At a glance, there really aren't that many "movements" in Judaism. Orthodox, reform, reconstructionist and conservative. That's pretty much it. Sure, there are some variations on this, but compared to the Christian world, Jews like to keep it simple.

Or do we? 

I decided to jump into the proverbial rabbit-hole of Jewish Denominationalism and discovered that there are more ways of being Jewish than there ever have been before.

Secular-As-Balls:

You still don't understand WHY Jews believe in G-d. Frankly, you think the whole "G-d Thing" is irrelevant. There's nothing about being Jewish that requires religion, customs, beliefs, worship, a love for Israel or the Jewish People. But if anyone DARES to slam the Jewish People or pretend that the Holocaust didn't happen, you'll be the first to kick their ass. It's like being an older brother: you can torture your siblings all you want to. But the minute some other kid tries to pick on your kid brother/sister, you're going to pound them into the ground. You express your faith (or lack thereof) by reading Heeb Magazine and going to the opening of the new Jewish Museum in your neighborhood. Just try to avoid the rabbi at all costs!

 

Hippiedox:

The product of Orthodox or immigrant parents, you voted for Barak Obama because he's cool like the new iPhone. You tone of voice moves between stoner and yiddishkeit, and your love for Matisyahu at times rivals the Lubavitcher Rebbe. You're more comfortable at Whole Foods than you are around your conservative in-laws, but you still feel a sense of sadness when a non-kosher restaurant opens near your shul. Kabbalah is your favorite pastime, because it's like being on a permanent acid trip.

See: Shemspeed, FrumSatire and "that guy" on the Birthright Israel trip.

 

Chabad-Could-It-Be: Thanks to Chabad's supply chain of eager rabbis, your small town of approximately ten Jews just got an Orthodox shul. Too bad for you that you have a shaved head, love bacon and still don't know what a mezzuzah is. But because you feel a cultural connection to Judaism, you decide to start attending services. You really hate the religio-political attitude of Chabadniks, but because this movement offers you the "real" Judaism that you cannot muster for yourself, you keep going back as an atonement for all the Friday nights you spent playing X-Box instead of reading the Good Book.

See: any Jew living west of the Mississippi river and east of Phoenix, Arizona.

 

Trans(gender) Denominational: You're an activist within Judaism. You want to reform (no pun intended) every corner of the Jewish World. Your obsession with Tikkun Olam really has nothing to do repairing the world as a whole, but instead concentrating on key issues within Judaism. Such examples include gay/lesbian rights, trans-inclusion, gender feminism, environmentalism and animal rights. You can't settle on one shul because they just don't address your "issues". Like a serial monogamist, you fall in love with one synagogue/rabbi and work the hell out of it until there is nothing left, then move onto another hot affair.

See: Union For Progressive Judaism, Barney Frank, and Kosherveg.com.

 

PolitiKosher: You love Israel. In fact, you're IN LOVE with Israel. There's something about the desert, the ruins, the graffiti and the bombs that just gives you this tingling feeling in your stomach. You think the Palestinians are secretly plotting your death and that if Netanyahu could just get his act together, the Messiah will surely come. Hopefully that person is you. Just in case, you've got your passport and a duffle bag filled with tallit ready to go.

See: Friends of the IDF, the Libi Fund and anyone wearing an "I Love The IDF" T-shirt.

 

Deconstructionist Judaism: Innovation is the tradition of the Jewish faith, and you are its greatest champion. You believe that G-d has a great sense of humor and personally marvels at your creative thinking skills. You pioneered such moments in Judaism as the chocolate seder, dog and cat bar mitzvahs, and menorahs hacked together from leftover Ikea stuff. You express your Judaism by taking Jewish ideas and making them better.

See: Moderntribe.com, Rabbi Laura Baum, Mel Brooks.

Many religions approach their movements like a ladder: the higher up you climb, the more "authentic" your faith. And generally speaking, the more conservative practice is usually what you're striving for. Judaism has a motto of horizontally-intergrated faith. A belief that Judaism is not a climb to the top, but rather a continuum that you place yourself on. More liberal? Slide to the left! More Orthodox, then move to the right.

Judaism, for me, is more like a spider web. A spider web starts by having a few pillars to hold it together. From these platforms, the spider is able to weave its web to the center. The purpose: to catch what the spider needs in order to survive. If one of the pillars that the web is connected to simply cannot hold the web, then the creative little spider finds a new anchor. If someone breaks the web from the inside, then the spider repairs it, differently than it was originally created. Still, the web stays intact. And every spider web is different, just like everyone's Judaism.

Benny Morris is the picture of the contemporary Israeli intelligentsia. In Morris’ work, we find the disappointed politics of the old Labor Party, once dominant in Israeli politics, now consigned to barely 10% of the Knesset.

In Morris one can also see the frustrated idealism of the Meretz party, once the conscience of the mainstream left and progressive activists to balance Labor’s mainstream pragmatism.

Morris, like his country, was born in 1948. He was a paratrooper in the army, and in 1969 was wounded during Israel’s war of attrition with Egypt. He worked for twelve years as a reporter for the Jerusalem Post, which was at the time a major left-leaning newspaper in Israel.

The historian again saw action as a reservist in Lebanon in 1982, but refused to serve just six years later in the West Bank, and was jailed for his stance. That same year, he gained national fame with his groundbreaking study, The Birth of the Palestinians Refugee Problem, 1947-1949.

Through the early 90s, Morris was regarded as an ultra-leftist and an icon of Post-Zionism. But as the Oslo years wore on and hopes for peace dimmed from the pinnacle they reached with the Rabin-Arafat handshake on the White House lawn in 1993, like so many Israelis , Morris grew more pessimistic and disillusioned.

With the Al-Aksa Intifada’s violence leaving hopes shattered during the early years of this decade, Morris started speaking much more about “Arab mendacity” and the desire of Palestinians and all Arabs to sacrifice everything for the sake of destroying Israel. This was most evident in a 2004 interview in Ha’aretz, where Morris criticized David Ben-Gurion for not expelling all the Arabs from the nascent state of Israel, among other things.

His newest book, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict illustrates the scope of Benny Morris’ work.

Benny MorrisMorris is an outstanding researcher. He digs down and assembles facts in minute detail. But as a polemicist, and in general as a thinker, he is not particularly adept. When he sticks to the facts, he has shown himself to be remarkably skilled at presenting them in an even-handed and thorough fashion, even when they do not support a view he holds. But when drawing conclusions or taking leaps of deductive reasoning, he tends to fall very short, with enormous, even prejudiced, bias coming through very sharply.

This too is well illustrated in his latest book. One State has three sections. The middle one which, though also flawed, is by far the best, details the history of both one- and two-state ideologies and strategies, from early bi-nationalism through to present-day diplomacy on the Oslo/Annapolis track.  

That history is not encouraging, with one solution after another being obstructed or rejected by one side or the other, sometimes both. But for Morris, the history is really two histories: one of pragmatic acceptance of partition of the land of Palestine/Eretz Yisrael on the part of the Jews, and the other the constant rejection of coexistence by Arabs.

Morris sets the tone in his first chapter, a review of the current rise of one-state thinking, largely among Palestinians and their supporters. He quotes, at some length, from Rashid Khalidi’s very worthy book The Iron Cage, accompanied by a flat statement that, despite Khalidi’s assertion to the contrary, Khalidi supports a single-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Morris offers no evidence for this assertion. He simply states it, based only on Khalidi’s exposition of the one-state position—an exposition that is clearly critical of the stance. And, one might add, an exposition that Morris himself would almost immediately imitate in this same book.

As Morris moves into his history of bi-nationalist ideas, notions of federated states and the various plans to partition Palestine, he works to trace a line from the earliest Palestinian and Arab opposition to Zionism directly and consistently through to today’s Palestinian proposals for full statehood and an end to the conflict. Morris, in his attempt to draw that direct line, makes no attempt to adjust his reading for circumstances. Thus, he sees the absolute rejectionism of Zionism by the Arab world before 1948 in the same light as he does the PLO’s gradual acceptance of a two-state settlement through the 1970s and 80s. For him, it cannot be possible that the Palestinians have come to accept the two-state solution as the only option, despite still believing that this is an unjust solution.

It seems that for Morris, Palestinian acceptance of a two-state solution can only be sincere if they recognize the legitimacy of the Zionist movement. That hardly seems a realistic standard. No Palestinian I have ever encountered, including the many who completely acknowledge that Jews have a historic, cultural and religious connection to the land, endorses a two-state solution on that basis. They do so because they recognize it is the only feasible solution.

This shouldn’t be such a leap. Morris himself has documented the fact that the acceptance by the Yishuv leadership, under David Ben-Gurion, of the Peel partition plan of 1937 was a tactic, and that Ben-Gurion never intended to settle for that small patch of land. It was a pragmatic decision. This is true today as well, for a great many Israelis—they don’t want to give up the West Bank, and certainly not any part of Jerusalem, but most remain willing to do so in order to end the conflict.

It is very telling that Morris’ analysis of the decline of the Oslo process makes no mention of the massive expansion of settlements. He pays a great deal of attention to the issue of expunging parts of the PLO charter (the amendments made have never been deemed sufficient by Israel) and the ongoing terrorism in the 90s. But he sees no role in the failure of the peace process for the massive explosion in the number of settlements and settlers in those years or the sharp decline in the Palestinian standard of living. This was due, in part, to the Palestinian Authority’s own corruption. However, the most direct factors were the increasing restrictions placed on Palestinian freedom of movement due to the settlements and their accompanying bypass roads, combined with the elimination of most of the jobs in Israel for Palestinians, as Israelis shifted to employing foreign guest workers from the Philippines, and Thailand, among other places, for menial labor.

Morris offers no alternative to the one-state or two-state solutions. He only suggests the revival of an old idea of subsuming, either by confederation or annexation, a Palestinian entity under Jordanian rule. The notion is far from the table, as it is an option that no one but a few Israelis desire. Beyond that, and not surprisingly, there is no constructive thought here.

In the final chapter, Morris does make some very important points about the problems with a two-state solution. The geography of partition has always been a major issue, one that has generally been understated. From the Peel Commission partition plan in 1937 to the Clinton Parameters in 2000, when one actually looks at the proposals on a map, they certainly don’t look like very practical alternatives. Also, the process of building an independent Palestinian economy is going to take a very long time, and even if successful, that economy is not likely to be on a par with Israel’s. And that will always be the comparison.

There are other problems with a two-state solution, and they’re getting worse every day.  Morris demonstrates one of the biggest: the anger and bigotry that decades of conflict have spawned. One example: “Israeli Jewish society remains largely secular, with Western, democratic values predominating. This can hardly dovetail with the authoritarian and religious values of Palestinian Arab society…”

Morris includes in his division Israel’s Palestinian citizens, pointing out the greater crime rates among Arabs than Jews within Israel’s borders. He conveniently ignores the universally accepted correlation between wealth and social status with crime rates and instead attributes the difference to the distinction between the Jewish culture and the Arab.

There are real reasons on the ground that a two-state solution is a lot more difficult than many people believe it to be. And I certainly agree that any one-state formulation is a non-starter. But Morris demonstrates what might be the greatest obstacle to any resolution: the irrational, bigoted hatred of the other. For him, there is no such thing as a trustworthy Arab.

Too many Israelis and Palestinians, as well as their supporters throughout the world, hold views of this type. Morris typifies the Israeli version. We’ve all heard a great deal about the Palestinian one, in places like the Hamas charter, or the Muslim one that Mahmoud Ahmedinejad displayed again so well in Geneva a few weeks ago. Until that mindset is overcome, hope is, indeed, in very short supply.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been a focus of media coverage throughout the world for decades. Yet, despite (or perhaps because of) widespread media attention in America, Americans often view this conflict from a distance, isolated from the painful reality by vast oceans and only a vague understanding of the participants’ motives. We often do not see that this conflict is actually an everyday struggle between real people, with names and faces never acknowledged by us. Palestinian artists, for example, have largely remained voiceless in the outside world, unable to find a forum through which to share their gifts. Even the most talented Palestinian writers go unnoticed, buried under silence. For this reason, it is such a joy to read Adina Hoffman’s biography of the Palestinian poet Taha Muhammed Ali, My Happiness Bears to Relation to Happiness: A Poet's Life in the Palestinian Century. Recognizing the need to share Palestinian artists with the world, Hoffman has chosen Ali (known as Taha throughout the book), a close family friend, as the subject of her biography.

As a Jewish American writer living in Israel, and as a friend of Taha, Hoffman offers a unique view. Hoffman’s friendship with Taha allows her to create a much more personalized biography than is typically seen. She draws the reader into her own internal struggles as she attempts to find truth within the multitude of facts, perspectives, and emotions. Taha’s life has been marked by countless battles and horrors since the inception of Israel. He recalls each conflict to Hoffman, describing the deaths and poverty that have marked his family’s history. Because Taha’s account of events often sharply differs from those of Israeli Jews, Hoffman must strive to find truths within these conflicting perspectives. She tells the reader of her own confusion and guilt in placing herself within the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Hoffman knows that there is no easy truth to be found—in believing one side of the story, she is automatically forced to disregard the standpoint of her friend. These internal struggles serve to exemplify the helplessness the two nations feel in coming to understand and trust one another. It is because of Hoffman’s friendship with Taha that she is able to create a candid, thoughtful exploration of Taha’s works and their broader cultural context. Hoffman succeeds impressively, crafting a heart-wrenching portrayal of an amazing, humble, good-humored artist forced to live in the heart of an often oppressive and war-torn country.

Taha was born in 1931 in a Palestinian village, Saffuriyya, which was later destroyed by the Israeli army. As a Palestinian born before Israel’s independence, every significant step in his life has been influenced by the Jewish and Arab battles throughout his homeland. These cultural tensions subtly influence his art. For example, in “The Falcon,” Taha writes of a songbird’s death, using the bird’s terror as a broader cultural symbol. Taha writes: “Massacres and cities / were gathered there in its gaze. / [. . .] / That small bird’s fear / cannot possibly be / its alone! / [. . .] / The fear of that small bird / [. . .] / cannot be fathomed except / as the fear of the flock as a whole.”

The surface level of this poem concerns a viper killing a songbird. However, as is typical in Taha’s work, beneath that simple subject lies the larger themes of pain and fear. Although Taha rarely writes explicitly about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he imbues each poem with painful cultural relevance. In relating each poem to the reader, Hoffman elegantly entwines Taha’s poetry with her own perceptive exploration of each piece. Because of Hoffman’s deft analysis, the reader is able to appreciate Taha’s cultural anger and frustration as well as his humor and joy through Cole, Hijazi, and Levin’s translations. Taha’s emotional complexity can be seen in one example of his poetry, when he describes the “hatred” he feels “after the rape / of the light of morning’s laughter,” and expresses his pain and rage at the Israeli domination of his people. Yet, after this painful, enraged moment, Taha shifts the poem’s tone, focusing on the ways that “the laughter / of a child” makes him become a happy fool, forgetting the conflicts and recognizing the joy in his life. Taha uses his art as a lens through which he examines his own complex emotional reactions to these conflicting emotions.

Hoffman also embraces this goal, focusing her biography not on historical events, but rather on “how he had seen it: to try, in other words, to convey the way such cataclysmic historical events look through the eyes of one exceptional man.” In Hoffman’s hands, Taha’s story simultaneously becomes both his own unique tale, and a microcosm for more universal experiences. As Taha describes, “In my poetry, there is no Palestine, no Israel. But [there are] suffering, sadness, longing, fear, and [these] together, make . . . Palestine and Israel.” By focusing on the emotional complexities of his life, Taha’s poetry speaks to the reader through its themes of pain, hope, and humanity.

While Hoffman creates a powerful portrayal of Taha’s life and art, there are moments within the text when she seems to take on too much. Hoffman attempts to incorporate a broader national history and an analysis of Palestinian poetic movements throughout the text. As a result, there are passages within the story where she loses the reader, buried under a multitude of facts, dates, and names. At these points, Hoffman abandons the most fascinating element of the biography—her relationship with Taha. Luckily, these moments of dissonance are rare. For the majority of the biography, Hoffman skillfully portrays the cultural tensions that she and Taha must navigate. This emotionally honest portrayal of two people surviving amidst conflict makes Hoffman’s book an essential addition to the sparse Western literary corpus devoted to real people bridging the divide between Israel and Palestine.

Renee Chase, a former teacher, is currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of English at the University of Denver.

January 02, 2009

Amir is not his real name, although that’s what’s written on his business card:Taxi Amir. I never find out what his real name is. Amir’s a Muslim from Palestine but his mum was born in Jerusalem and eight years ago he got Israeli ID.

We’re driving back from Bethlehem. Amir’s ID allows him to cross the Palestine-Israel divide in the hills by Beit Jala and Walada. Amir moved recently to Jerusalem where he worked on the buses, cleaning, picked up Hebrew, and started driving a taxi round the city and beyond.

‘I saw I had to learn Hebrew very good and very fast,’ he says. ‘So I listened and asked questions and then I learned to read. I took anything with Hebrew on it and at first I couldn’t understand – I just looked at the words – but I learned bit by bit. Now I read a Hebrew paper every day.’

It’s not that easy for Amir, getting fares. The other day a woman of about 50 jumped into his cab and they were driving along and a couple of lights in he puts the radio on – just softly. It’s Arabic, though, the music that’s coming out.

