ideological organizations to continue their work in pushing the limits of the American Jewish debate. But J Street's role, more than to carve out radically new swaths of territory, will be to bring a growing number of American Jews, and others, into the ideological territory that has already been carved out, but desperately and urgently needs to be reinforced: Two states, 1967 borders, the illegitimacy of occupation and settlement, the legitimacy of Palestinian national rights, and serious, unswerving American commitment and involvement to make it all happen.

In the terminology of American expansionism, J Street needs to be the homesteader, not the frontiersman-explorer. Its work needs to be prose, not poetry.

If J Street's supporters expect J Street to be just another "safe space", this time for the Facebook generation, then the real potential for creating something immensely important - and powerful - might be lost for years to come. And there's no guarantee that Israel will still have a two-state option by that time.

Finding our way on 'J Street'

2009-10-28T15:12:00.007-04:00

Most of Meretz USA's active leadership attended J Street's inaugural annual conference, Sunday evening through Tuesday. This links to the historical view that our executive director Ron Skonik took on the eve of this event.

Attending with us were an announced total of 1500 registrants. Most sessions were mobbed; twice I could hardly find a piece of wall to lean on, let alone a seat or (in one case) even floor space to sit on.

J Street has been whacked from right, left and center, yet has tried to conduct itself in a polite and even welcoming manner. Most sessions that I saw were informative and uplifting. A few others seemed more about showing how far it has gone in a mere 18 months of existence, but it deserves to crow about itself.

As our former executive director and now Meretz USA board member, Charney V. Bromberg indicated to me, "The peace movement has now found its center of gravity." Describing itself as the "political arm of the pro-Israel, pro-peace movement" (I take "political" to mean that it strives for influence in Washington), J Street welcomed the participation of Meretz USA and at least 19 other peace-oriented Zionist or dovish organizations in the US and Israel as "partners" --- as written on the conference badges that participants from those groups wore on their necks to facilitate access.

It has grown from a founding staff of four, a year and a half ago, to 30 today. Its initial two legally distinct entities, J Street and J Street PAC, have multiplied to five: there is the J Street Education Fund and an on-campus university student group called J Street U; the latter existed for several years as the Union of Progressive Zionists, which Meretz USA helped found and took the lead in fostering with staff time; and there is the brand new merger or alliance with Brit Tzedek V'Shalom as J Street's "grassroots" or field arm (with a possible new name still to be determined).

J Street's positions are nuanced and often misunderstood, if not deliberately distorted. Hence, today J Street U has felt it necessary to deny the claim that J Street U has dropped the "pro-Israel" part of its central slogan and organizing principle as "pro-Israel, pro-peace."

Scheinberg: Good news from Israel

2009-10-23T00:08:00.002-04:00

This is the text of a "Radio Shalom" commentary by Stephen Scheinberg, an emeritus professor of history at Concordia University in Montreal:

I get tired of all the news of conflict from the Middle East. I hoped to be able to wake up this morning to the news that Israel’s great writer Amos Oz had won a Nobel prize, but we will have to wait for that. Yet there is interesting news on the technological front.

You may recall that Israel is now in the process of building the infrastructure, throughout the country, for its own electric car. That will involve first, installing recharging outlets in 500,000 of Israel’s 3 to 4 million parking spots. For those who need to drive more than 100 miles at a time there are battery swap stations being established to do quick changes of the batteries, in less time than a current fill-up with gasoline. These swap stations are the really innovative part of the plan and China, among other nations, is interested in them.

Of course, as a small country, Israel is ideally situated to go electric and with a new and complementary-electricity producing highway, on the way. You heard me right, an Israeli company in cooperation with the Technion University has just successfully tested a highway that can produce electricity. It is done by embedding generators in the asphalt, two inches below the surface. The weight of the passing cars produces the electricity through applied mechanical stress. The manager of the project, Dr. Lucy Edri-Azoulay, estimates that a kilometer of a four lane highway will be able to produce enough electricity to power 2,500 households. This system sounds like an Israeli winner to me and, in time, it should find large export markets.

Imagine a nation replacing its polluting automobiles with clean electric cars and producing much, if not all of the power, for recharging their batteries, from the highway itself. This is not the stuff of science fiction. Israel is now pioneering technologies on the cutting edge of the world’s green future. She can be a technological “light unto the world.” May she also demonstrate such innovative capacity in peace making.