‘Oh my God!’ says his passenger, throwing open the door. ‘You’re an Arab! Why didn’t you tell me you're an Arab?’ And she’s gone without even paying the fare.

A lot of people assume Amir’s Jewish. His Hebrew’s perfect, but it’s more than just the words you use – it’s the confident way you say them that makes the difference. We stop at a checkpoint on the road from Walada to Jerusalem. Amir winds down the window and addresses the soldier: ‘Ma hamatzav achi–what’s up brother?’ It’s pouring with rain and the soldier glances briefly at me in the back. ‘Tayeret’ says Amir – she’s a tourist. The soldier waves us through.

‘You have to speak to them first,’ Amir says. ‘Then they relax. If I’m just sitting here silent the soldiers get scared and take the whole car apart. I’ve been through here with four people in my car and they let us pass. Another time, I was alone and they opened everything – it was 20 minutes before they let me go.’

Then there was the couple in their 30s. Amir was cabbing one day in Jerusalem, downtown. His Arab cabbie mate was up ahead – there was a queue and Amir told the couple his mate was first. ‘We don’t want him, he’s an Arab,’ they said. ‘We’ll take you – we want a Jew.’

It’s not easy to tell what Amir is. There are no special identifying signs. His taxi has yellow Israeli plates, and its only adornment is an air-freshener, swinging the colours of the US flag. Amir himself is dark, semitic, but not too dark. He’s 26. His mother wants him married soon – his younger brother’s a father already, at only 23. It’s just not easy finding her – the right one. But girls like Amir, they really do.

There was this woman, only 22, who took the the cab especially for him. There was a line of cabs all calling her – Taxi! Taxi! Monit! She’s strolling along and they’re all calling to her and she ignores them, every one, until Amir. This fine-looking woman spots him, stops and saunters back, bending into the window as he winds it down.

‘How much to L–’ she says.

He tells her 50 shekels. Much too much. Wants to make sure she’s getting in for him.

‘That’s cool.’ She jumps into the front seat. And they’re just sitting there talking and she’s all, how old are you, what do you like doing, where do you go? Are you married? Do you have any kids?

After a while, she says, ‘So where are your family from? Morocco, Tunisia, Iraq?’ And he says, ‘No, I’m an Arab, they’re from Palestine.’

She just sits there, frozen, arms clamped rigid to her sides: ‘Oh my God! I would have started something with you right now. I thought you were a Jew.’

Ever since Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union, Jews have had renewed interest in the "what if?": what if Jewish refugees from WWII had been welcomed in some land outside the Middle East? What would Israel be like today if it were not the only Jewish state? Alexander Heldring, former Ambassador of the Netherlands, tells us here about the Jewish quest to settle Surinam--Zeek

 

From 1946 until the mid-1950s, an American-Jewish organization called the Freeland League negotiated with Dutch and Surinamese authorities about the possible resettlement of 30,000 Jewish displaced persons and refugees from Central and Eastern Europe in Surinam. Hopes were high when the authorities concerned initially reacted positively to the plan. But the project never came to fruition. So what went wrong?

The Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonization had been founded in Great Britain in 1935 by the Jewish lawyer Dr Isaac Nathan Steinberg, who twelve years earlier had fled Russia. As a representative of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, Steinberg had briefly joined Lenin's first cabinet in the capacity of minister of Justice, but due to his much more liberal views on politics he had soon fallen at loggerheads with the Bolsheviks.

 

Even before the start of WWII, due to the persecution of Jews in Nazi-Germany, the Freeland League had searched urgently for a thinly populated area (‘Territory'), somewhere in the world, where Jewish colonists could settle and cultivate the land. They would become citizens of the country concerned while simultaneously retaining their own Jewish culture and Yiddish language as much as possible. For the Territorialists, Palestine was not an option, since they, unlike the Zionists, did not aspire towards creating an independent Jewish state. In those days, moreover, Palestine was still ruled by the British mandate, with a limited admission policy.

At first, the Freeland League focused on Australia because on that vast continent there were so many areas still sparsely populated, especially in the Northwest. Isaac Steinberg, chosen as the most convincing representative of the League due to his charismatic personality and brilliant oratory skills, launched an intensive campaign in Australia in favor of Jewish colonization. Initially it seemed that he would succeed in his objective. However, despite the support of several Australian agencies and substantial public opinion, the League failed to obtain consent from the central government in Canberra, which officially rejected the plan in 1944. They did not want a mass influx of Jewish refugees from Europe to settle as a separate group in a remote part of the country.

 

The Freeland League did not lose heart, and two years later, in 1946, it directed its attempts to find a sanctuary for the survivors of the Holocaust in another sparsely populated area, and that was found in Surinam.

Surinam

Why did the League select Surinam? Located on the northeast coast of South America between British Guyana and French Guyana, Surinam was still a Dutch colony at the time. Although four times the size of the Netherlands, its population amounted to no more than 180,000. The descendants of African slaves accounted for the largest ethnic section, approximately 75,000 people, followed by around 56,000 people from the Indian sub-continent, and 35,000 Javanese from the Dutch East Indies. Smaller ethnic groups consisted of Chinese, Lebanese, Amerindians and Dutch. There was also a small community of fewer than 800 Jews, who had settled in Surinam as far back as the mid-seventeenth century.

Initially - as had been the case with the Australia project - it appeared as if, during its negotiations with Surinam and the Netherlands, the Freeland League would succeed in its effort to carry out its colonization project. A delegation of the League headed by Isaac Steinberg visited Surinam in April 1947. After negotiations with an advisory commission appointed by the governor, the delegation and the commission signed a Joint Declaration in which both parties agreed to admit a maximum of 30,000 Jewish immigrants into Surinam. The Surinamese negotiators had insisted on this number, such being smaller than that of the Javanese segment of the population. On 27 June 1947, after a heated debate, the Staten (the Surinam parliament) decided thus to admit this maximum number of 30,000 Jews ‘under stipulations to be agreed on at a later stage'[i].

The colonization pursued by the Freeland League was targeted at the Saramacca district, west of Paramaribo, the capital city of Surinam. At the end of 1947 and the beginning of 1948, a group of five American experts commissioned by the League made a thorough survey of the spot and concluded in their report that the area referred to was suitable for the Jewish colonization. The Freeland League would cover the costs of this project (estimated at US$35 million) using funds meant to be made available by Jewish organizations and some American trade unions.

However, a few months after the foundation of the State of Israel (14 May 1948), the new governor of Surinam informed the Freeland League in New York that the Surinamese Staten wished to suspend the discussion on the Jewish immigration until  ‘total clarification of the general international situation'[ii]. This was virtually the end of the Jewish colonization scheme in Surinam, although Surinam has never transformed the ‘suspension' into a formal ‘discontinuance'.

The League did not accept what it considered to be a unilateral decision. Although in the immediate years after the founding of the Jewish state, most of the inmates of the DP camps in Europe emigrated to Israel, there was a substantial number of Jews, especially the non-Zionists, who wanted a safe haven somewhere else in the world. They remained the League's principal target group and for almost nine years it continued its efforts to reopen the negotiations with the Surinamese government. Once in a while it would appear as if a new government in Surinam, perhaps not entirely aware of the history of the Saramacca Project, might be willing to re-examine the matter. Each time, however, this would fail to be followed up by the Surinamese authorities and eventually the League stopped pursuing its goal of having Jews resettle in Surinam.

After Isaac Steinberg's death in January 1957, the League gradually dropped the ‘territorialist' part of its mandate and started to focus more on helping to preserve Yiddish as a living language. This latter goal is still being pursued by the League for Yiddish in New York[iii], which might be regarded as the Freeland League's successor.

 

The only publications on the Freeland League and its colonization projects which I have been able to trace so far are the following. In 1948, Isaac Steinberg himself described his efforts to create a Jewish settlement in Australia in his book Australia, the Unpromised Land: In search of a Home[iv]. Copies are almost impossible to find. More recently, in 1993, a book by the Australian journalist Leon Gettler appeared under virtually the same title, Unpromised Land[v]. In 1967, the well-known American expert in Yiddish, Michael Astour, released his extensive study entitled the History of the Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonization (750 p.), but only in Yiddish[vi]. During the negotiations with the Surinamese and Dutch authorities, the two magazines produced by the Freeland League itself, Afn Shvel (Yiddish[vii]) and Freeland (English), also published many articles on the Saramacca Project.

The only in-depth study on the specific topic of the Freeland League and Surinam published in the Netherlands so far was made by Laura Almagor with her Master's thesis for the University of Utrecht, 'A Forgotten Alternative', presented in July 2007 (104 p.)[viii].

 

Why Surinam is not the Jewish State

 

In the beginning, there was enthusiasm for this project in both Surinam and the Netherlands. Put briefly, this initial positive reaction to the concept stemmed from the awareness that this could help displaced Jews in Europe; that the population in Surinam and its economy would grow; and that the reputation of Surinam and the Netherlands would be enhanced internationally (something that the Netherlands with its problems in Indonesia certainly needed) and it wouldn't cost the Netherlands a single penny. From 1946 to 1948 this enthusiasm transformed itself into various concrete arrangements between the Surinamese government and the Freeland League, favorable and recorded statements in the Staten of Surinam, the Dutch Lower House of Parliament, the United Nations General Assembly and affirmative letters from the then governor of Surinam to the League.

 

However, the colonization plan failed. In Surinam itself the resistance against the plan gradually increased, especially within the Creole National Party of Surinam (NPS). The black population was afraid of possible political and economic dominance by the Jewish immigrants. In its public relations campaign, the NPS even employed discourse which harked back to an era when Jewish slave masters exploited the sugar plantations.

The Zionists, who had their own agenda, also fueled these fears. After all, as long as Palestine was under British mandate and the British obstructed mass immigration of Jews from Europe, Surinam might well serve as an acceptable alternative for a possible sanctuary for Jewish displaced persons. This was a threat to the Zionists' ambitions and so the Zionists concentrated their lobbying against the colonization project of the Freeland League within Surinam itself. They sent the formidable Mrs. Ida Archibald Silverman, who had already won her spurs in contributing to the failure of the colonization project in Australia, to Paramaribo. The Zionists observed that initially not only the Jewish community, but also other people (including Muslims), the Surinamese government and some political parties showed great sympathy for the idea of a Jewish immigration.

Mrs. Silverman, during a three-day visit to Paramaribo in March 1948, managed to create a divide within the Jewish community of supporters and opponents of the colonization project. She would later remark: ‘I went there to check on and nip in the bud, if possible, Steinberg's nefarious scheme (via the Freeland League) to bargain with the then Dutch Governor for permission to settle Jewish refugees in the disease-infested jungles along the Surinam river. [...] It took very little effort on my part to disillusion the Governor...So that, aside from the thousands of dollars wasted on the experts ... nothing good came from this scheme.'[ix]

Within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in The Hague, the opinion reigned that the Freeland League would never acquire the necessary funding for the plan.  This turned out not to be true at least in terms of financial support, which the League had already enjoyed from some American trade unions and would have continued to enjoy, had the Dutch eventually consented to the plan.

Immediately after the war, there were certainly sympathizers of the colonization project within the Dutch government.  The most determined opponents were a couple of officials in the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, later joined by their colleagues from Overseas Territories, who eventually managed to convince their respective bosses to reject the project. There is substantial evidence that in the summer of 1948, the Netherlands government exerted pressure on the Staten of Suriname to ‘suspend the discussion' regarding the colonization plan, which ultimately led to the failure of the project.

Evidently the Freeland League had been so misled by the initial positive attitude of the Surinamese and Dutch governments that it didn't actually bother to lobby in the Netherlands. The League's lobbying campaign focused on Suriname, because it was under the mistaken impression that the entire decision-making process regarding the project would take place in Paramaribo. Only after Isaac Steinberg received a warning from his friends in Surinam about the Dutch pressure on the Staten of Suriname did the League decide to deputize its leader to the Netherlands, but Steinberg was denied access.

If the Freeland League had succeeded in concluding a binding agreement with the Surinamese and Dutch governments on the Jewish colonization, and if some U.S. agencies (such as trade unions) had made sufficient funds available for the implementation of the plan, would the League have been able to attain its desired number of 30,000 Jewish immigrants for a colonization in Suriname?

The answer is yes, if one focuses on the period right after the war. There is ample evidence hereof in the archives I had access to, for example the letters to the Freeland League from inmates of the displaced persons' camps in the American and British occupation zones in Germany and Austria[x]. However, any likelihood of Eastern European Jews in particular coming to Surinam was precisely one of the severest objections which the Dutch government harbored against the League's Surinam plan.  The government didn't want a large numbers of Jews from Eastern Europe in Suriname, 'because they are infiltrators who will turn Suriname into a communist state[xi]'. 

Conclusion

From my research, it seems apparent that neither the Dutch nor the Surinamese government treated the colonization project or the Freeland League itself with particular integrity. Dutch Prime Minister Willem Drees and his immediate entourage themselves have pointed out in various internal memoranda that in the discussion with the Freeland League following the initial negotiations, the Dutch position was very weak and the course of things "not unquestionable"[xii]. In these documents Drees and his colleagues also admit that the commitments which the Netherlands and Surinam had entered into with the Freeland League were in fact firmer than they had initially thought. According to one of Drees' advisors "this issue has developed and been treated in a very unfortunate fashion"[xiii].

The League's allegation that the Dutch government had exerted pressure on Suriname to suspend the negotiations has always been publicly denied by the Netherlands, but admitted in private. If on the Dutch side there was an awareness that this matter had not been treated in an entirely just manner, it is all the more striking that the authorities in The Hague and Paramaribo acted in a rather sloppy fashion, to say the least, in their further handling of contacts with the League: in due course, governor (s) and ministers no longer took the trouble to reply to letters of the League, except Prime Minister Drees himself. He was the only one who in his last letter to the Freeland League wrote that he personally regretted that the colonization project had not materialized.

What would have happened if the Jewish colonization project had materialized? This, of course, belongs to the realm of the ‘What if?' theory in historiography[xiv], or perhaps to Dutch journalist Jeroen Trommelen, who a few years ago wrote that Surinam had missed " a wonderful opportunity to develop into the nuclear weapons, iceberg lettuce producing nation that Israel ultimately has become"[xv]: a deliberately exaggerated and somewhat facetious prophecy.

The immigration of 30,000 Jews would, in my view, undoubtedly have contributed positively to Surinam's economic welfare, as significant Jewish presence elsewhere has proven.

But what impact would such a large amount of settlers have had on the native population? With the Australia project, the Freeland League unfortunately had overlooked the interests of the native Australians (Aborigines) of the region[xvi]. In the case of Surinam, however, the League had always emphasized its wish that the Jewish colonists be settled in an unpopulated area, thereby avoiding any allegations of dominance altogether.

 

But even with a large Jewish community, Surinam would never have become an alternative option for Palestine. The Freeland League regarded Australia, Alaska or Surinam as a refuge only complementary to Israel. It remains remarkable that at the time, the Zionists offered so much resistance to the colonization scheme in Surinam, as if indeed that country might have presented a serious alternative for the Zionists' ambitions. On the contrary: I believe that the Jewish colonization project in Surinam might eventually have served the interests of both the colonists and the Zionists. The colonists could perhaps even have followed the example of the largest Jewish community in South-America (i.e. the 190,000 Jews in Argentina), the majority of which are strong supporters of Israel[xvii].

 

(c) Alexander Heldring 2009. Alexander Heldring Sr. is former Ambassador of the Netherlands to Burkina Faso, Niger, Ghana, Togo, and Benin. In his thirty-plus years of foreign service to the Netherlands, he has served in Poland, Belgium (NATO), the USA, Switzerland (UN) and Surinam. He is currently writing a dissertation about the Freeland League.

 

---

[i] ‘Handelingen van de Staten van Suriname',  July 1947, pag.164 t/m 184. Bijzondere collecties van de Koninklijke Bibiotheek, The Hague, Netherlands.

[ii] Letter from governor W. Huender to the Freeland League dated 14 August 1948. National Archives (NA) in The Hague, file 2.10.54, # 11842.

[iii] www.leagueforyiddish.org

[iv] V. Gollancz, London, 1948, 172 p.

[v] Fremantle Arts Center, Australia, 174 p.

[vi] Many thanks to Dr Israel Zelitch, Hamden Connecticut, member of the Executive Board of the League for Yiddish in New York. Dr. Zelitch kindly translated for me more than 80 pages from this book from Yiddish to English, so I was able to access the relevant chapters on the Freeland League and Surinam.

[vii] Still published by the League for Yiddish in New York (www.leagueforyiddish.org).

[viii] http://igitur-archive.library.uu.nl/student-theses/2007-0913-200158/(Secured)Laura_Almagor_Een_vergeten_alternatief_Het_Freeland_League-plan_voor_joodse_kolonisatie_in_Suriname.pdf.

[ix] The Jewish Forum, October 1956. Copy available at the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana, University of Amsterdam, Hans Samson collection.

[x] E.g. YIVO, New York, Isaac Steinberg papers RG 366, files #523-547.

[xi] Ministry of Foreign Affairs in The Hague. Dossier ‘Freeland League', code 6/1945-1954, 3404 ~12015

[xii] National Archives in The Hague, file 2.03.01, # 4691

[xiii] Ibid.

 

[xiv] See for instance What if?, edited by Robert Cowley, Macmillan London, 2000.

[xv] De Volkskrant, 23 September 2000: Een joodse staat in Zuid-Amerika (A Jewish state in South-America).

[xvi] Leon Gettler, Unpromised Land, op.cit. p.  142, 143.

[xvii] Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd edition, volume 2, Thomson Gale, Farmington Hills MI, 2007, p. 430 and 435.

 

*************************************

Images from artist Michael Blum's installation Exodus 2048

Year 2048. The US no longer play a prominent role in world politics. After the wars of Pakistan and Iran, and the guerilla warfare imposed by Al Qaeda over the years, American leaders have decided to act in the sole interest of the country and not to intervene any longer in the affairs of the world, and consequently withdrew all support to Israel. In addition, the demographic balance has been shifting in the Middle East. Palestinian population has tripled in the last 50 years and is bursting out of the West Bank and the Gaza strip. The pressure of Arabs over Israeli Jews has become so strong that the latter, having lost the support of the US, have no other option than leave the country and emigrate. Some sporadic fights take place but, like the Arabs who hardly fought in 1948 (according to the myth), the majority of Israel’s population leaves without opposing resistance. While an Israeli government in exile tries to rule from Brooklyn, New York, other Israeli representatives successfully negociate the re-location of the state of Israel in Uganda, as proposed by Theodor Herzl in 1903. A majority of Mizrahi, unable to return to the countries of origin of their great-grandparents, accept to relocate in the New State of Israel. Nonetheless, a large number of Ashkenazim, wealthy and educated members of society, refuse to settle in Uganda. Some manage to be granted a visa to the US and join their families. Some others make a new start in Europe, South America or China. 

It’s in this context that the Exodus 2048, a Maltese ferry, is found roaming in the North Sea with about 4 500 Israeli refugees aboard. Rejected from most European ports during a three-month ordeal, the ship is finally allowed to dock in Rotterdam. Initially not allowed to disembark, the refugees are eventually accomodated in a variety of public buildings requisitioned throughout the Netherlands. The Van Abbemuseum being one of the requisitioned buildings, it now hosts a group of 120 Israeli refugees awaiting the result of their asylum application. They hope to receive, with their residence permit, a piece of land to establish a kibboutz. Named Eretz Hoven, it should revive the utopian spirit that led to the creation of the first kibboutzim in pre-Israel Palestine.

 

 

Wanna get "Che Herzl" T-shirt? Just surf your way over to Jewlicious and you'll find it along with all kinds of other swag designed especially for those aspiring to be the coolest of the cool Jews.

Yep, I did a double take when I saw this one.  I know there all too many leftists who are appalled at the sight of Che Guevara turned into a pop T-Shirt icon, but what on on earth do we make of Che Herzl?

Beyond Jewlicious' shallow hipster-frumster chic, this image raises some interesting assumptions about the very meaning of Zionism itself.  Indeed, there are many who fancy Zionism as the "national liberation movement of the Jewish people."  This concept was made especially famous by Chaim Herzog during his remarks in response to the UN's "Zionism is Racism" resolution in 1975:

Zionism is the name of the national movement of the Jewish people and is the modern expression of the ancient Jewish heritage. The Zionist ideal, as set out in the Bible, has been, and is, an integral part of the Jewish religion. Zionism is to the Jewish people what the liberation movements of Africa and Asia have been to their own people.

While I understand the substance of Herzog's argument, I have to confess that this particular defense of the Zionist enterprise has always rung a little hollow for me. First of all, I'm not sure it's all that accurate to describe Zionism as a national liberation movement -  certainly not as we've come to understand this concept post WW II.

While its hard for us to admit, Zionism is the product of ideologies  (i.e. 19th century European ethno-nationalism) that have fallen pretty far out of favor today. That's why it feels like Herzog's comparison of Zionism to the liberation movements of Africa and Asia is more than a little spurious.  After all, those movements were uprisings of indigenous peoples against centuries of colonial oppression. By contrast, Zionism sought to create an ethnic Jewish presence in Palestine and ended up doing so at the expense of its current inhabitants.

Not surprisingly, Che himself considered Zionism "reactionary" (according to biographer Jon Lee Anderson). I know he'd be rolling in his unmarked grave if he knew that his face adorned the shirts of clueless American teenagers; I can only imagine the cartwheels he'd be doing upon learning that his image had now become fused with Theodor Herzl's.

Anyhow, I'm not sure that reconceiving Zionism as a proto-national liberation movement is even all that compelling any more. Now that we've witnessed the post-modern travails of decolonized nations, we're learning that  "national liberation"  might not necessarily be all that it's cracked up to be. I'm not sure I have any good answers (certainly not one that would fit on a T-Shirt); I suppose I'm just suggesting  it's worth challenging the romanticizing of nationalism in all its various guises. 

“I think the people who are criticizing it or criticizing the idea of it, don’t really get it, because if they did, they would like it,” Gwyneth Paltrow recently told People.   Oh Gwynnie, I feel your pain!  As the writer for Jewssip, Celebrity News From a Higher Authority, I  know how it feels to be judged by close-minded individuals who just don’t understand.  Just the other evening at my local bar,  a very angry Palestinian with an authentic kaffiyeh (aka terrorist scarf) called me “a piece of subhuman garbage” after I told him about Jewssip.  I tried to engage him in a conversation about comedy as a means for social change, but he was too busy calling me a “delusional moron."

Find Out What Happened.... 

This much we know. On February 7, Hampshire College, a small liberal arts college in Massachusetts, divested from a mutual fund which owned equity in companies that do business with Israel. What we don't know is whether the decision to divest was specifically triggered by Israel-related concerns, or whether it was the consequence of general guidelines on ethical investment. A Palestine advocacy group on the Hampshire campus says, emphatically, that it was the former; in that, and in nothing else, they are in agreement with Alan Dershowitz. The college authorities, however, are insisting upon the latter interpretation.

It would appear that both parties are right. Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) can certainly make the case that it was their petition which triggered the review of the college's investments and that, consequently, their divestment campaign has triumphed. Equally, the fact that 200 companies were found to be in violation of the college's investment guidelines - SJP identified only six, because their sole concern is divestment from Israel - bolsters the case of Hampshire's Board of Trustees that "the decision expressly did not pertain to a political movement or single out businesses active in a specific region or country."

The Trustees decree that "no other report or interpretation" of the divestment decision aside from their own is valid hasn't exactly nixed SJP's ardor. The group maintains that in the eight months prior to the February 7 decision, only the six Israel-related companies they fingered were in the frame. The other companies, SJP says, were hastily added in a bid to prevent the decision being described as divestment from Israel.

Hampshire's Trustees have not directly responded to this particular charge. Yet this interesting morsel tucked into the middle of a JTA report, if correct, rather punctures the SJP's spin on events: "Three of the six companies failed a screen for socially responsible investing based on their sales of military equipment, employee safety record and other violations, according to a spokesman. Two of the companies named by the student group - Motorola and Terex - passed the screen, the spokesman said. A sixth company, United Technologies, was unlisted."

One could spend days going through the inconsistencies in each side's position. Why, for example, did the Trustees, in their statement of clarification, namecheck SJP and its antics if the group had nothing to do with the decision on the mutual fund? Why did they not just announce a review of the mutual fund in line with the ethical investment guidelines? What on earth does SJP mean when it calls for divestment to include "Palestinian organizations or groups" involved in targeting civilians? And why, then, does it only mention by name those companies with a stake in Israel? Come to think of it, when SJP talks about the goal of an "end of the occupation as defined by UN resolutions," without specifying which resolutions, are they not tempting even the most ardent advocate of student involvement in the design of higher education to scream, "get back in the f**king classroom!?"

And yet, what's at issue here is not the detail of who said what. Nor is it really about whether a decision like this - or ten similar ones - will make a significant difference to either Israel's economy or the willingness of companies to conduct business there; a great deal more punishment will be needed to dent an economy which, despite having been subjected to two wars in the last three years, still merits an 'A' credit rating from Standard and Poor's.

Rather, it is about what boycotts have always been about: symbolism.

Not for nothing does SJP remind the world of Hampshire College's record in divesting from South African apartheid. Now they can portray a seamless link between Afrikaner domination back then and Zionist occupation in our own time. A message of support from Archbishop Desmond Tutu certainly reinforces this, as does the applause of the usual suspects - among them Noam Chomsky, Cynthia McKinney, Naomi Klein and the unctuous anti-Zionist blogger Philip Weiss.

What we have here is an echo chamber, morally and sonically insulated from precisely those accusations about double standards - the treatment of student dissidents in Iran and Syria, for example - which Alan Dershowitz elucidates. Hence, I confess a certain sympathy with Dershowitz's determination to show Hampshire's faculty and student body that "bigotry has its cost." At the same time, I would point the Hampshire Trustees in the direction of another US college, and another project, which sets a much more productive example.

Bard College, another upscale institution in the American northeast, has embarked on a joint venture with the Palestinian Al Quds university to bring the traditions of open thought and academic rigor to a region which desperately needs them. Liberals and leftists should appreciate that this initiative is not about petrodollars; Bard President Leon Botstein told the New York Times that "he was glad not to be following the example of larger universities building campuses in rich Persian Gulf emirates, a development that he said was 'like investing in Monte Carlo or Liechtenstein to develop Europe.'" Supporters of Israel anxious about boycott and divestment initiatives gaining traction should be soothed by Sari Nusseibeh, the Palestinian philosopher who is President of Al Quds, readily stating that "we do a lot of projects with Israel."

It is, as Botstein would seem to be suggesting, an open market. Hampshire College could probably find itself a niche with both Israeli and Palestinian institutions. If only its Trustees would put their minds to it, this divestment spat, and all the infantile gestures around it, could be safely in the past.

On February 11, 2009, aggression against Jewish students at York University in Toronto reached new heights. The subject at hand had nothing to do with the Middle East. A press conference was underway in which student activists were reporting that they had obtained the necessary 5,000 signatures required to peacefully and lawfully impeach the existing student government that had supported the union that had shut down York University for three months.

In other words, the students wanted to learn. The teachers wanted to teach. York University did not want to lose even more students. They had experienced a 15% decline in applications for the next school year due to the closure and to the bad press it had received.

But, a highly pro-Palestinian student government, (which has learned the value of using force in response to, or to obtain, election results in both the West Bank and Gaza and obviously, now in Toronto), turned into a frightening mob which screamed out anti-Jewish as well as anti-Israeli curses, banged on the floor and on the walls, and refused to disperse. The campus police could not handle the situation. They locked twenty Jewish students into a room for their safety and then called in the Toronto police who determined that they could not provide security for the Jewish students whom they chose to lead out to safety amidst a hate-filled mob, chanting chanted ""Die, bitch, go back to Israel," and "Die, Jew, get the hell off campus."

On February 12, 2009, Jonathan Kay, the Editorial Page Editor, published the eye-witness account of Jonathan Blake Karoly in the National Post. Karoly describes the clever verbal tactics used by the mobsters to try and rush the already overcrowded room. "Let the colored people in," "Maybe if my friends bleach their skin they'll be let inside," "Zionism is Racism." Karoly notes that as he took pictures of the melee, the Middle Eastern student who had yelled many of the racial slurs, saw that Karoly was also wearing a kippah and threatened to "take his camera and smash it." He threatened no other student, only the Jew.

According to Karoly, after the press conference was over, the mob outside the student press conference came and stood outside the Hillel office on another floor. They chanted, banged, yelled, and menaced and would not leave. When the Toronto police finally came, "one pro-Palestinian student (pulled his) Kaffeiyah scarf all the way up to his eyes." And, as the police led the twenty Jewish students out, single file "through this unruly mob, they were pointing, laughing and chanting that we were 'racists on campus.'"

None of this is new. In addition to an alarming number of anti-Semitic incidents which took place in Canada during the first intifada, the suffocated intellectual atmosphere on many campuses was also noted. On December 17, 2002, one hundred well-known Canadians signed an ad in the Globe and Mail that read "[a]n increasing number of students in universities and colleges say that they fear reprisals if they challenge prevailing pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli views. If they argue that Israel has the right to exist, they are often greeted with threats, even physical assault."

And then, on September 9, 2002, Benjamin Netanyahu was scheduled to speak at Concordia University in Montreal. One thousand Palestinians and their supporters gathered to scream vitriolic hate. They also taunted, spat at, and physically and verbally harassed all those who had come to hear Netanyahu speak. The police cancelled the event but they did not intervene as individuals were attacked. I personally knew some of the people who were attacked at Concordia. They included Concordia professors who were badly beaten and highly traumatized.

As usual, the ADL's Abe Foxman is dead wrong.  In an ADL press release, Foxman links a "pandemic" of anti-Semitism to Israel's military action in Gaza to defend its citizens from non-stop, relentless rocket attacks.  He writes, that no one imagined that the war in Gaza would "so explode in an epidemic, a pandemic of anti-Semitism." The press release goes on to say that the global fallout from the Gaza crisis (is) the biggest threat to the safety and well-being of Diaspora Jewry in decades. "This is the worst, the most intense, the most global that it's been in most of our memories."

Where has he and the ADL been for the last eight years? Flying to conferences with Saudi princes and assuring their Jewish funders that they had it all under control? Or does the ADL expect Israel alone to bear the relentless burden of Jew-hatred, but never Diaspora Jewry who are meant to live safe lives?

Foxman's 2003 book on the subject also missed the boat. He viewed the danger of anti-Semitism as coming to us mainly from the Christian right-wing. He totally underplayed the danger which is facing Jews, Israel, the West, and America and which is coming our way courtesy of Islamists, Muslims, jihadists and their left-wing supporters in the West.

I no longer can speak on campuses without armed security. This is true even when I am not speaking about Israel or anti-Semitism. (Perhaps my reputation precedes me.) But, just as the student press conference at York: These days, on campus, whatever the subject is, it is always about "Palestine." And, those who support "Palestine" behave like brownshirts--or worse.

In an interview with Press TV on January 24 , Noam Chomsky gave voice to the cynicism of the hardcore left, predicting that the Obama administration would show little substantive difference with past American governments in its dealings with Israel.

"The US is not going to join the world in seeking to implement a diplomatic settlement," Chomsky told his Iranian interlocutor. "and if that is the case, (George) Mitchell's mission is vacuous."

In theory, one can debate all sorts of things. However, the proof is in the actions oft he new president. Already we are seeing signs that Chomsky's pessimism is misplaced. In fact, early indications show a distinct change in American policy, with the possibility of more to come.

Durban 2

One small examplewas Obama's reversal of the Bush administration'sdecision to boycott the planning of the so-called Durban2 conference. This gathering, which will be held in Geneva in April, is a follow up to the much criticized first World Conference Against Racism that took place in 2001 in Durban, SouthAfrica.

That conference was largely diverted by pro-Palestinian groups and governments pushing anextremist agenda. The US and Israel both walked out. Some of those same NGOs and governmental delegations are pushing a similar agenda this time. But there are also strong forces working to ensure that this WCAR addresses broader issues of racism, and avoids the descenti nto anti-Semitism that characterized the first conference.

Israel has already announced its boycott, as has Canada. The United States has now decided, however, that the best way to prevent the conference from descending into an anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic frenzy is to engage in the event's planning. If that fails, the Americans can always decide not to participate, as the U.S. and Israeli delegations did in 2001.

Barack Obama should be applauded for taking this course of action. He is working to prevent another demonstration of anti-Jewish racism, while demonstrating that failed strategies for combating it are being abandoned. Sadly, the Israeli government, and a number of prominent U.S. Jewish leaders would rather continue to use claims of anti-Semitism as a political hammer than try to eradicate the phenomenon.

The Settlements

The Durban 2 decision is nothing in comparison to the stance that is emerging regarding settlement expansion in the West Bank. Ha'aretz reported on February 15 that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Special Mideast Envoy George Mitchell are expected to take a firm stance with Israel on settlement expansion, including threatening to reduce the remaining $1.3 billion in loan guarantees the US has promised to Israel by the amount spent on settlement expansion.

This expectation was bolstered by statements in the House of Representatives Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia. On February 12, opening a hearing on the Gaza War, the chairman of the subcommittee, Gary Ackerman, one of the House's key pro-Israel leaders, issued a scathing indictment of Israel's settlement enterprise. Coming from a source like Ackerman, blame for the stalled peace process being laid at the doorstep of settlements alongside (though not, Ackerman was quick to point out, on an equal footing with) Palestinian violence was surprising, to say the least.

Ackerman's bold statement indicates that the direction Obama intends to head in is being mapped out not only with his own team of advisors, but with key pro-Israel figures in Congress. Unlike Jimmy Carter or George H.W. Bush, whose maverick policy making endeavors eschewed such collaboration, Obama is crafting an approach that he hopes will be executed without opposition from legislators and AIPAC-allied forces.

Indeed, at that very hearing (which I attended) we saw how things may split amongst Israel's supporters in Congress. While Shelly Berkley and ranking Republican Dan Burton sang the same old tune, other notable figures like Robert Wexler appeared very much in line with Ackerman, as did some of the House's newer lawmakers, such asrepresentatives Gerald Connolly and Michael McMahon. This indicates that the Obama team has marshaled reasonable Democrats behind it, and is ready to brave the attacks of the old guard.

Border Crossings

It is no coincidence that Israel has suddenly shown a willingness to discuss ways to openGaza's border crossings as part of a long-term truce and reconstruction arrangement. The idea was never hinted at during the Bush administration's tenure, right through its very last day. Suddenly, under Obama, it has become a cornerstone of every proposed arrangement.