A note to our readers: We'll be away for a few days next week in Washington, DC, at the J Street conference.

Should 'Human Rights Watch' watch Israel?

2009-10-22T00:48:00.008-04:00

Maybe Robert Bernstein, the founding chairperson of Human Rights Watch who served HRW from 1978 to '98, is right in his NY Times op-ed of Tuesday, Oct. 20, that HRW should focus only upon correcting human rights abuses in closed, authoritarian societies. The British officer, Col. Richard Kemp may even be correct, or close to correct, in his assessment that Israel was attempting to be humane in the Gaza war (doing “more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare”).

There were those cell phone calls telling civilians to flee their neighborhoods about to be targeted– creepy yet humane insofar as lives were saved– but it still should be clear that things went wrong in producing so many non-combatant victims. For my money, the strategy itself was problematic: fighting in heavy population centers in pursuit of an ill-conceived mission that punished the people of Gaza as a whole for Hamas attacks on Israel.

I don't have any magic prescription for Israel's dilemma in facing an enemy that insisted on attacking Israel proper even after a wholesale withdrawal from Gaza of Israel's settlements and soldiers in 2005, but I have some thoughts. For one, Israel is said to have been obligated to end the economic blockade of the Gaza Strip as part of its ceasefire agreement that survived four of the agreed upon six months; what if the blockade were ended, but with a newly negotiated provision to end the smuggling of rockets and other arms through those tunnels built beneath Gaza's border with Egypt?

Bernstein would be correct that “intent” needs to be assessed in relation to whether such events were crimes: “... there is a difference between wrongs committed in self-defense and those perpetrated intentionally.” But Israel needs to react more openly in this regard, as even the Likud deputy prime minister, Dan Meridor, suggests with his new proposal for establishing an independent commission to investigate the events described in the Goldstone Report.

To sum up, Bernstein makes some interesting points on where HRW may be going wrong, but he fails to address what Israel actually did in Gaza. Here are highlights of his op-ed:

At Human Rights Watch, we always recognized that open, democratic societies have faults and commit abuses. But we saw that they have the ability to correct them ― through vigorous public debate, an adversarial press and many other mechanisms that encourage reform.

That is why we sought to draw a sharp line between the democratic and nondemocratic worlds, in an effort to create clarity in human rights. ...

When I stepped aside in 1998, Human Rights Watch was active in 70 countries, most of them closed societies. Now the organization, with increasing frequency, casts aside its important distinction between open and closed societies.

Nowhere is this more evident than in its work in the Middle East. The region is populated by authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records. Yet in recent years Human Rights Watch has written far more condemnations of Israel for violations of international law than of any other country in the region.

Israel, with a population of 7.4 million, is home to at least 80 human rights organizations, a vibrant free press, a democratically elected government, a judiciary that frequently rules against the government, a politically active academia, multiple political parties and, judging by the amount of news coverage, probably more journalists per capita than any other country in the world ― many of whom are there expressly to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. ...

Human Rights Watch has lost critical perspective on a conflict in which Israel has been repeatedly attacked by Hamas and Hezbollah, organizations that go after Israeli citizens and use their own people as human shields. ...

Leaders of Human Rights Watch know that Hamas and Hezbollah chose to wage war from densely populated areas, deliberately transforming neighborhoods into battlefields. They know that more and better arms are flowing into both Gaza and Lebanon and are poised to strike again. And they know that this militancy continues to deprive Palestinians of any chance for the peaceful and productive life they deserve. Yet Israel, the repeated victim of aggression, faces the brunt of Human Rights Watch’s criticism. …

Are Jews NOT a 'people'? Postscripts

2009-10-20T09:54:00.010-04:00

I asked Charles Nydorf, an authority on Yiddish whom I know slightly, about Prof. Sand's notion of Ashkenazi Jews originating with the Khazars, and his reference to Paul Wexler (a professor of linguistics at Tel Aviv University) in this connection. I see from some online citations, that Prof. Sand did not adequately explain Prof. Wexler's work.

As discussed in a 1996 science article in the NY Times: "... in a 1993 book, "The Ashkenazic Jews: A Slavo-Turkic People in Search of a Jewish Identity" (Slavica Publishers),.... Dr. Wexler uses a reconstruction of Yiddish to argue that it began as a Slavic language whose vocabulary was largely replaced with German words. Going even further, he contends that the Ashkenazic Jews are predominantly converted Slavic and Turkic people who merged with a tiny population of Palestinian Jews from the Diaspora."