In my discussions with officials at the State Department, it has been very clear that, while they always felt this was a necessary condition, Israel's responsiveness to the idea changed dramatically once they knew the President agreed with that direction.

Obama's team has demonstrated its interest in building stability in Gaza. It has also been absolutely clear (as was Ackerman) that anything that legitimized Hamas was a red line it was not willing to cross. But  instead of leaving the people of Gaza to starve, they have insisted on exploring alternatives that would allow the territory's civilian population to pursue their businesses and access needed services while bypassing its Islamist government

This strategy might well fail. The hope is to find a way to re-establish the Palestinian Authority in Gaza. Hamas is both determined and well-positioned enough to prevent that. The Obama administration will not legitimize Hamas, and sees that as too high a price to pay to open up access to the devastated territory.

Hamas stands accused of very serious breaches of Gazans' trust. It appears to have wantonly deployed its forces in civilian areas during the fighting with Israel (to a greater degree than the considerable extent that the physical terrain and crowded conditions of Gaza made inevitable), and it has carried out beatings and executions of political enemies during and after the war. Hamas' well-documented attempts to steal aid from UNRWA nearly cut off the one lifeline for humanitarian assistance that the people of Gaza have left.

Hamas' position is not strong, and recent polls indicate that, while its profile remains high in the Arab world at large, in Gaza, support is at a low point. There may indeed be a way to administer the crossings without benefiting the Palestinian organization.

However, even if there is not, the fact that the US has chosen to vigorously pursue this approach is further evidence of real change from the Obama administration. Its stated eagerness to open a dialogue with Syria, and its slow pace in appointing an envoy to Iran further underline the depth of this change.

The Blank Cheque Has Bounced

Despite this change in policy direction, it is important to recognize that Israel isstill the American government's most valued ally in the Middle East. It is seen by the Obama administration as the closest friend the US has in the region, and it will remain that way on the President's final day in office.

What has taken hold in Washington is the clarity that only a party outside of a conflict can have. It is the view of what is truly in the best interest of both Israel and America. It is an understanding that giving Israel a blank cheque to decide its own course is unwise, especially when that course is subject to the volatile emotions of a populace in long-term conflict and a political system that is fractured and broken.

Martin Indyk, former US ambassador to Israel and founder ofthe pro-Israel think tank the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, stated after Obama's electoral victory that the "era of the blank cheque is over." This change is not due to decreased sympathy for Israel. On the contrary, it is precisely because of such sentiments, combined with a sober analysis of Israeli needs, that the Obama administration is embarking on this course. And it's also why it may very well succeed.

The rightward shift in Israel is a major obstacle. But Israel -- even Benjamin Netanyahu-- has already demonstrated that it understands that this is a new America it's dealing with. The question of how effective this strategy will be will come down to how well the Obama administration can deal with the backlash from so-called "pro-Israel" forces, who do not understand how much harm they are doing to the Jewish state, with their focus on protecting the settlements and defending other Israeli policy excesses.

Part of that equation will be measured by Obama's willingness to stay the course. But part will also come from the efforts of pro-Israel, pro-peace groups whose task it will be to counter two opposing forces. One is the supporters of the status quo, such as AIPAC, and more radical US organizations, such as the Zionist Organization of America. The other is the radical left who will follow Chomsky's lead and insist that until the US adopts an unrealistic and ineffective posture of withdrawing its support (particularly military aid) for Israel, nothing will change.

Moderate US peace organizations must demonstrate that a clear American stance that supports Israel's ability to defend itself, insists on an end to the settlement enterprise, and that gives Palestinians a real chance to build their society is a politically viable and effective position. Though liberal activists and pundits alike have been making this point for years, this is the first time since the beginning of the Oslo era where there has been such a serious chance to actually follow through. If they are effective, Obama's diplomacy stands a serious chance of succeeding.

Note: This piece and its companion, to be published next week, were written from notes taken while on a Birthright trip that spanned the end of December, 2008 and the beginning of January, 2009. Though written in the present tense, they are not, strictly speaking, journals or diaries. They were all written with the benefit of hindsight.

 

Pre-Gaming

"If it is now asked, 'Do we presently live in an enlightened age?' the answer is, 'No, but we do live in an age of enlightenment.' As matters now stand, a great deal is still lacking in order for men as a whole to be, or even to put themselves into a position to be able without external guidance to apply understanding confidently to religious issues. But we do have clear indications that the way is now being opened for men to proceed freely in this direction and that the obstacles to general enlightenment--to their release from their self-imposed immaturity--are gradually diminishing. In this regard, this age is the age of enlightenment, the century of Frederick." - Immanuel Kant, 1784

 

My brother and I wake up to the news that 155 Palestinians are dead in Gaza, killed by Israeli missiles after a barrage of Hamas rockets had fallen on Israeli cities. We finish packing anyway and head to JFK with the assumption that the trip will be canceled, that Israel is only days away from another war. We show up four hours early, as instructed. There are a number of groups milling about, and it takes a few minutes to find ours. I have left most of the planning to my brother and haven't even bothered checking on the details once the trip was set. As we approach, the group leader NP's hat and flowing beard rise monolithic above the group of early-twenties-ish heads. Their faces shaved and cheerful, bordering on euphoric, they grab name tags from him as he describes a record-producer friend of his (a real catch) to a tall, eminently marriageable blond. I panic.

What do I know about the people who were to shepherd me through Israel? You hear horror stories. Interminable red-faced Zionist harangues, thinly-veiled meat-markets and marriage-orgies, cult-like protein deprivation, and so on. I'm a casual atheist raised Jewish and I have visions of an extremely awkward 10 days of Masada re-enactments, forced bar mitzvahs, and the great M.D./J.D. hunt. Looking at the name tags, I see Goldstein, Wasserman, and so on, and then I remember that Hebrew school was yet another circle of middle school's Inferno, not to mention the last time I had to be social with this many Jews.

The flashbacks catch me off guard. Even though I'm in my mid-twenties, working on a doctorate in American literature, teaching at a very respectable college, I suddenly feel withdrawn, cynical, beleaguered, stand-offish, ugly, ignorant. I have reverted to being the under-developed skeletal soul that I spent a decade outgrowing. Still, I give my name, take my tag, and drag my ugly duffel bag to ticketing.

* * *

Birthright (Taglit in Hebrew) is a no-brainer. A (more or less) free trip to Israel offered to every Jew between the ages of 18 and 26, courtesy of a few rich American Zionists and the Israeli Government, it's designed to connect young Jews to Israel. Who wouldn't take a free trip, replete with free hotels and meals, to another country? This temptation is the founding assumption: even non-believers, even those who lack sympathy with Israel, will find it hard to turn down the offer. Birthright itself is actually an umbrella encompassing several varieties of trip run by several varieties of facilitators. All of them take Zionism as their central tenet, but some are more religious than others. As I stand next to my brother in the ticketing line, I finally wonder about the precise mechanics that led him, a more religious Jew than I, to choose this trip out of the many offered. Could this be a discreet ploy on his part to stir up whatever cooling embers of belief I have left? It's a long line and I'm looking at him sideways the whole way.

We pass through security and head to the gate. I drift in to the comforts and rituals of pre-flight: listlessly half-reading a novel, compulsively buying and eating overpriced snacks, chewing half a pack of gum. I glance around and it's easy to see that, at 25 years, I must be one of the oldest on the trip. There's a kind of giddiness that permeates these kids - they're social, wandering up to each other, making introductions, exchanging the names of colleges, ages, and so on. Some of them are holding beers, and a couple are double-fisting, pre-gaming for what they assume will be a barely-remembered pub-crawl through the Holy Land. Nobody talks about the New York Times headlines staring out from the gift shops.

There are at least 100 people wearing Birthright name tags at the terminal. Those that haven't congealed into groups of fours and fives sit paired-off around the terminal. My eyes occasionally meet those of a few of the scattered fellow restless. We look away quickly, but they're not reading their novels either. A pair of very young-looking girls wearing University of Virginia sweatshirts talk to each other quietly as their heads swivel, and I imagine they see what I see: the first hour of a frat party about to go airborne. I don't approach them because I value reticence and skepticism in these situations - if we congeal, blend in and eventually begin the irregular orbits of these other groups, we risk falling into nondifferentiation. We risk the slipstream of sociability that smooths over rankles, lowers hackles: we risk acquiescence. This is surely what they want from us, and I imagine we sit silent and separate knowing that our near-total ignorance of each other is an ace-in-the-hole that we can play, but only if and when we want to.

Eventually they ask us to gather into the groups designated by the number on our name tag. I haven't put mine on. I dig it out of my carry-on, find my group, and my brother and I sit down with about 35 others in group 18. We look around at the faces that we're to spend the next 10 days with. A name game commences, the first of two we'll experience on our trip. We're to go around the group, say our name, where we're from, and our "favorite piece of furniture." Where I'm "from" is a tricky question and I answer it according to my mood. I tell them I live in New York and elicit audible admiration by choosing "hammock" (full disclosure: not actually my preferred furniture). After the name game ends we're handed The Rules. There aren't that many and only three strike me as having any consequences, but their implications are manifold:

1. No drinking alcohol anywhere other than the two bars and the winery we will visit as a group. You may not purchase alcohol anywhere outside the hotels. You may not get "drunk." "Drunk" is defined as any degree of consumption that results in vomiting, inappropriate behavior, or that prevents you from participating fully in group activities. Anybody who violates these conditions will be sent home immediately at their own expense.

2. You must stay with the group at all times. Anybody who intentionally wanders from the group or goes off on their own at any time will be sent home immediately at their own expense.

3. You must wear your name tag at all times.

As the bearded NP and fellow guide CM flesh out the implications of these rules and the reasoning behind them, the contours of the coming week begin to emerge. I'm nervous at this point: dreams of meandering walks through Tel Aviv have been replaced by disconcerting visions of field-trip protocols, buddy checks, and the reawakening of teen rebellion. Not that I'm pro-vomit, but we are, after all, adults, and the return of the impulse to sneer in the face of a camp counselor is a reminder of the essential pettiness of that gesture. And while the logistics of leading a group of foreigners through a country on the brink of war certainly demands vigilance, at the least, the name tag is a bit humiliating.

I half-heartedly introduce myself to a few people in the vicinity, and totter around the airport until we board the plane. After a ten-hour flight, another orientation (the first of innumerable times we're encouraged to stand in a circle, jump up and down, and hug people who are, at that point, total enigmas, save for their preferred furniture), and then a long bus ride from Tel Aviv to a hotel in the Golan Heights where we will stay for several days.

We're reminded about the name tags. I stuff mine deeper into my bag, and I have to remind myself that I am in Israel because it looks like the Arizona desert where I grew up. I am in Israel and I am going to see some shit. I hated being a child. I couldn't wait to grow up. I spend my first night in Israel staring at the ceiling.

The Lion

"There is absolutely no difference between a hard thing and a soft thing so long as they are not brought to the test." - Charles Sanders Peirce, 1878

After a night spent staring at the ceiling, we get up early and head to breakfast. Some circle the food suspiciously - most of it is clearly identifiable: hard-boiled eggs, bell peppers, cottage cheese, salad, French Toast, etc. A few bowls of yogurtish-looking material turn out not to be yogurt at all, but something else entirely. A few people, like myself, linger around the food because we dread having to find somewhere to sit. It's the first day of school, after all, and one defines oneself by the company one keeps. The best strategy is to get an empty spot and wait for people to congregate around you either by choice or necessity, but that's no longer an option. I take a chance and sit next to a few nice-looking people who turn out to be from New York. We talk about a lot of New Yorky things.

We're about ready to head to the bus and embark for Tzefat, one of Israel's holy cities, but, again, we're corralled into a circle in the hotel lobby and told by one of our well-meaning Israeli guides to play a name game. This one is "I Never," which is usually a kind of sexual party game, but here it’s shorn of its titillating overtones (I volunteer that I've never been to Hawaii). Eventually it's over.

The drive to Tzefat is heartening. As the bus winds its way up into the city (the highest in the region), we're told that it is the center for the study of Kabbalah, and that this will be one of the focuses of our visit there. The city is built almost uniformly of the same off-white stone, and besides the striking visual effect, it makes wandering through the city a disorienting experience. Because Tzefat is basically built on the side of a mountain, it's easy to get a basic orientation, but once you try to retrace your steps, the winding alleyways and streets have a habit of leading you back to your starting point.

Tzefat is also home to an artist community of sorts. The relationship between Kabbalah and the artists seems pretty close, and we get a glimpse of it while visiting Avraham, who is basically an American hippie from Michigan who found Kabbalah through the writings of Aryeh Kaplan while in college. We're taken to Avraham, it seems, because, whether or not he actually gets high, he's a stoner. Instantly recognizable as the type who will wander into a house party and extemporize on the virtues of yoga or Reiki or Rumi or Phish to anyone willing to listen, Avraham is there to pitch Kabbalah to us. Most of this pitch consists of repeating how "amazingly, totally awesomely awesome" (verbatim, by the way) Kabbalah is, and of how it will totally change our perceptions about everything. The evidence is right before our eyes, apparently.

Just hours after our guides were warning us of the shallowness of the recent celebrity Kabbalah craze, we've been confronted with somebody who pushes Kabbalah like hits of ecstasy. No doubt Avraham means well, but I can't help but feel that what's on display here is a familiar blip in an extremely unfamiliar place. His Americanness and his particular genre of personality is on display for us, a vexed mirror that shows us traces of our culture in an ancient city thousands of miles away. Avraham's speech patterns, his broad smile and his way of ending every other sentence with "man," signal his alignment with some of our most cherished mass-cultural forms. Kabbalah does not come to us through Madonna's plastic spiritualism; rather it comes by way of Arlo Guthrie and Cheech and Chong.

We depart from Avraham’s studio and visit a series of cramped, ornately decorated synagogues, their art and pillars completely alien and terrifying. By the time we leave, it's raining. Tzefat is a spectacular place to be rained on, and so I'm a bit dismayed when we're pulled into a Chabad-run hostel in order to play another name game. This one lasts for well over an hour and takes the well-known form of "My name is [name] and I'm bringing [name of item that begins with the first letter of your name] to the picnic." I bring marmalade and, again, minds are blown. But really it's like hell, and I say so. After which I'm reminded that Jews don't believe in hell. And yet I feel I must be in hell. The Kabbalah has much to say about this.

We're eventually released back into the rain to eat. I have some amazing falafel and an even more amazing cigarette. We're supposed to be back on the bus in about a half hour to head up to a kibbutz on the Lebanon border. Someone forgets something back at the hostel and a few of us volunteer to go back and get it. This is when I get somewhat profoundly lost. Lacking all sense of direction in even the most familiar places, the mise en abyme of Tzefat's alleys sends me into a tailspin. We're able to get someone to show us where the hostel is, but finding the bus is problematic. In these circumstances, though, I begin to realize that getting lost is the only avenue to independence. Eventually, some kindly strangers point us sort of in the right direction and we clomp down a massive stone staircase to the bus. A guide meets us halfway and reminds us not to run, presumably because water makes things slippery.

We head up to the kibbutz and we're shown the series of barbed-wire fences that mark the border with Lebanon. The kibbutz occupies an important tactical position - it has the high ground that looks down over Lebanon, which allowed IDF troops to repel Hezbollah soldiers as they attempted to breach the border during the 2006 war. Apparently not a single one made it across. The dining hall of the kibbutz bears the scars of this tactical position - the building's facade is covered in divets made by shrapnel from the rockets that fell during the war. There is a hole in one of the front doors.

Once inside the building, we're introduced to Aryeh ("lion" in Hebrew), who helps run the kibbutz. Aryeh was born in America and decided to make Aliyah in the 60's rather than "waste” his life in the States any longer. He's been through four wars, and it shows. His face is deeply lined and never quite shifts into neutral. Either he speaks animatedly or stares with roving, wide-eyed intensity. He tells us that they plan to leave the façade unrepaired as a reminder of the war and what it cost to maintain the kibbutz. Aryeh's a bit schizophrenic, swinging from full-throated, bright-eyed laughter to a contemptuous sneer in a matter of seconds. He is also possessed of an unparalleled Zionist fervor. Most of what he says amounts to invectives against the world media for what he – and many people we speak to on our trip – perceives as entrenched anti-Israeli bias. "Read your history" he tells us, and launches into a detailed explanation of why only Jews have the right to control Israel, of how the world is saturated with anti-Semitism, and, implicitly, why we ought to abandon our superficial, petty lives in the States and move to Israel. Any Arabs you meet, even in the states, he says, are not, will not ever really be, your friends. They have agendas and they are tricky people, he warns.

Aryeh's arguments are impressive insofar as they trace continuities in ancient wars over the holy land up through the present day, insofar as they rationalize all of Israel's action against the Palestinian people as a necessary and commensurate retaliation against outrageous acts of aggression, and insofar as they are able to reframe the broader political landscape of the Middle East within an essentially messianic teleology. But everything he says is contingent on an undergirding Zionism. If one is a Zionist, then Aryeh's explanations provide a neat causal chain that leads to the present political situation. If one is not, then he has nothing worthwhile to say.

Aryeh is literally unable to think about the notion of moral complicity, of what the disparity between Israeli and Palestinian death tolls look like to someone who bears a certain skepticism towards the Zionist metanarrative. When someone asks him to try to think about the situation from a Palestinian's perspective, he blurts out "Why should I?" He wields an aphasic's resistance to abstraction in service of the motherland. It’s no surprise that this refusal to think hypothetically typifies a key tactic in many of the Zionist arguments we hear on our trip. And it's no surprise that nothing I hear on my trip is helping me think past a Palestinian death toll that mounted steadily throughout our stay. Without belief, this mode of argument comes to nothing.