This was Nydorf's response to my query:

Paul Wexler is very well respected but his opinions are in the minority. The 20th century consensus was that Yiddish originated about 1000 years ago on the Rhineland or in Bavaria and that it is based on a mixture of Germanic, Semitic, Romance and Slavic elements with the dominant structural influence being German.

There are of course, dissenters. Wexler is one and my own research based on materials from the Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry has led me to a new theory which I have been presenting in my blog. In my theory Yiddish originated considerably before 1000 and its original Germanic elements came not from German dialects but from Gothic.

As for the Khazars, Nydorf disagrees with Wexler: "The Ashkenazim already existed at the time the Khazars converted and they were living far away from Khazaria in Austria, Germany, Bohemia and France."

Hillel Halkin wrote a devastating response to Sand's book in The Forward. Halkin, an American-Israeli writer and translator who leans toward the right, may have marred it just a bit by getting personal. The following is a taste:

... Sand’s book, which argues that there was no such thing as a Jewish people until one was “constructed” by Zionism and Jewish nationalism in the 19th century, would have attracted little notice had it been written by a professor of history at the University of Damascus. As the work of a supposed historian at the University of Tel Aviv, it is a scandal, a fashionably phrased political screed against Zionism that cherry-picks its data while pretending to be history. Alas, it will be accepted as history by many readers who are as dutifully impressed by its 568 footnotes, as were, it would seem, the French journalists on the Aujourd’hui panel.

Not that Sand gets everything wrong. His book is full of perfectly correct and quite unoriginal observations: some elaborating why today’s Jews are not all descendants of biblical Israelites and stem in part from ancestors who joined the Jewish people by religious conversion over the ages (although Sand’s treatment of the considerable genetic research on the subject is shockingly shoddy, he is not wholly wrong about the matter); some pointing out that Diaspora Jews never shared a single spoken language or material culture, let alone territory, as do most peoples; and some dwelling on the problematic nature of the State of Israel, which aspires to be Jewish, democratic and secular while denying non-Jews certain privileges extended to Jews and defining Jewishness in terms of traditional religious law. These are all issues worthy of discussion, and there is nothing wrong with raising them.

And yet to go from there to Sand’s absurd conclusions that the Jews, who considered themselves a distinct people from their early history, were “invented” as one in modern times; that their historical connection to Palestine is “imaginary,” because they are not descended in their entirety from ancient Palestinian Jewry; or that the idea of a Jewish state is therefore less acceptable than the idea of a French or Spanish state, demands a thoroughly dishonest manipulation of the facts. Indeed, if one is talking about the “construction” of national identities, an enterprise that numerous post-modernist historians of nationalism to whom Sand is indebted have written about, it is the French and Spanish who are the parvenus, having undertaken the task only in the late Middle Ages. And if you are looking for peoples who accomplished this even later, in the last two or three centuries, say, you might consider the Italians, the Germans, the Americans, the Brazilians, the Indians and a host of others (including those latest of latecomers, the Palestinians). You would never, unless you wanted to flaunt your ignorance, mention the Jews, who had a fully developed national consciousness at least 2,500 years ago. ...

This article inspired a huge number of online comments, including this one. I can't judge the truth of the first paragraph on genetics (such research in Israel was ridiculed by Shlomo Sand, who depicted it as completely bogus and ideologically motivated) but the second paragraph below seems particularly insightful in indicating that conversion to Judaism through most of the post-Judean history of the Jews (basically an "exile"-- notwithstanding Sand's protestations to the contrary) had to be rare. It does not even mention that such conversions under Islam were punishable by death and those in "Christendom" also dangerous:

... More studies have been carried out on the genetic history of the Jews than on most ethnic groups, perhaps because there are so many Jewish doctors to take advantage of the fabled willingness of Jews to participate in research. These studies not only show that almost all Jewish populations have origins in the Middle East, but that the DNA of Jews from almost every corner of the Diaspora is more similar to that of other Jews than to any other population. When compared with non-Jewish groups, the closest match is with the Muslims of Kurdistan, not with the European peoples alongside whom Ashkenazi Jews lived for centuries or the Arab neighbors of many Sephardi populations.

Other groups with histories of ancient migrations do not have the same degree of continuity. Hungarians are known to have originated on the Eurasian steppe and moved westward in a migration many centuries long, arriving in the Carpathian basin about 995 CE. They speak a language from the steppe, take pride in their history of migration and military conquest and expected that genetic research would demonstrate their central Asian origins. The evidence to date, however, has shown a varying but quite small element of central Asian ancestry in Hungarian populations, along with great similarities between Hungarians and their Slavic and German neighbors. This does not mean that the Hungarians with Slavic ancestry are not real Hungarians. Rather, Hungarian culture has been so powerfully attractive that for many centuries people of Slavic, Germanic and other ancestry elected to join the Hungarian people. Ironically, the genetic distinctiveness of the Jews in part may reflect the unattractiveness of joining a religious minority that was oppressed and impoverished through much of its history.

Are Jews NOT a 'people'?

2009-10-19T09:38:00.012-04:00

Shlomo Sand is a professor of history at Tel Aviv University, with a specialization in Europe. In New York last week to promote the English-language edition of his book, "The Invention of the Jewish People" (Verso Press), he quipped that he would not have published his book before obtaining job security as a tenured professor. Although somewhat flawed in his English, he charmed a packed audience of the "Marxist Theory Colloquium" at New York University with his wit and devastating attacks on ideas that most Jews and Israelis hold dear.

The basic notion is that the people we know as Jews are a disparate collection of peoples who are descendants of converts, but not of the original inhabitants of the land of Israel, and that the Palestinian Arabs are actually descendants of the ancient Judeans to a much greater degree than today's Jews. His basic points of argumentation include:

1. that the Romans never "exiled" the Jews from Judea and that most of them converted to Islam with the Arab conquest about 600 years after Rome's suppression of the two great Jewish rebellions;
2. that Ashkenazi Jews are mostly descended from the Khazars --- a Turkic people, originally from near the Caspian Sea, who largely adopted Judaism over 1000 years ago;
3. that Sephardic Jews are mostly descended from Berbers who had a Jewish kingdom that fell to the Arab-Muslim conquest of North Africa;
4. that Yemenite Jews are descended from a Jewish kingdom in Medieval Yemen;
5. that the idea of a "Jewish people" was "invented" by Zionist thinkers in the late 19th century.

If this were a dispassionate academic discussion of scholarly issues, there'd be less of a problem here. Instead, Prof. Sand presents his ideas in incendiary ways, to forums that are emotionally committed to thinking of Israel as automatically in the wrong in whatever it does and to a large extent unjust in its very existence. Sand engages more as an ideologue and provocateur than as a true scholar.

According to Wikipedia, Prof. Sand is a red diaper baby who belonged to an Israeli Communist youth organization and the anti-Zionist Matzpen group in the 1970s. I point this out only to indicate that his personal history predisposed him to a sharply dissenting viewpoint regarding Israel.

I lost my cool at certain points and shouted out brief comments protesting some of what he asserted as fact: for example, that Israel as a self-defined "Jewish state" cannot be a democracy. I indicated that Israel is a democracy since the word fundamentally denotes majority rule, but I would agree with critics that it's a flawed democracy and in some ways not a liberal one. He actually shot back that Israel is liberal in many ways --its pluralism, its free press, etc.-- and I would not disagree, but this leaves him arguing a contradiction: that Israel is both "liberal" and undemocratic. (Following the lecture, I explained to someone sitting near me, who had believed otherwise, that Arab citizens of Israel vote and are even elected to political office.)

In another of my interjections during his talk, I indicated in response to his #1 point that the Romans killed most of the Jews of ancient Judea/Palestine in the course of putting down the rebellions of the years, 66-73 C.E. and 132-135 (Bar Kochba's revolt). He said that contemporary accounts always exaggerated numbers and that you have to discount them by "dropping a zero."

But even if this were true, many if not most survivors were exiled as slaves; still, he dismissed the notion that the figures carved in Rome's Arch of Titus, depicting men carrying menorahs and other Jewish artifacts, were exiled Jews-- because their faces were shaven (and therefore Roman). Evidently, these figures were Roman soldiers carting off booty from the Temple; but the Roman Coliseum is understood to have been built by Jewish slaves. He is correct that Jews remained (he makes the point that rabbis there created the "Mishnah"), but their viability as a people with the numbers and means to sustain national independence was surely gone by then. There is certainly no dispute that Palestinian Jews compiled the "Jerusalem Talmud" after the Roman wars; but these points prove nothing other than how hard he's arguing to minimize the extent of the catastrophe suffered by the Jews at the hands of the Romans.