* * *

Wet and cold, we shuffle out of the dining hall and toward the bus. My brother takes a picture of one the kibbutz's residents, who asks him to delete it: "Last time that happened, I ended up on YouTube and almost lost my Green Card." We head back to the hotel for a bit before our dinner and "night out" in nearby Tiberias.

At the restaurant we're plunked down at a table and an incongruous series of dishes appears before us: spaghetti, hummus, fried fish, salad, orange juice, pizza, eggplant, and so on. Gradually people drift to the bar at the back of the restaurant and lines of people stream back wielding shots. Dinner lasts about a half hour and we're walked over to Big Ben, the first bar we'll visit on the trip. Big Ben is located in the middle of a strip mall. It's a long, narrow affair modeled after the American version of an English pub.

It's also incredibly loud. "In Da Club" is pumping and the guides try to get people to step onto the dance platform and sing karaoke. My brother and I wander to a side room that's a bit quieter and settle down at a table with a handful of other people from the group. It turns out that many of these people will become friends of a sort as the trip goes on. I think of us as a small group of draft dodgers. The uncanniness of the setting seems to amp up the pints of Goldstar that I'm gulping, but I retain brief snippets of conversation. Gossip, Heidegger's Nazism (a party favorite), Rate My Professor, Bushwick, Chicago, whether or not we're being indoctrinated (too early to tell), the nonchalant way one of our guides dances while holding his gun.

Eventually we're led back to the bus. We only have to pull over once for vomiting: not bad. So much for Rule #1. As we curl around the Sea of Galilee, I think about Aryeh again. If there is a time to contemplate the emptiness of American life it is now. We would carry that emptiness with us in a travel size tube, I suppose, if it weren't available for purchase. Aryeh and Big Ben become part of Birthright's dialectical logic: thesis (Aryeh), antithesis (Big Ben), synthesis (late-night half-drunken outlining of the Dialectics of Birthright). A half-coherent murmur drifts up from the back of the bus. Forced to find a position between the impending Gaza invasion's moral aporia and a night at Big Ben, I choose the bulwark of a temporary, recalcitrant silence.

As I reported last week, Fatima Hajaig, the Deputy Foreign Minister of South Africa, delivered a speech at a Palestine solidarity rally that could have been scripted by a sub-editor on Der Sturmer. “The control of America, just like the control of most Western countries, is in the hands of Jewish money,” she screamed, “and if Jewish money controls their country then you cannot expect anything else.”

Hajaig has now offered…what, exactly? A clarification? An apology? A restatement of her original remarks?

Whatever you want to call it, here it is:

I have just returned from a visit to Japan and learnt of the controversy surrounding some comments that I was purported to have made. I have reviewed the proceedings of the meeting and wish to say, to state the following: Throughout my life I have been opposed to apartheid and all forms of racism. It is this opposition that drove me into exile and to work with the African National Congress for decades. Along with all in the ANC and consistent with the recent resolutions adopted at our Polokwane conference in December 2007, I have long been cognisant of the immense suffering the Palestinians have experienced in the form of expulsions, collective punishment and massacres, of which the recent war in Gaza is but the latest example. It is to this suffering that I spoke at the meeting. I deplore the attempts of Zionists to justify policies that have worsened the crisis in the Middle East, in particular unmitigated state violence directed against unarmed civilians as much as I deplore indiscriminate attacks against Israeli unarmed civilians.

At a singular point in my talk, and entirely unrelated to any South African community, I conflated Zionist pressure with Jewish influence. I regret the inference made by some that I am anti-Jewish. I do not believe that the cause of the Palestinians is served by any anti-Jewish racism. As a member of the South African government and a committed member of the African National Congress, I subscribe to the values and principles of non-racism and condemn without equivocation all forms of racism, including antisemitism in all its manifestations and wherever it may occur.

To the extent that my statement may have caused hurt and pain, I offer an unequivocal apology for the pain it may have caused to the people of our country and the Jewish community in particular. I wish to reiterate that the major issue in relation to the Palestinian Israel conflict is the enormous suffering of the Palestinian people and the struggle for peace for all its’ people based on justice and security for Israelis and Palestinians alike.

As Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, I reaffirm the government’s commitment to engage all parties in Israel and Palestine to find an amicable and just resolution to the conflict in that region.

Let’s begin with the phrase, “some comments that I was purported to have made.” What’s implied here is that she may not have made these comments, or that what she said has somehow been distorted. One problem, though: she’s on record. Listen for yourselves here, about 50 seconds into the broadcast.

Then she adopts the moral high ground, with a reminder of her service to the ANC and her anger at “Zionists” who justify indiscriminate attacks upon civilians. Her point here is to say, in essence, do not judge me for what I may or may not have said, but rather by my political beliefs.

Then we get the killer line: “At a singular point in my talk…I conflated Zionist pressure with Jewish influence. I regret the inference made by some that I am anti-Jewish.” Check out the fascinating inversion going on here: instead of the word “Zionist” being used as deliberate code for “Jew,” the word “Jew” is being - accidentally? - used as code for “Zionist.”

Fatima Hajaig doesn’t want to explain how she flipped those around. And why should she? Antisemitic canards about Jews and money and power were, no doubt, furthest from her mind when she made this unfortunate slip of the tongue. Those of us who dwell on this point are playing the usual Zionist trick of changing the subject. As Hajaig’s defenders in South Africa’s Palestine Solidarity Alliance put it, what we have here is “no more than a sinister means of diverting public attention from the ever increasing reports war crimes, ethnic cleansing and a massive humanitarian crisis caused in Gaza by Israel.”

Yes, it’s very sinister. After all, Hajaig is clear that what she calls “anti-Jewish racism” does not serve the cause of the Palestinians, so how could she possibly be suspected of anything other than noble intentions? When Hajaig rails against Jewish financial influence, or when Hamas quotes from the Protocols, or when Torah scrolls are pulled from the ark of a synagogue in Caracas and defaced by a group of armed men, none of this is directed at Jews. Shame, really, on those who say otherwise.

Actually, one reason that Hajaig’s statement is so tortuous is that it goes on. And on. And on. Just when you think you can’t take any more, along comes this flourish: “To the extent that my statement may have caused hurt and pain, I offer an unequivocal apology for the pain it may have caused to the people of our country and the Jewish community in particular.” Ah, Fatima Hajaig. If she wasn’t South Africa’s Deputy Foreign Minister, she’d be the creative mastermind behind Benetton’s next advertising campaign. And teaching the world to sing at the same time.

Perhaps the one saving grace is that what we have, up to now, are Fatima Hajaig’s own words. But what of that final sentence, with the reference to an “amicable and just resolution to the conflict?” I can only think that such diplofluff was inserted by a South African Foreign Ministry bureaucrat who didn’t bother to read the preceding paragraphs.

To return to my original question: how are we to categorize this statement, other than by noting its astonishing stupidity? In my view, it is a statement of contempt, rather like the person who smashes a bottle over your head and then assures you, three weeks later, that they didn’t intend to hurt you.

If Hajaig is signaling that she now wants to move on, her supporters in South Africa already have. Boycotting Israel was a constantly reiterated demand at the rally where Hajaig underwent her Hitler moment. It now appears that Cosatu, South Africa’s trade union federation, plans to take that to the next stage this weekend, refusing to unload an Israeli merchant ship scheduled to arrive in Durban. (Anyone spot the irony there?)

As sure as night follows day, activities like these, in South Africa and elsewhere, are bound to be accompanied by more speeches fingering Jews as the problem. But as to whether the speakers will even be bothered to say, afterwards, that they really meant “Zionists,” all bets are off.

When you live in a place that is steeped in turmoil and chaos, where women are rarely in positions of autonomy (let alone power), it is rare and inspiring to hear the story of someone taking a chance even if it means risking their life on a daily basis for change.

Amira Hanania is one such individual. She is the only lead female journalist working for Ma'an News Agency, which is Palestine's only independent news source. Just as surprising is Amira's age, she is all of 26 years old. I found the video below on feministing.com. It was taken from a clip from the forthcomming documentary Live from Bethlehem. Despite the conflict on both sides, there is no denying that Amira Hanania is surely a feminist in the truest sense of the term.

 

On the 20th day of Israel’s invasion of Gaza, at the time of this article's writing, what is missing is the quality of rahamim -- of mercy, of feeling and knowing when enough is enough. Israel’s government no longer knows the difference between mercy and mercilessness.  Overwhelming power has been demonstrated; overwhelming damage has been done. However voices such as that of David Grossman, who early on called for a ceasefire, have been ignored. Grossman understood that part of the responsibility of power lies in realizing when not to use it, or how to cease using power before it damages those who abuse its possession.

 

Rahamim moderates power, understanding that social, political or military advantage is always temporary and that the task of peace-making lies ahead. Hamas represents a vile, reactionary ideology of religious ignorance compounded with racist xenophobia and exterminationist fervor. That is to say, Hamas looks much like its Jewish counterpart among large elements of the settlement movement in the West Bank. Both share nominal commitments to peaceful democratic process so long as it supports their own vision of national sanctification and obedience to divine commandments. Both view two peoples sharing one land as a contradiction whose resolution lies in conquest and expulsion, or at least subordination as a condition for permitting the other’s continued existence. Both represent the face of religious fascism and its call for individual submission to a divine national mission to be achieved by force of arms.

 

Before it became counter-productive, there was full initial justification for using armed force against the more than 8500 missiles Hamas fired into Israel in its militaristic pursuit of an Islamic republic. A government that did not act to secure the safety and well-being of its citizens would fail if it did not act decisively in such circumstances. Yet the same principle holds for Palestinians as for Israelis: how should their government – governments, at this point – attain their interest in peace and security in their own land?

 

Taking one step further, in order to remove these West Bank settlements and establish a Palestinian state, as eventually needs to happen, might we not wonder also how much force will be required to remove Israel’s colonists? That civil war scenario within Israel well may be closer than it appears at present. Despite the exterminationist fantasies of Hamas, it will be Jews fighting Jews to disestablish Israel’s mini-empire in the occupied territories. Will we use the same quantum of force against Jewish theo-fascists in Kedumim as against Palestinians in Gaza, and – equally applicable to both right- and left-wing Israelis – how will we live together if we do? What will be the resulting political ethos in Israel after such a conflict. Will it lead to the creation of a destabilizing new class of ex-settler pieds noirs as in the Fourth Republic? Will the decolonization of Israeli society be possible?

 

The violent logics of colonialism and anti-colonialism not only become visible, their invisible futures hang over current decision-making. Vast majorities in both Israel and Palestine who wish desperately to live in peace with each other nonetheless find themselves caught up in violent conflict because Israeli and Palestinian extremisms feed off each other. In the politics of Israeli-Palestinian antagonism, the middle and its compromises constitute the weakest position. Political power emerges from promises to deliver the hardest blows against the other antagonist. This dynamic has resulted in a lengthy deterioration of the Israeli-Palestinian contest towards ever-greater extremism. On the Israeli side, positions decried thirty years ago as racist Kahane-ism achieved cabinet-level advocacy through Yisrael Beitenu until it left the current government. On the Palestinian side, a relatively secular nationalist leadership has been challenged and supplanted by religious extremists in the role of leadership of the resistance. For negotiating with Israel Mahmoud Abbas regularly gets pilloried by rejectionists as a tool of Euro-american imperialism, a Zionist collaborator, and a Palestinian Uncle Tom.

 

How did this dynamic of deterioration seize hold of the Israeli and Palestinian bodies politic? Neve Gordon’s book Israel’s Occupation provides a first-rate discussion of the history of the post 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and enables readers to understand that as a history driven by colonial concepts and policies. Unlike some recent and shoddy scholarship, Gordon exhibits full command of original sources and a clear ability to interpret them, avoiding rhetorical hyperbole in doing so. In fact, his interpretive abilities concerning Israel’s policies to consolidate a new spatial regime in the occupied territories have provided us with as good an historical guide on the subject as has been written to date.

 

Part of the historiographic problem lies in that, as Gordon points out, no Israeli government has adopted formally any of the numerous settlement plans proposed, including the Allon Plan, the Weitz Plan, the Dayan Plan, the Sharon-Wachman Plan, and the Drobles Plan. “This vagueness concerning Israel’s territorial objectives” Gordon writes “was both instrumentally convenient and genuine, and can be seen as serving the temporary and arbitrary modalities of control.” The absence of any formally adopted plan (excluding the Jerusalem bloc) has meant that ideology and opportunity combined to change social topography. For example, a number of Jewish settlements have been created at or near the spots where Palestinian attacks killed settlers, a practice that seeks to reinforce Jewish presence through demonstrative memorialization. Inside pre-’67 Israel, planning and building are heavily regulated; in the territories, Israel’s planning invents a regulatory regime of immediate convenience, one driven by twin beliefs in security and divine sanctification.

 

As Gordon reviews the well-developed mechanisms of control – land appropriations, water appropriation, bypass roads, restrictions on Palestinian movement and development, surveillance, closures, settler violence, and more – a portrait emerges of a model anti-democracy. Most important, he relates this methodology to its effects on the Palestinian economic situation and its decline during the Oslo years of the 1990s. The pauperization of Palestinians during this period contributed heavily to the frustrations that erupted in the second intifada beginning in September 2000. What was once an exploitation of cheap Palestinian labor in the 1970s-80s transformed into economic marginalization by the current decade. An attempt to normalize the occupation along the lines of classic colonialism, Gordon argues correctly, switched to a separation principle in response to the second intifada. Palestinians have increasingly lived within fragmented, restricted, confined and limited spaces.

 

The narrative of deprivation and disintegration of Palestinian civil society that Gordon relates has at least two missing additional chapters, ones that are now in the process of being written. The first of these is the Palestinian one, a chapter whose narrative must include the continued solidification and manifestation of popular rage over the occupation and its denial of human and collective rights. A second chapter must deal with the pervasive damage that Israel has inflicted against its own national interests and social constitution through the perpetuation of the occupation. Defeating and purging the racism that enabled and empowered the occupation will take generations of education, if such an educational project can even be accomplished. Hoser rehamim – an absence of mercy – is in the end an attribute of a colonialist sense of superiority over fellow humans.

The Trade Union Congress is raising money for humanitarian aid in Gaza. Please note that the Palestine General Federation of Trade Unions and the International Transport Workers' Federation are not just independent entities--they are considered enemies by Hamas. Whatever your politics, there is no denying the human suffering in Gaza. Please consider donating money here.

All proceeds will be forwarded through the Palestine General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU) and the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) to support emergency humanitarian relief operations carried out by them in Gaza. All trade union relief operations are co-ordinated through Red Crescent in Jordan, Egypt and Gaza and focused on the identified needs of the people affected by the events. The first ITF-PGFTU humanitarian flight is due to leave for Gaza on 08 Jan 2009. The TUC supports an immediate ceasefire by both sides, and the pursuit of a political solution to the problems of the Middle East based on two states.

Thanks, appropriately enough, to Drink-Soaked Trotskyite Popinjays for War.

I'm holding a peace rally this Sunday. Here's the press release, should Jewcy readers in the metropolitan area wish to attend:

On Sunday, January 11, a coalition of New York-based Jewish and Zionist organizations will be holding a mass demonstration outside of the Israeli consulate on 42nd Street and 2nd Avenue in unreserved support of Israel’s military action in the Gaza Strip. AIPAC, the ADL and several other groups will join forces to proclaim in the name of American Jewry that it is Israel’s right and responsibility to decimate Hamas, even at the cost of hundreds of civilian Palestinian lives and thousands more injured.

Also on Sunday, a mass demonstration by pro-Palestinian activists will transpire in Times Square, where protesters will condemn Israel’s actions in Gaza and — in all probability — justify Hamas’ attacks on Israeli civilians as a legitimate response to Israel’s blockade of Gaza, its multiple violations of the 2008 ceasefire agreement, and the international community’s failure to adequately address these matters.

Both of these groups will likely demonize one another — the Jews decrying the Palestinians and the pro-Palestinian activists maligning the Jews — each engaging in gross displays of hatred, and advocating not in favor of peace, but in one side’s victory over the other.

We wish to propose a third way: A counterdemonstration to both the pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian demonstrations. That is, we wish to propose a pro-peace demonstration.

We invite individuals who favor an immediate ceasefire, oppose the occupation, support the two state solution, and who believe in the rights of both Israelis and Palestinians to live in peace and security to join in action against those who justify violence and hatred on either side, and against those who claim a monopoly on representing our voices in this matter.

We wish to see not just a contingent waving Israeli flags and another waving Palestinian flags, but also a contingent waving Israeli and Palestinian flags together, carrying peace signs and banners with slogans like, “Fighting for peace is like f*cking for virginity” and “Peace cannot be achieved militarily.”

We call on all organizations — Jewish, Arab and otherwise — which advocate in favor of peace, dialogue and coexistence to join in this action by encouraging their constituents to come out in full-force. (If your organization is interested in cosponsoring this event please be in contact.)

Those who truly believe in peace should and must make a showing and demonstrate that there are significant number of us who differ from both sides in their responses to this latest round of violence.

We have been granted permission by the NYPD to assemble south of the consulate on 2nd Avenue near 41st Street from 11AM-1PM. I hope to see you there.

If you visited Jewcy in the past couple of weeks, the sheer abundance of the word "Gaza" in our headlines probably gave you the impression we'd been bought out by Ted Turner.  Or, if you hide under a rock during the holiday season like yours truly, you were completely bewildered. I thought rounding up Jewcy's coverage of the recent disarray in the Middle East, along with some background info, would prove helpful for those who were left in the dust of the Israeli tanks breezing into Gaza.

Back in June, Egypt brokered an informal and rather nugatory six-month truce between Israel and Gaza.  Throughout the summer, Hamas continued firing rockets into southern Israel, and the country's border with Gaza was repeatedly violated. While Americans celebrated the election of their first African-American president, Israeli Defense Forces entered Gaza to destroy a tunnel used to traffic weapons, casting further doubt on the truce's efficacy. Cross-border raids and attacks expectedly increased, leading up to the decision to take the already comatose truce off life-support in late December.

A new, twenty-four hour truce was called, again at the behest of Egyptian mitigators, to put a damper on the rapidly intensifying exchange of fire. Yet, as soon as it expired, six rockets were fired into the Negev and clashes insued along the Israel-Gaza border fence.  This, along with a downpour of dozens of mortar shells launched by Gaza fighters on Christmas Eve, prompted a heavy Israeli offensive.

On December 27, Israel began a series of intense air strikes throughout the Gaza strip, killing upward of 200 and wounding countless others.  Strikes continued unabated the next day, as the international community began voicing its concern. Edmund Standing posted on what he sees as blatantly biased press coverage of the attacks. Meanwhile, Shira Danan gave a voice to those discomforted by Israel's course of action.

As attacks roared on, Jewcy correspondents Paul Widen and Haim Watzman both reported from Jerusalem. Widen updated us on the politics inside Israel while giving unique insight on how Israelis are responding to the offensive. Watzman is hosting his daughter's fellow students who have been evacuated from Sapir College, which is located near Sderot, a southern Israeli city within missle range of Gaza.

Jewcy editor Michael Weiss posted an essay on why Hamas is a political failure.  Meanwhile, Tel-Aviv declared the area around Gaza a "closed military zone," the Gazan death toll rose to over 350, and Jewcy received a letter from Beersheva.

By New Year's Eve, a solution had yet to be reached by the UN.  The Gazan death toll reached 400, while the Israeli death toll remained in the single digits. Gershom Gorenberg reported on the innocent children caught in the crossfire of a childish conflict, the effects of which, he says, Israel has not fully understood. 

Shira Danan gave us some first-hand accounts from Gaza on New Year's Day. Israel denied an EU truce requesting forty-eight hours for the delivery of humanitarian aid into Gaza.  Deaths in the embattled region brushed 420, while the Israeli body count broke ten.

On January 2, foreigners were ushered out of Gaza while Israeli officials begin planning a ground invasion. Andrew Bostom posted an essay displaying Hamas' abhorrence of the Jews.

On January 3, tanks rolled into Gaza to begin a ground offensive.  Neal Ungerleider reported from the "bubble" of Tel-Aviv.  Howard Schweber contemplated the value of pragmatism in the tango between Israel and Hamas.

By January 5, the EU decided it was about time to send an envoy to broker a solution.  French President Nicolas Sarkozy began a tour of the region in search of a long lost truce. Michael Weiss wrote a post pointing out that Hamas is not just a threat to the Jews, but to Islam and Palestinians as well.

The most recent news is all the more disparaging. By now, Gazans have buried over 500 of their compatriots.  Haim Watzman posted on the moral choices involved in the war on the very day Israeli attacks hit refugees outside a UN school. Hamas continues to launch rockets into Israel. The US has only recently begun voicing its concern for a ceasefire.  

I hope this post has helped catch you up on the exploding conflict in the Middle East. Let's hope there isn't much more to follow.

I have already tried to show how Hamas has failed the people of Palestine politically, and how even the most optimistic appraisal of the organization's supposed "pragmatism" has failed to pan out, even under exigent circumstances in which pragmatism should surely trump ideological purity. However, lest one come away with the narrow assumption that Hamas's theocratic fascism represents a direct long-term threat only to Jews, I invite you to consider the following speech made by Ahmad Bahr, the Acting Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council (and a Hamas member), on April 13, 2007. Coming as these words do from the political equivalent of Nancy Pelosi in Palestine, they should not be easily dismissed as mere rhetoric:

"You will be victorious on the face of this planet. You are the masters of the world on the face of this planet." Yes, [the Koran says that] "you will be victorious," but only "if you are believers." Allah willing, "you will be victorious," while America and Israel will be annihilated, Allah willing. I guarantee you that the power of belief and faith is greater than the power of America and Israel. They are cowards, as is said in the Book of Allah: "You shall find them the people most eager to protect their lives." They are cowards, who are eager for life, while we are eager for death for the sake of Allah. That is why America's nose was rubbed in the mud in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Somalia, and everywhere. America will be annihilated, while Islam will remain. The Muslims "will be victorious, if you are believers." Oh Muslims, I guarantee you that the power of Allah is greater than America. We saw to them that with the might of Allah, with the might of His Messenger, and with the power of Allah, we are stronger than America and Israel.

I tell you that we will protect the enterprise of the resistance, because the Zionist enemy understands only the language of force. It does not recognize peace or the agreements. It does not recognize anything, and it understands only the language of force. Our jihad-fighting Palestinian people salutes its brother, Sudan.

The Palestinian woman bids her son farewell, and says to him: "Son, go and don't be a coward. Go, and fight the Jews." He bids her farewell and carries out a martyrdom operation. What did this Palestinian woman say when she was asked for her opinion, after the martyrdom of her son? She said: "My son is my own flesh and blood. I love my son, but my love for Allah and His Messenger is greater than my love for my son." Yes, this is the message of the Palestinian woman, who was over 70 years old--Fatima al-Najjar. She was over 70 years old, but she blew herself up for the sake of Allah, bringing down many criminal Zionists.

Oh Allah, vanquish the Jews and their supporters. Oh Allah, vanquish the Americans and their supporters. Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them all, down to the very last one. Oh Allah, show them a day of darkness. Oh Allah, who sent His Book, the mover of the clouds, who defeated the enemies of the Prophet, defeat the Jews and the Americans, and bring us victory over them.

One has heard about the cult of death that underwrites Islamic attentats, and it would certainly not strike most Western ears as newsworthy that Hamas is a fundamentally anti-Semitic movement. But that it is openly dedicated to the "annihilation of America" should hit home with sympathizers and apologists, eager to invoke sinister and histrionic moral equivalences between the current Israeli incursion into Gaza and 9/11, and eager to view Hamas as pledged to little more than national "resistance," albeit draped in colorful religious garb. If anything, Hamas' anti-American sentiments reflect Iran's supervisory role as both the party's main financier and as its imperial guardian in an ideological war that extends well beyond the borders of the modern Levant. (For more on this subject, see Robert Kaplan's excellent new piece in the Atlantic.)

Continue reading...

The first thing to understand about what is going on in Gaza is that it is not the result of a sudden decision or an immediate provocation by one side or the other; this thing has been in the planning by both sides for months. It was only a question of when to trigger events.  Since both Israel and Hamas can always be relied upon to overreact to a provocation, thus each side has the ability to effectively schedule the others' overreactions (hence the metaphor of the tango, a form of dance consisting entirely of a series of carefully scheduled overreactions.)

At the beginning of last week, it seemed clear that this was a conflict by something like mutual agreement.  Both sides wanted to improve the terms of the existing truce, and both saw military conflict as a way to get there.  Israel had never been satisfied with the conduct of that truce:  no suicide bombings was a relief, but continuing (albeit much fewer and ineffectual) rocket attacks and above all continued weapons smuggling were intolerable.  Hamas, in turn, was infuriated by Israel's refusal to relax its siege of the territory -- imposed in retaliation for the election of a Hamas government -- despite the truce and despite Hamas' statements that came within a hair of formally recognizing Israel.  Despite these concessions to Israel's demands Hamas found itself governing a besieged and slowly starving population that was rapidly heading from crisis into something close to famine.  (The cynicism of Tzipi Livni's assertion in Paris that "there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza" was simply breathtaking, as is the hypocricy of the constant description of conditions in Southern Israel as "intolerable" while residents of Gaza are reduced to eating pet food.)  To make the case explicit, in December Hamas offered to extend the truce in return for opening border crossings, despite having allowed sporadic rocket and mortar fire into Southern Israel throughout the length of the truce. Israel responded by a raid to destroy a tunnel that they said was going to be used to attack Israelis. Hamas responded with a barrage of rockets. Israel initiated Operation Cast Lead.

Ha'Aretz investigations have shown the operation was in the planning stages for six months.  Israelis on the Right criticized the government for its inaction in this period, but the IDF was spending the time poring over photographic data from drones and satellites, pinpointing bases, weapons silos, camps, and the homes of officials; Hamas used that same period to make its own preparations including booby traps and IEDs (many of which appear to have been destroyed by Israel's air and artillery bombardments).  The final plan was presented to Barak on November 19, and approved by the Cabinet on December 19th, following which Livni flew to Cairo to brief the Egyptian government.  The timing on the Israeli side obviously involves considerations of upcoming Israeli elections -- both Livni and Barak have shot up in the polls over the past week -- and the last chance to act with the anything-goes free pass of the Bush administration.  The timing considerations on the Hamas side are less clear, but may well include a desire to create a certain set of facts on the ground for the new American President and Secretary of State.

Israel's preparations appeared to pay off handsomely during the air phase of the operation.  IDF data on Gaza are so complete that the IAF frequently calls houses up by cell phone and delivers ten minutes' warning, a maneuver called "roof knocking."  Targeted assassinations from the air, in addition, fuel suspicions of informers on the ground, but it is possible that they are simply the result of drone surveillance technology.  In the past, sometimes residents of targeted houses would take to the roof of the targeted house in defiance; sometimes the IAF pilots would not fire.  Such a warning appears to have been given in the case of Nizar Ghayan, who was killed along with his four wives and eleven children.  (Why did Ghayan not leave his house?  Maybe he wanted martyrdom -- he had previously sent his son on a suicide bombing mission that killed two Israelis -- or maybe it is just not possible to get 16 people out of a house in ten minutes and he did not want to choose.)

As a result of Israel's careful preparations and relatively discriminate air attacks, the operation seemed to be working out to Israel's advantage to an almost startling degree.  Most importantly, an emergency meeting of Arab League foreign ministers in Cairo produced statements by Arab governments that essentially blamed Hamas. Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al Faisal told the session "this terrible massacre would not have happened if the Palestinian people was standing united behind one leadership," and Arab League Secretary General Amr Musa focused on the "unacceptable" disputes within Palestinian ranks and the Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul  Gheit declared that Hamas had "given Israel an excuse" and declared that rocket fire into Israel must stop as a condition of any truce deal as Mubarak steadfastly ruled out opening the Rafah crossing until it is in the control of the Palestinian Authority and international monitors, Cairo police clashed with demonstrators, and 40 Muslim Brotherhood leaders were arrested.  

Meanwhile, while Syria and Iran issues the expected denunciations, Hezbollah has thus far shown no interest in launching attacks from the North.  In Jordan -- with its 3 million Palestinians still in giant refugee camps --  King Abdullah stated that "nothing justifies the world's failure to hold Israel back" and Queen Raina spoke of a "crime against human dignity,"  But Jordanian responses, both government and private, have been focused on providing humanitarian relief, not on threatening to cut off ties with Israel.  Through the weekend protests in Amman were peaceful and relatively small (the biggest saw 24,000 people in the streets near the foreign embassies and was entirely law-abiding). 

Even Hamas' leadership seemed to be of two minds.  On January 1, on the same day that Ismail Haniyeh said there could be no truce until the siege of Gaza was lifted, senior Hamas official Ayman Taha told reporters that "as soon as we receive a proposal, we will study it.  We support any initiative that would end the aggression and lift the siege."  On Dec. 31st exiled Hamas leader Khaled Mishaal spoke to Russia's foreign minister of "readiness to cease armed confrontation but on condition of the lifting of the blockade of Gaza," according to a statement by the Russian Foreign Ministry. On Sunday, Jan. 4th he went even further, telling the Iz al-Din al-Qassam Web site that he was prepared not only for a "cessation of aggression" -- he proposed going back to the arrangement at the Rafah crrossing as of 2005 prior to Hamas' electoral victory, in which the crossing would be managed jointly by Egypt, the European Union, the Palestinian Authority presidency and Hamas.

Thus at the end of the second or even the third day of air strikes, had Israel pulled back it would have seemed to be in an excellent position to seek truce terms more to its liking, with Arab support for international monitors and an end to weapons smuggling and an increased role for the PA at the crossings.  In return, perhaps, Israel would have considered lifting the siege of Ghetto Gaza.  As odd as it may sound, the result of the air attacks might have been something like a win-win on the ground, a boost for the PA, and a step toward new levels of cooperation with moderate  Arab governments.

Instead Israel launched a ground offensive that Defense Minister Barak promises will be "neither short nor easy."  The question now is, what is Israel after, and what is its exit strategy?  At the outset of the air campaign, government representatives were eager to assure the world that the only goal was a cessation of rocket attacks.  IDF Brig. Gen. Mike Herzog told reporters that Israel had no intent to topple Hamas, and the IDF's recommendation (again, as reported in Ha'Aretz) was that "more pressure . . . be put on Hamas to make it agree to a long-term cease-fire under conditions more favorable to Israel" by an intensive but brief incursion.  But even before Saturday the tone from the civilian leadership was different. It is clear that the Israeli leadership has no intention of ordering a cessation of operations until its goals are met, and that its goals go far beyond a cessation of rocket attacks and weapons smuggling.  Comments by Olmert, Barak, and Livni all support this conclusion. 

Livni's comments to journalists on December 28th in Sderot were particularly interesting.  For one thing, she declared that "this is a zero sum game . . . not between Israel and Hamas, this is a zero sum game between the extremists and the moderates, between Hamas and Fatah, between Abu Mazen and Haniyeh."  In other words, there is no such thing as a win-win outcome by definition.  In addition, she declared that "Hamas is not legitimate and Hamas control of the Gaza Strip is not legitimate" and called on the international community to avoid "legitimating" Hamas. The key, Livni insisted, is that the Annapolis approach represents an attempt to reach out to "pragmatists."  "We decided to initiate the Annapolis process according to a strategy that was agreed with the international community and with the pragmatic part of the Palestinian Authority. The idea was to work with the moderates, to work with the pragmatic leadership of the Palestinian Authority in order to reach a peace treaty."  Friday evening Vice Premier Haim Ramon told Israeli TV that "we need . . . to reach a situation in which we do not allow Hamas to govern."

So there seem to be two distinct sets of goals at work, here:  1) to end the rocket attacks and weapons smuggling and bring international monitors and the PA into the process of monitoring truce terms; and 2) to bring down Hamas and strengthen the PA and "pragmatic" elements in Arab states everywhere.  The problem is that these goals are incommensurate, and the strategies for pursuing one contradict the strategies for pursuing the other.  The first set of goals are pragmatic, concrete, immediate, and promise to lessen tensions and improve security.  The second set of goals are ideological, global, and promise endless war until final and complete victory.  Which is Israel pursuing?  With the commencement of the ground operation, there is very grave reason to fear that the "pragmatism" that Livni praises on the part of Abbas is not part of her own strategic vocabulary.

What exactly would this mean for military operations over the next week?  Think about those six months of careful preparations.  When an IDF spokesperson says "we have a long list of targets," one has to wonder what these "targets" comprise; names of individuals?  is the whole ground offensive an enormous murder raid to take out the Hamas leadership?  Put it this way:  supposing it wanted to (it doesn't), how could Hamas "surrender" at this point?  By offering up the dead bodies of every elected official?  That's how sieges used to end.  The siege had already produced a situation in which electricity, heat, water, food, electricity and medicine were only intermittently available; does Israel contemplate a complete and final destruction of Gaza's infrastructure?  The creation of its own little African-style famine right here on the shores of the Mediterranean, Somalia-style, complete with Al Qaeda infiltration and new homegrown groups?  American diplomatic personnel with whom I spoke expressed concern about "PIJ" -- that's "Palestinian Islamic Jihad" -- as the new wild card, joining the Al Qassam Brigades who were previously responsible for the bulk of the most devastating suicide bombing attacks against Israel.  There are more dangerous creatures than Hamas out there.

Weakening Hamas makes sense if it means strengthening the PA --  the Annapolis model -- and bringing Arab states into the process in a postive way.  But "weakening Hamas" by producing mass civilian casualties and an overwhelming humanitarian catastrophe, that is something else. The attacks from the air, although savage, were relatively contained and focused.  By contrast, the use of artillery and ground forces is not.  The goal of truce terms that would put an end to weapons smuggling and involve international monitors, accompanied by the promise of a lifting of the siege of Ghetto Gaza, was one that aroused considerable support within the Arab world.  A campaign to exterminate Hamas at the cost of thousands of civilian deaths is not.  There is a real and immediate danger that Israel will snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, by radicalizing the population of Gaza even further, depriving pragmatic Arab government of maneuvering room, making it impossible for Abbas and the PA to resume control in Gaza, and finally turning even American public opinion against the program of endless war.