During the Q & A, I calmly asked him how his ideas comport with linguistic scholars who see Yiddish as originating about 1,000 years ago from eastern French and western German dialects, and then moving eastward. He complimented me on the question, indicating that the answer is in his book; he takes the view of a scholar named Paul Wexler who contends that Yiddish developed in eastern German lands rather than the west. It took me a day or two to realize that this didn't answer my question, because whether Yiddish originated in western German lands or a couple of hundred miles to the east, this doesn't show why Yiddish, the lingua franca of Eastern European Jews, would be based on German and not on the Turkic tongue of the Khazars.

With regard to #5, I've already discoursed somewhat on this in an earlier posting: "The Zionist movement successfully remade the Jewish people as a nation in the land of Israel. It took a series of scattered religious and ethnic communities and – with the ‘help’ of pervasive and (eventually) genocidal antisemitism – gathered them up and transformed them. ...”

Prof. Sand admits that there is such a thing as "Jewish identity," apart from the religion. But he doesn't seem to understand that all national identities are "invented."

I blogged on this as well: "This is one of the lessons I drew from an insightful book by Prof. Rashid Khalidi: Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (Columbia University Press, 1997). He makes the point that 'National identity is constructed; it is not an essential, transcendent given....' Khalidi proceeds to relate how Palestinians didn't see themselves as a distinct people until well into the 20th century. Just as anti-Zionist writers and activists would never think of denying Palestinians their understanding of themselves as a people, they should not be denying the Jews their sense of peoplehood – a consciousness born of centuries of persecution, discrimination and worse, not to mention strong religious and cultural continuities."

Early Reform Judaism, born in 19th century Germany and the US, attempted to recast Jewish self-definition into only a religious frame; classical Reform Jews were Americans or Germans of the "Mosaic" faith. The traditional or Orthodox view of Jews is of "Ahm Yisrael" -- the people or nation of Israel (even among anti-Zionist Orthodox Jews). The left has generally granted people the right to define themselves, to "national self-determination"; only for the Jews does this seem not to be the case.

Sand proved that he knows little about Jewish religious practice in asserting that "Jews don't read the Bible." I don't see the relevance of this to his thesis, but I assume that he was really thinking about the fact that observant Jews interpret the Bible in light of Talmudic and later rabbinic commentaries; but the Torah (the first five books) is read in traditional synagogues three times a week-- Saturday, Monday and Thursday-- supplemented by readings from the Prophets every Saturday, and the chanting of other Biblical scriptures on specific holidays (e.g., the Megillahs of Ruth on Shavuot and Esther on Purim).

We had a nice little discussion afterwards. We briefly got into some core political issues: when I indicated that I'm with Meretz USA and that the Meretz party believes that Israel should be a "Jewish state" that is also "of all its citizens," he dismissed this as "an oxymoron."

We both agreed and disagreed some on the 1948 war and the Palestinian-Arab "Nakba" (catastrophe): we agreed that it was not at all unreasonable for Palestinian Arabs to flee the fighting with the expectation of returning to their homes once the war was over, but that it's too late for a Palestinian "right of return." He hastened to add, of course, that he disapproves of Israel's "Law of Return" (something that I see necessary as an insurance policy for Jews requiring a safe haven from persecution).

I see the Nakba as a Palestinian as well as Jewish responsibility in that it happened because of the violent Arab rejection of the UN's partition plan. He harked on the fact that the smaller Jewish population was granted a larger share of the land -- ignoring that the Jewish state was to have a large Arab minority and that many survivors of the Holocaust (stateless refugees in DP camps--as he was, ironically, as a child) were sure to move there.

He believes strongly in Israel as "an Israeli state," rather than a Jewish state; while I agree that it's only proper and healthy for Jews, Arabs and other Israeli citizens to forge a sense of common nationality as Israelis, I don't see it as wrong that Israel also serves a special function as the one place in the world that Jews can call their spiritual homeland (whether or not it's actually their ancestral home). Finally, Prof. Sand and I agree on the need for a two-state solution, for Israel and the Palestinians, and we'd both welcome a regional confederation some day, but we disagree profoundly on many other things, as I've indicated. Click here for a follow-up posting.

Netanyahu as sadistic toreador

2009-10-16T11:58:00.005-04:00

Yossi Sarid was the leader of the Meretz party from 1996-2003 and a Meretz MK from 1992-2006. Currently he is a columnist for Haaretz who offers a dry, acerbic wit, a wonderful command of the Hebrew language, and probing insights into the Israeli social psychology that forms the underlying foundation upon which Israel's political struggles are played out.

In his latest column - Abbas is a dead man - Netanyahu and Barak killed him - Sarid depicts an Israeli leadership and public that are driven not only by legitimate security interests, but by triumphalism, anger, and an almost unrestrainable, self-destructive impulse to demean the enemy, the same enemy with whom peace must eventually be made.

Here is a snippet of Sarid's troubling indictment:

"Netanyahu does not merely want to win; he also wants to humiliate. He does not merely want to stab a knife in the back, but also turn it in the stomach. Bibi understands the nature of the beast's soul - that of Israeli public opinion, which cheers on the toreador who places his foot on the bull when it is already dead."

Better in Hebrew (and entitled "Why Humiliate?") than in translation, it is still a difficult and bracing read in English.

Obama's Nobel: good news for Mideast

2009-10-15T08:36:00.004-04:00

This post is from Michael Lame, the founder of “Re-Think the Middle East,” an organization attempting to elevate the quality of public discourse regarding the Middle East. He blogs at www.rethinkme.org:

President Barack Obama, as everyone knows, has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Many people ask: Does he deserve it? Well, it depends on what the meaning of the word “deserve” is: “Deserve: to merit or have a claim to…because of one’s acts, qualities, or situation.”

Obama’s acts or actions have not produced definitive results on the world stage, not yet in any case. His qualities, as discerned through his words, probably weighed more with the Nobel Committee than any identifiable accomplishments. Speeches given in Cairo, Ankara, Prague, Strasbourg, and at the U.N. in New York have all been well-received internationally. Obama is the anti-Bush, signaling a new direction in foreign policy, and that sits well with Arab, Muslim, Russian, and European audiences, among others.

For those of us who care about the future of the Middle East, the award of the Nobel Peace Prize should be received as good news, though perhaps for reasons not at first obvious. Click here to read more.

Baskin: Don't tread on Temple Mount

2009-10-13T14:45:00.003-04:00

Gershon Baskin, the co-CEO of IPCRI -- Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information touches upon several topics in his Oct. 12 commentary in The Jerusalem Post, but none more effectively than the question of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem:

... Events, particularly those surrounding Jerusalem, have their own internal energy that, as we have seen in the past, can easily get out of control. In this region, we should make sure not to let the genie out of the bottle -- and Jerusalem is the ultimate genie. Both the Israeli and Palestinian governments should be extremely cautious in their handling of Jerusalem. The second intifada was launched because of a misinterpretation of the direction of Ariel Sharon's provocative visit to the Temple Mount close to a decade ago. Sharon's target was then-prime minister Ehud Barak, not the Palestinians.

THE PALESTINIANS today do not understand that Israel is not planning to destroy al-Aksa Mosque or to take over the Temple Mount, despite the desire to do so by some right-wing and religious fanatics.

Because of the sensitivity of the situation in Jerusalem, Israel should unilaterally freeze its excavations in the area of the mosques for a limited time. The Israel Antiquities Authority should invite Palestinian experts, religious leaders and PA officials to see the excavations area firsthand. Israel should also invite PA President Mahmoud Abbas to Jerusalem, to pray in al-Aksa Mosque, to see the Western Wall and the excavations around the mount.

Abbas should then declare his recognition of the fact that the Temple Mount was the location of the Holy Temple (which is even mentioned in the Koran). Abbas need not worry that his recognition would grant Israel and the Jewish people the green light to rebuild the Temple in place of the mosques. There is no such intention, there are no such plans and the Chief Rabbinate has once again stated that Jews should not go onto the Temple Mount as a matter of Halacha.

According to Jewish law, the Temple will be rebuilt only when the messiah comes, so Abbas should be able to rest assured that until the messiah arrives, the Temple Mount will remain under Muslim control - and when the messiah finally does show up, he will be wise enough to deal with the future of the mount.

The Palestinians should understand that when Yasser Arafat foolishly denied the Jewish connection to Jerusalem and the Holy Temple, he did great damage to the peace process. Recognizing this fact would facilitate greater understanding. ...