Israel seems to believe that it can calculate these things to a nicety; this much horror will be tolerated, this much we can get away with and still have someone to negotiate with afterwards.  But that is a dangerous calculation.  Already Mubarak has joined Abdullah and Abbas in condemning the ground assault, and Abbas has released hundreds of Hamas prisoners from PA jails.  Does Livni really believe that there are no limits to what Mubarak can tolerate?  (Were those limits, perhaps, spelled out in their meeting in Cairo just before operations began?  Mubarrak, too, is playing a dangerous game.)  Hamas is not beloved among Arab governments or among Palestinians; but how long can any of leader in the Arab world hang on to a moderate position in the face of endlessly broadcast video clips of dead children?

Israel's leaders have apparently decided that stopping the rocket attacks and the weapons smuggling is not so important after all; what is much more important is inflicting misery on Gaza and showing the world that Hamas must never have a place in the discussion.  Actually securing truce terms favorable to Israel's security would have required talking with Hamas and international cooperation, which would have bestowed that dreaded legitimacy.  Much better to keep shooting and count on Israel being the last one standing at the end.  As for pragmatism?  Apparently it's overrated.

During wartime, the cognitive dissonance in Israel is overwhelming.

I'm typing this piece from the safety and comfort of Tel Aviv, where I went after my neighborhood was struck by rockets. There's a bloody and terrible war happening an hour's drive from here. 19 year olds who would be attending keggers in America are in gunfights with Hamas militants. Little kids are being blown to bits because their next door neighbor launched rockets at Israel a few months ago. There is madness, stupidity, heroism and a million other things besides happening here.

But right now I'm staying in a comfortable neighborhood in north Tel Aviv that reminds me of the Upper East Side back in New York. There are lots of ladies who lunch and a strip of coffee shops a few blocks down where you can get a decent cappucino and pain au chocolat.

I am bouncing between the houses of distant relatives and friends because of the war. These days, I'm normally an MA student in Middle East Studies at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheva. However, Beersheva came under rocket attack on December 30 and 31. One Grad rocket landed less than 700 meters from my house on early Wednesday morning. I ran in midsleep to a bomb shelter and heard the explosion as clear as day through the fortified concrete.

As a result, the IDF's Homefront Command has indefinitely cancelled classes at Ben-Gurion University and shut down almost all commerce in the cities surrounding Gaza.

I returned yesterday to Beersheva yesterday to pick up some personal effects. I stumbled onto a ghost town. Workplaces that don't have rocket shelters are closed. Stores that aren't fortified are closed. Schools are closed. Restaurants are closed. A few hardy kiosks, greengrocers and cafes that run day-by-day are remaining open and risking government fines. Nothing but stray cats, retirees chain-smoking outside their shelters and little kids sneaking away from their moms to throw rocks at the stray cats. Too depressing, too zombie movie.

The only hopping place in Beersheva right now is the Soroka Hospital, the Negev's largest medical facility. Though Beersheva has been lucky enough to escape rocket fire during the past few days, other cities haven't had that blessing. Ashkelon, Ashdod and the poor citizens of Sderot have been under constant rocket attack since the cease fire between Israel and Hamas broke down a few weeks ago.

Although both Ashkelon and Ashdod have hospitals, the critically injured are bought to Soroka. Helicopters land at Soroka carrying poor bastards whose arms and legs were shot full of shrapnel. There are Bedouins from the desert whose villages lack air raid sirens and cannot hear the warnings. There are manual laborers who work outdoors and don't have access to shelters. And then there are just the people who can't run quickly or who found their shelters padlocked shut by a neglectful city government.

Hell, there are even a bunch of Gaza civillians who were medivac-ed out of the war-sieged territory for treatment here.

Coming to Beersheva by train, almost all of the other passengers were reservists called up to duty. There was one kid who looked like one of my Russian friends from high school. There was a cute girl with a hipster-ish haircut reading Israeli gossip magazines while wearing a shoulder tag for an elite intelligence unit. There was a reservist with an iPhone and designer glasses who looked for all the world like a New York blogger. On the ride down to the Negev, we could see black helicopters flying over the Occupied Territories looking for any escalation of the situation there. Radio attachments from cell phones were playing the latest news from Gaza. I tried to use my limited knowledge of Hebrew to figure out what was happening while talking in broken English to the reservist in the next row.

I came back to Tel Aviv to hear of stone-throwings by Palestinians in Jerusalem and the West Bank and of more deaths in Gaza. Meanwhile, I'm sitting at a bar, drinking imported beer and eating a Cubano while talking about Barack Obama and the IDF with the bartender in bad Hebrew.

And there's a war an hour away, but everyone's ignoring it here in the "Tel Aviv bubble."

Last week I received a press release from Physicians for Human Rights-Israel about a sharp increase in child burn victims in the Gaza Strip. This was before the Israeli air campaign began. After what's happened in the last couple of days, PHR's email now seems like a message from another historical era, a time so calm that it was a major concern that

"In December alone, 16 Palestinians were hospitalized who were burned while trying to heat their homes. Most of the cases reported to the NGO were of children playing with fire, following attempts to light bonfires for heating and cooking and lighting candles in order to illuminate homes."

The fires, that is, were the result of the siege of Gaza, which included fuel shortages and power outages. The head of the burn unit at Shifa Hospital in Gaza reported that his unit was collapsing under the strain. I can only guess that Dr. Nafed Abu Shaaban is having a much harder time this week.

Nonetheless, the problem of kids getting burned can help to understand why all of Gaza and southern Israel are in flames at the moment.

Israelis don't see the effects of the siege in Gaza, or the way it was maintained during the six-month "calm." Israeli journalists have a far easier time covering Mumbai than covering Gaza. What Israelis saw during the "calm" were Palestinian violations. Israel claimed that Hamas wasn't keeping the agreement. That was true. It was also true that the Israeli government continued hoping, against all evidence, that the siege would provoke popular uprising against Hamas rule. Hamas regarded the calm as a failure in relieving siege conditions.

When the six months ended, Hamas decided that those Israelis would only understand force. To a man with a hammer, as the saying goes, everything looks like a nail - especially to an angry man. With a little careful thinking, anyone on the Hamas side could have figured out that no Israeli politician wanted to agree to reduce the siege in response to rocket fire. That would be giving in.

To continue reading, please visit South Jerusalem.

Imagine writing seriously about French intellectual history without speaking French. Consider publishing books on Mayan indigenous cultures without knowing their languages. The pretense of knowledge and political bankruptcy would be self-evident. Yet this sort of intellectual masquerade occurs much too often in contemporary scholarship of the Middle East.

Scholars should be able to read or speak the languages of the human cultures they engage. Doing historical or cultural research in translation, or teaching from translated materials one cannot read, is to live within epistemological close confinement. Language-learning is the key to breaking through such confinement, and Middle East scholarship especially needs cross-cultural and multi-linguistic work if it is to function as a bridge between the multiple isolations of the region’s divergent nationalisms and their narratives. It cannot be too strongly emphasized that it is critical for scholar-teachers to set an example and learn the languages of the cultures, peoples, and governments they study and write about.

Where scholars cannot select, read, and analyze primary sources in their original language, then their work is hopeless and can only be dismissed. Among scholars of the Middle East, from whatever political perspective they claim, such language-deficient authors represent repetition, albeit from a different source, of those non-Arabic-speaking Arabists who were the instruments of European colonialism. Scholars who do command the necessary languages to address the Arab-Israeli conflict have a major advantage. One thinks of Anton Shammas, fluent in both Arabic and Hebrew, and others who are able to argue their views articulately from within a full and commanding cultural knowledge.

Apologetic defense of a non-language-based standard of historical or cultural scholarship often seems no more than an excuse for fundamental antagonism and social avoidance, not any serious engagement. A Middle East scholar at an Ivy League institution wrote me an e-mail message along these lines, claiming that that "many of the primary documents of Israeli history have always been composed in European languages; and a substantial number of Israel's citizens have always written and expressed themselves primarily in other languages, including English, French and Arabic."

Having done research in various Israeli archives, both government and private, I am profoundly aware of precisely the opposite. The vast bulk of those documents, almost to their entirety, is in Hebrew: they have never been translated into any other language. It says a great deal about a fundamental misunderstanding of the pre-state Yishuv or Israeli society that a scholar would even consider asserting that many of the primary political, legal, or social documents of Israeli society have been composed in European languages. That this sort of error passes for commonplace knowledge is perhaps an expression of an ideological and anti-historical predisposition to view Israeli society as thoroughly European, another profound and too-frequent error.

Let’s turn to Jeremy Salt’s The Unmaking of the Middle East: A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press) as an example of the dangers of language-deficient scholarship. Salt, based at Bilkent University in Ankara, whose major previous work concerns Armenian history, has produced this volume without evident knowledge of either Arabic or Hebrew. His lengthy bibliography contains only English-language sources (almost no translations from regional languages among them), mostly published in London or New York, as if the Middle East required Euro-American publishers for self-understanding. Salt’s historiographic method lies in weaving a skein of selected secondary sources that suit his theses, primary sources be damned.

As if this were insufficiently problematic, the book has quite limited purchase on its expansive title, which promises an address to “the Middle East” and “Arab lands”. The volume begins with brief reviews of well-known histories of the end of Ottoman rule; the fate of the Armenians; and developments in Egypt, Syria and Iraq after World War I. The middle two-thirds of the book deal entirely with a history of Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab conflicts, after which it explores the Bush wars before concluding with another address to the current state of the Israeli-Palestinian situation.

This makes for a highly unbalanced book, one that treats Israel and Palestine while neglecting the remainder of the region. Entire histories of Western imperialism and economic exploitation disappear behind this focus. When formative diplomatic events such as the Sykes-Picot Agreement evaporate in the briefest of references, or the Arabian peninsula as a whole remains nearly excluded from discussion as a site of petro-imperialism, then the scope of absences renders the book unusable even as a general history. Since central drives of imperialism involve capital, labor and the profitability of colonial enterprises, it seems near-inexplicable that Salt includes almost no address to these issues – and to class – throughout the volume.

On the real topic of this book, Israel and Palestine, Salt displays inexpert scholarship-from-a-distance. His lack of cultural and political knowledge sprinkles the text with errors such as where he identifies the killer-rabbi, Moshe Levinger, as “ultraorthodox”; in fact, Levinger emerged from the national-religious stream of the Mercaz Ha’rav yeshiva and such an error indicates Salt does not understand basic social differences. Salt’s problem is not simply misinformation, but persistent ideological blinders that disable his historiography. One would never know from his account of the events of 1948 that the Arab Legion was officered, trained and equipped by the British, as completely realized a manifestation of Western imperialism as existed in the Middle East.

Salt claims regarding 1948 that “The image of massive Arab armies descending on Palestine from all directions was a lie”; provides a wildly inaccurate account of the balance of forces at the beginning of the war; and describes ensuing events as one-sided conquest. Again, an uninformed reader would never know of southern kibbutzim overrun by the Egyptian army in bloody fighting, the Etzion massacre, the fall of the Jewish quarter in Jerusalem’s old city, or that the Iraqi army held the San Simon neighborhood of Jerusalem while the Egyptians held Bethlehem. This decisive period of conflict between Arab and Israeli forces was an immensely hard-fought and costly battle for all sides, not the rout that Salt describes.

The same pattern of misleading history and absent consideration evidences itself elsewhere in The Unmaking of the Middle East, but there is little point in paying it more attention. Some books are masterful engagements with the communities and conflicts of the Middle East – for excellent treatments of Israel’s mini-empire in the Palestinian territories, see any book by Amira Hass or Eyal Weizman’s recent Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation – and there are books that will fade quickly and unremembered.

This weak effort lodges in the latter category. One formative difference separating out memorable scholarship lies in a capacity to speak local languages, to engage in primary research, and contribute new perspectives. This is not simply a matter of competent cultural knowledge, but rather it reflects a democratic ethos. A democratic scholarship, one that witnesses against class, racism, colonialism and imperialism, listens to the voices of peoples and stories told by the disenfranchised.

all images from Maya Escobar's piece you and your friends vol 1

Growing up in Argentina, my girlfriend Gabriela and her sister Paola cherished ice-cream day. On that day they got to eat as much ice-cream as they could. Only there was a catch. Gabriela’s mother employed the ice cream rule: during ice-cream time, the rule was that one sibling would decide how much ice-cream would go into each bowl, while the other had the right to first pick. That way, if one of the sibling had distributed the ice-cream unevenly, the other benefited. It was an ingenious system designed for fairness.

Now, what if we could employ the ice-cream rule to the Arab-Israeli conflict? Imagine the following: President Obama meets with Abbas and Livni/Netanyahu. He gives the latter a map and says, “Go ahead, two states for two people. You draw the boundaries, you choose a capital, and you decide where people have a right to reside. There will be no opposition or interference from Abbas. However, once you finish, it is up to Abbas alone to choose which side to take.”

Is there any question as to how the conflict would be resolved? Half a bowl of ice-cream for Abbas and half for Livni. Of course, such an approach would seemingly not be in Israel’s immediate interest since she possesses more than half of historic Palestine (the much more developed side as well). However, as has become clear to many across the Israeli political spectrum, if in the immediate future there is no viable solution to the Palestinian-Zionist conflict, Israel's territorial advantage (along with its demographic baggage) will be her undoing.

Thinking over a divided land, I am reminded of the story of King Solomon and the baby. As is told, when two prostitutes came to the king with conflicting claims over ownership of a baby, he adjudicated with a stratagem: "Cut the live child in two", he said, "and give half to one and half to the other." Realizing what is at stake, the real mother came forth and pleaded with the king to give the child to the other woman, "only don't kill the baby." The other woman said, “Cut it in two.” Hearing this, the king immediately returned the child to its rightful mother.

Now it is not out-of-bounds to use this story to champion the vision of a one-state solution, or Greater Israel or Greater Palestine. If the baby is a symbol for the land, then the true owner of the land will not compromise by dividing it into parts. On some kind of mystical level, the land needs to be indivisible and whole. One people, one land / two people, one land. Either way, one land it must remain.

But there is another reading of the story that could be helpful. It seems to me that the moral of the story is that real and unconditional love sometimes means letting go of something that is of ultimate concern. For the child to survive, the mother had to let go of her claims to him. Likewise, if the people of Israel and Palestine love their land as much as they say they do, then they need to let go of their vision of what Palestine and Israel ought to be - not let go of a vision of Palestine or Israel per say, just the one that is keeping them from realizing peace. Israelis and Palestinians are attached to myths (e.g. undivided Jerusalem, right of return) that given the reality on the ground serve no good. A new schema is in order, one that is based on genuine compromise and fairness, not on the unreasonable and exclusive claims of religion and history.

Jonathan Garfinkel, author of Ambivalence: Adventures in Israel and Palestine, spent the past week guest-blogging on Jewcy from his temporary, not-so-humble abode at the Schloss Solitude, a castle in near Stuttgart, Germany.  Despite a brief interlude in which he contemplated meeting with extraterrestrial lifeforms, Garfinkel spent most of the week talking about his experience living among artists in Germany.  He began with an explanation of his play, House of Many Tongues, which just opened and is derived from the book.  Then he gave us the low-down on present-day Germany, followed by a tantalizingly detailed narrative that would make any tourist skip the schnitzel and head straight for the schvitz.  Finally, Garfinkel reminded us about the dark side of German history, and how it has left its mark on all those who somehow became entangled with it.  Want more from Jonathan Garfinkel?  What are you waiting for?!  Go get his book!

Setting a good exampleI'm standing on the subway platform at Broadway/Lafayette with my friend Abe, a Lebanese guy who has a HUGE schnozolla, which makes me look positively Arayan by comparison.

This Hasidic guy with the hat, the beard, the robes, the whole deal is looking us over.  Back and forth between Abe and me.  I can't figure out what this dude is up to.

Slowly, he starts to walk over to us, "Uh-oh," I think, "we're going to be converted or something."

Now he's right in front of us and is looking back and forth at both of us.  Finally he makes the decision to speak to Abe, "Which train do I take to Williamsburg?"

I realized that the whole stare down was that he wanted to make sure that he was speaking to a Jew and not some unholy outsider.  Well, he made the wrong choice.  He was speaking to an ARAB and when he got home I'm sure he was going to get one big spanking.  I started laughing and thinking, "Yo, bro, I'm the Jew here, talk to me..."

All this to say that every day I am dismayed by the ongoing subtle and not so subtle war between Arabs and Jews.  This has been bothering me for most of my life.  For some reason I know as many Arabs as I do Jews, actually maybe more, and no one has ever tried to blow me up--or whatever happens between these two peoples.  Yes we talk, yes we disagree, but we are closer than many of my American colleagues.  The sad thing is that we are more similar than we are dissimilar.

I wish we could fix this problem.  It would change the tenor of the world.  Yes, I know that it is easy to heap all the blame on one side, and yes sometimes I do that but that tactic hasn't worked and isn't going to work.  I'm not saying this to be all lovey-dovey.  I actually have no solution or suggestions other than to work on this one-on-one. 

In many ways I feel so bad for the Palestinians, not because of the so-called iron hand of the ‘oppressors' but because of how they are duped by their own people.  The vast majority of people want to be able to see their kids happy and going to school, they want to relax after dinner with their family and maybe have a picnic and a color TV.  They need medication for their sick kids, they need money to eat.  No one talks about the roughly $20 million dollars a year that Arafat's wife gets from the Palestinians while she lives in Paris (not the cheapest city on the planet) bathed in jewels and spouting crap that she would be proud if her daughter became a suicide bomber but girls don't do that sort of thing.  What, she is certainly driven by a noble cause, with a deep heart for her people.  That 20 mil would build a school or two, start a new farm, buy people tools.  And that's not a one time deal, that's every year.  So while decent people struggle she goes shopping.