Boycott advocate NOT being punished

2009-10-12T13:33:00.006-04:00

This can be read as a follow-up to what Ron Skolnik wrote recently on this general subject of boycott. At the behest of In These Times (ITT) magazine, I contacted authorities at Ben-Gurion University to examine the rumor that boycott advocate, Neve Gordon, was being punished for his views.

ITT published a shortened version of my findings in its November issue; I was not pleased with the way this piece was edited because it did not emphasize that Dr. Gordon’s teaching post at BGU is not under threat. The complete version is now online at InTheseTimes.org. This is the shortened version as I would have edited it:

In an August 20 op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, Neve Gordon, an Israeli professor of politics at Ben-Gurion University (BGU) in Beersheba (and a contributor to In These Times), announced his support for the Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions (BDS) movement. Calling it “the only way that Israel can be saved from itself,” Gordon argues that it will force an end to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories beyond the pre-June 1967 borders of Israel.

Gordon’s bold and very public call for an international boycott against Israel has triggered a pushback from some Israelis and others.

On Aug. 27, Virginia Aksan, president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America, wrote to Rivka Carmi, president of Ben-Gurion University, protesting the university’s alleged effort to dismiss Gordon from his dual roles as a senior lecturer of politics and as chair of BGU’s department of government and politics.

On September 2, The Jewish Forward reported that the American Associates of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev—a U.S.-based organization that raises funds for BGU—had called for “disciplinary action” against Gordon because his op-ed was hurting their fundraising efforts.

Faye Bittker, BGU’s director of public relations, said in an e-mail to In These Times: “The university ... NEVER EVER threatened him with dismissal ... However, the University feels that a call for a boycott is ... the equivalent of screaming fire in a crowded theater, as an academic boycott undercuts every single value that the University stands for, and were such a boycott to succeed, it would cause great damage to both the University and to the State of Israel. Moreover, the University feels strongly that if Neve really believes in such a boycott, he cannot fulfill his responsibilities as the chairman of the department ... and as such should resign.”

The Forward reports that Isaac Nevo, a senior lecturer in philosophy at BGU, organized a letter signed by 48 faculty that demanded Gordon not be sanctioned for his views. And Hebrew University law professor Alon Harel initiated a petition signed by 180 Israeli academics, similarly opposed to punishing Gordon. Interestingly, both Nevo and Harel actually oppose BDS.

Nevo did suggest that Gordon “may consider” resigning from his administrative position. But Gordon told The Forward that he sees his stepping down now as an impossibility because it would be regarded as punishment for his views.

Nevertheless, he admitted to “a contradiction” in performing his duties as chair, since he views visits by foreign academics to Israel as “extremely problematic” unless their visit helps highlight what he sees as the injustices of the Israeli occupation. (Gordon did not respond to queries from this writer.)

Vanessa Redgrave against anti-Israel protest

2009-10-08T11:58:00.003-04:00

The actress,Vanessa Redgrave, has long been an activist for the Palestinian cause and a vociferous critic of Israel. Ms. Redgrave has not likely altered this basic view, but a news article in Haaretz reveals her to be an unusually intelligent and sensitive voice on the Toronto Film Festival controversy about honoring the city of Tel Aviv on its 100th anniversary year:

In a letter to the New York Review of Books co-signed by artist Julian Schnabel and playwright Martin Sherman, Redgrave defends the festival's choice to spotlight Tel Aviv and denounces those who have called for a boycott.

"We oppose the current Israeli government, but it is a government," Redgrave and her co-signatories wrote in their letter, "Freely elected. Not a regime. Words matter." ...

"Thousands of Palestinians have died through the years because the Israeli government, military, and part of the population fervently believe that the Arab states and, indeed, much of the world do not want Israel to exist.

"How then are we halting this never-ending cycle of violence by promoting the very fears that cause it?

"Many citizens of Tel Aviv are particularly aware of the situation of the Palestinians and are concerned about their government's policies and their country's future. And none more so than the Tel Aviv creative community. This is exemplified by Israeli films that criticize their government's behavior.

"These citizens of Tel Aviv and their organizations and their cultural outlets should be applauded and encouraged.

"We do not agree that this involvement is a reason to shun or protest, picket or boycott, or ban people who are expressing thoughts and confronting grief that, ironically, many of the protesters share."