Yes, I know it's all more complicated than this and yes, THEY should fix it and stop shooting missiles at Israel.  But sometimes you just have to try.  I always felt that the day that Bush took office he should have taken Arafat and whoever the Israeli guy was at the time into a room and said, "Look, this crap stops now, you all don't leave here until we fix this."  But that takes leadership and vision and instead Bush got on his high horse and "refused" to talk to Arafat while casualties mounted on both sides.  I would say that this was not an effective strategy.  We could have made a difference or at least tried to make a difference and didn't.  So more people died and on it went.

I know everyone will start barking over this and the volume will get turned up and fingers will start pointing.  But there just has to be a better way for all of those involved to lead decent lives and turn away from this makeshift war.  In my life, I always believe there is an answer for everything and a solution for every problem.  I know I have no suggestions but maybe someone smarter than me does because we all need to fix this not only for ourselves and for our children but for God as well. 

Philip Smith spent the last week guest blogging for Jewcy.  This is his farewell post.  Want more?  Check out his book, Walking Through Walls.

Daniel Lubetzky: with an assortment of his nutritionally and spiritually fortifying products If you don't know who Daniel Lubetzky is, you should. The founder of PeaceWorks, a hugely successful international company that promotes peace through business, and OneVoice, a movement of Israelis and Palestinians joining forces to achieve a grassroots, tangible means towards working together for peace in the region, Lubetzky is a proven master at turning theory into action. PeaceWorks offers a range of popular specialty food products and currently does business with Israelis, Palestinians, Egyptians, Turks, Indonesians, Sri Lankans and Australians. Meanwhile, over 640,000 citizens have signed on as supporters of the OneVoice Mandate.

In this interview, Adam Neiman of No Sweat submitted eight questions to Lubetzky, Helen Jupiter submitted four, and Joey Kurtzman tacked one on at the end.

ADAM NEIMAN: Your father was a holocaust survivor. How has this informed your engagement with the Palestinian/Israeli conflict and the occupation?

DANIEL LUBETZKY: I think everything I do is through the prism of the son of a Holocaust survivor, for both good and bad; the positive way to explain it is that I made myself a promise to do whatever is in my power not to allow what happened to my father to ever happen again to anyone else; the more neurotic explanation is that I live under a shadow of persecution and feel an enormous drive to build bridges and create better bonds on a personal basis as well as between cultures, religions, nations, and peoples.

Specifically as it regards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I first approached this as a progressive Zionist who felt very strongly that Israel has to be the homeland for the Jewish people, a haven for those escaping the type of persecution that my Dad was not able to avoid when he was taken to Dachau as a little kid; as I began working deeply on the issue, I also felt a strong affinity with Palestinians who were deprived of freedom and dignity in ways that did painfully remind me of stories my Dad would share about his experiences at the Kovno Ghetto (NOT AT ALL like the dehumanization and death faced in a concentration camp, but with restrictions of movement and denigrations that serve nobody but extremists who prey on despair).

Israelis and Palestinians are destined to share a future – each needs the other to achieve the full potential of freedom and security for their offspring; they can either get their act together and make the difficult but necessary historic compromises to achieve a comprehensive peace, or they can be deluded by absolutist visions that will eventually drag them to a truly intractable and eternal war.

AN: I read that you wrote your master’s thesis on economic cooperation between Israelis & Palestinians. This issue seems to have called you for many years. What’s the Daniel Lubetzky genesis story that brings you to this intensely charged place and time in Jewish history?

DL: It was a Senior College thesis, not a masters, but it was 268-pages, the first time I was intellectually stimulated to become a real nerd, in 1989-90; the son-of-a-holocaust-survivor experience and education certainly got me committed to forging peace between Israel and its neighbors; the concept of economic cooperation as a means for fostering peaceful relations came from combining my passions for the Middle East peace and for entrepreneurship; since childhood I had run a few businesses, from being “Houdani” (instead of Houdini) the Magician during middle school, to setting up “Da’Leky Times” and “Watch-U-Want” kiosks at shopping malls selling watches and clocks while in high school and college; when I went to Israel for my year abroad and was studying at Hebrew University and searching for a thesis topic, the idea hit me that market forces could be powerfully channeled to advance peaceful relations.

Good Theory: good practiceAN: You started with a for-profit venture, PeaceWorks, marketing food products created by Israeli and Palestinian partners back in the 1990s during Oslo. Now your focus seems to be largely political, with OneVoice calling for negotiations leading to a two-state solution. How did that evolution come about?

DL: PeaceWorks was my effort to turn theory into practice. It evolved from my college thesis, and subsequent work in law school on how to create incentives to encourage joint ventures among neighbors striving to co-exist. When I realized the theory was making people fall asleep and going nowhere, I decided to give it a shot. Around the time that I was finalizing my research, I came across this obscure little jar of sundried tomato spread that was delicious, and when I found out the Israeli company that made it had gone out of business because they were sourcing their glass jars from Portugal and their sundried tomatoes for Italy, I realized there could be a way to prove the theory by sourcing glass jars from Egypt, sundried tomatoes from Turkey, and olives and olive oil from Palestine, etc. That is how MEDITALIA and Moshe & Ali’s started – and it is still goes on 15 years later, with relations that have withstood the test of time and the vicissitudes of the conflict.

The PeaceWorks Family: of products Eventually my company PeaceWorks, expanded to include a venture in partnership with a women’s cooperative in Indonesia – Bali Spice – bringing Muslim, Christian, and Buddhist women together to make a line of Asian sauces. We also created a new division to market healthy snacks not made in conflict regions, but donating 5% of their profits to the PeaceWorks Foundation, which is how KIND Fruit and Nut Bars were born.

The evolution into creating the PeaceWorks Foundation’s OneVoice Movement came about as I realized that economic cooperation is a positive but not sufficient ingredient in the equation for ending the conflict. After the breakdown of the Camp David negotiations and the breakout of the second intifadah and the cycle of violence in 2000-2002, I was enormously depressed and initially did not understand where all my Palestinian business partners and all those Palestinian moderates I knew had gone. Why weren't they raising their voices? They were shocked when I confronted them with this question, and showed me that from what they saw in the Arab media, it appeared that the missing moderate voices were those of the Israelis.

We then realized the huge problem society faces: that it is in the nature of the overwhelming majority of moderates to be passive, and uninteresting, while a passionate minority of extremists – including violent extremists with absolutist visions that deny the humanity of the other side – will stop at nothing to spread their message. We also realized that traditional media magnifies the influence of this extremist minority because it’s what makes for “compelling” TV and news coverage.
So we recognized that we needed to build a human infrastructure of moderates across Israel and Palestine, and to create tools that would amplify the voice of moderates to help them seize back the agenda for conflict resolution.

Today OneVoice has offices in Ramallah, Gaza City, and Tel Aviv; it has chapters in pretty much every Palestinian and Israeli University, as well as across most refugee camps, villages, and cities; over 640,000 citizens have signed on to the OneVoice Principles or OneVoice Mandate, and over 3,000 Israeli and Palestinian youth leaders have participated in OneVoice programs to organize themselves and their communities at the grassroots level to propel their elected representatives towards a two-state solution.

AN: What are your thoughts about the recent economic initiatives and the Palestinian Investors Conference?

DL: The day the investor conference took place coincided with our 6th Annual Board Meeting in Jerusalem, so I regretted I was not able to attend. A few of our Palestinian and International Board members attended, as did our Israeli Honorary Board member MK Ephraim Sneh. I heard good things about it, but don’t have first hand info. It's easy to be skeptical about it and paint it as a PR stunt, but it seems to me that it generated hope and interest in Palestinian economic development, both of which are very important. I was also told by several Palestinian friends that this was the first time they saw enormous effort on the part of the Israeli government to truly create a very comfortable environment for the conference attendees and the people of the region, with far less checkpoints and very courteous relations. The week to me seemed filled with energy and buzz.

I am extremely supportive of economic development at this stage, and consider it critical to building a vibrant Palestinian civic society and Palestinian State. It has to occur in tandem with political progress, but it is certainly vital. Tony Blair and Prime Minister Fayyad both seem very committed to achieving progress on the ground, which is also important to contrast this approach in the West Bank to Hamas’s apocalyptic and totalitarian governance in Gaza.

AN: Recent polls say that a significant majority of Palestinians consider peace talks futile or counterproductive. Most Palestinians I know think talks are just window dressing for the occupation and that Israeli deeds--expanding settlements, checkpoints, and constraints on movement of goods and services--are all that matters. And many Israelis also believe that Palestinian talk of peace during the Oslo period was just a smokescreen for expanding “security” forces that turned into terrorists when push came to shove. Has the very word “peace” become degraded in this context? Has language lost all currency?

DL: Yes, most Palestinians and Israelis have lost the ability to visualize that peace can be achieved, and the word “peace” has indeed been devalued. Everyone says they want “peace,” but they hang on to this word while hanging on to absolutist or unrealistic positions that are not consistent with peace. That's why OneVoice launched the Imagine 2018 Campaign this year: To compel people to dare to visualize what their lives could look like in 2018 if a framework agreement was achieved this year (as the Heads of State committed to) and implemented over the next year, and to deal with the problem of restoring some meaning to the word "peace." We also instituted a “Breaking the Taboos” series of Town Hall Meetings.

Can OneVoice Accomplish Enough: for World Cup 2018 to be hosted in Israel/Palestine?AN: Last year, OneVoice had to cancel long-planned simultaneous concerts in Jericho and Tel Aviv because of security threats on the West Bank. OneVoice’s current focus is on the latest round of peace talks, with a clock on the OneVoice site ticking down to 12/12/08--my 52nd birthday, by the way. These talks were initiated by three very weak leaders, with an outcome that at the very best cannot be implemented before the next Palestinian elections--again assuming a Fatah candidate can run and win in Gaza. Does this strategy carry a huge risk of increasing people’s cynicism and despair? Have you created a large target and sent an invitation to the extremists to blow it up?

DL: The reasons for postponing the OneVoice Summit are thoroughly (and painfully but earnestly) discussed on my blog, in the entries between September and November 2007. The "clock" started ticking on 12/12/07, your 51st birthday, which coincided with the date when the Israeli and Palestinian Heads of State started their negotiations. In our OneVoice Mandate, signed by hundreds of thousands of people over the course of 18 months, we demanded that the elected representatives immediately restart negotiations, which should remain uninterrupted until the achievement of a comprehensive agreement, within a framework of no more than one year.

When we made this demand, even our Board members thought we were taking too big a risk, as negotiations had not been conducted for 7 years, and the conflict hadn’t been solved for decades. We explained that it is the role and duty of citizens to push and propel their leaders to do this, without us worrying about political repercussions, and that we would rather try and fail than not try at all. In fact, we succeeded: At Annapolis, Bush, Olmert, and Abbas all agreed not only to rekindle negotiations, but to our surprise, they even committed to a framework agreement within a year. So the Clock is an effort to hold them accountable.

That said, I sadly feel that you may be correct, as given all the internal problems Prime Minister Olmert is facing, not to mention the challenges Abbas faces in Palestine and the fact that Hamas controls Gaza, most observers feel there is no chance an agreement will come through in 2008.

We are indeed evaluating whether we should change our call to action. That said:
1) We should also take into consideration that part of the reason why “Leaders are Weak” is because we as citizens make too many excuses not to act to strengthen leaders with moderate agendas; and so instead of making excuses for why it is futile to act, if we are able to again galvanize public support, it is at least more likely that progress will be made.

2) We should bear in mind that some progress in the negotiations and political environment is critical, as we are not just at risk of giving up the upside of an agreement, but also of seeing Hamas spread its reign into the West Bank if the political track does not show that diplomacy and a two-state-solution are a better alternative to nihilistic absolutism.

AN: I spent a couple of weeks in the holy land at the beginning of the 2006 war with Hezbollah, half on each side of the green line. Both the Israelis and the Palestinians were absolutely convinced that the Western media was hopelessly biased against them. Are they both right, or both wrong? How is US and European reportage informed by anti-Semitism and/or racism? Is there a feedback loop between the conflict and what could be described as the world’s longest running reality horror show?

DL: The media is biased towards news that sells, and news that sells tends to be news that exacerbates conflicts, reinforces stereotypes, and plays into our primal defensive instincts. So, in a sense they are both right and they are both wrong: They are right that the media is biased, but it is not biased in the favor of the other--it is biased in the bent towards extremist views. The only way to change that is for citizens to vote with their feet and demand deeper and more nuanced coverage, which is unlikely to happen, or to generate newsworthy events about the otherwise “boring” mainstream citizenry that cherishes a resolution of the conflict.

Yes, there is a dangerous feedback loop between the conflict and the “reality horror show” of this conflict. The more negative things one sees about the other, the more we adopt bad opinions about them and assume they are all “the enemy,” which leads to false polarization. We then become entrenched in a garrison mentality of Us Vs Them. The only way out of it is by forcing ourselves to think for ourselves, and to meet the other at a human level.

AN: One Voice appears to be resolutely secular. Your list of “partners” doesn’t include any representatives or affiliates of the denominations of any of the Abrahamic faiths. Is this by accident or design? It has been noted that the real conflict here may be internal: Between secular elites in Israel and Palestine and a multitude of people with little education or income but a boatload of belief. Considering that religion is an enormous part of the problem in the holy land, is it realistic to think a solution can be found that doesn’t include the voice of the faithful? Do you see any positive role for people of faith in resolving this conflict?

DL: Our Honorary Board actually incudes foremost religious leaders of all the Abrahamic Faiths, from Imam Feisal Abdel Rauf, to Rabbi David Rosen, to Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, to Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, and on and on.

Progressive Religious leaders such as the above are very much part of the solution, but they face the same problem discussed earlier: The media find it less sexy to interview sensible people than big screaming extremists.

HELEN JUPITER: Through OneVoice and the Imagine: 2018 contest, you are working to engage and amplify the moderate voices on the subject of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict--voices we rarely hear. How have you inspired moderates to take effective action?

DL: First, we asked Israeli and Palestinian kids ages 13-17 to share their vision for what 2018 could look like if a framework peace agreement were to be achieved. The Palestinian Ministry of Education imparted this essay campaign across the West Bank. We imparted it through our staff in Gaza. And in Israel our staff imparted it with the cooperation of the Israeli Ministry of Education and other youth movements and kids’ websites (Tapuz). Tens of thousands were exposed and participated; thousands were finalists. We will soon announce the 100 winners and publicize some of the essays in Israeli and Palestinian newspapers and on the web.

The next phase, which we've just started on, is to work with foremost filmmakers (from Hollywood as well as from Israel and Palestine) and ask them to select one essay that speaks to them and turn it into a 1-5 minute short film. We also have two more phases that are big surprises to be shared later in the year.

HJ: Is it possible to spark galvanizing passion in moderate thinkers?

DL: It is possible, but it is very difficult. It is in the nature of moderates to be less assertive, and if we are to tackle the challenges our world will face this century, it is imperative that we re-educate ourselves to understand activism is necessary.

HJ: What can Jewcy readers--largely based in the US--realistically do to have an impact?

DL: The OneVoice site has a section with a list of very specific and concrete ways in which people can get involved, starting with something as simple as joining the movement, signing up to receive our updates so people hear the deeper news and not just the alarmist partisan news, forwarding the news updates to their friends and encouraging them to join, making donations in cash or in-kind, volunteering in their communities, hosting presentations about OneVoice, and/or writing to media and policy makers with this message.

HJ: It seems to me that there are three major branches in your thoughts on ending the Israeli/Palestinian conflict: economic, grassroots activist, and political. With PeaceWorks, you've developed a business model that manages mutually-beneficial relationships between Israeli, Egyptian, Palestinian, and Turkish companies. With OneVoice, you've brought together over 645,000 citizens in support of a two-state agreement. Market forces and grassroots peoples' movements are important and can be effective, especially in conjunction with one another, but are they powerful enough to influence political policy-making? What progress have you seen through your campaign thus far?

DL: I think that the two greatest accomplishments are:
1) Helping re-frame the conflict, from the view circa 2001 that this conflict is one of Israelis vs. Palestinians or Jews vs. Muslims, to a more nuanced understanding that the conflict is not about “us” vs. “them,” but about empowering moderate voices on both sides to help overcome absolutism and nihilism.

2) Injecting into the political arena the concept about the possibility of achieving a two-state agreement within a one-year framework – what is still missing a commitment to uninterrupted negotiations, which is the only way to guarantee getting there: You get in the negotiations room and don’t come out till you conclude an agreement.

JOEY KURTZMAN: Palestinians sometimes protest that when Jewish-Americans call for “peace” in Israel/Palestine, they are actually calling for Palestinians to surrender their right to struggle. Does Peaceworks believe that Palestinians have the right to select the means by which they pursue their own national liberation?

DL: PeaceWorks actually does not deal at all with these political issues – it just fosters economic cooperation; the OneVoice Movement does not deny people their “narrative,” but it focuses on bringing about working solutions that can truly pull the Israeli and Palestinian people out of the “intractable” conflict; the conflict is only “intractable” if you insist you want “peace” but you deny that peace entails some painful compromises. If either Israelis or Palestinians hang on to absolutist positions, they should at least recognize theirs are not consistent with the pursuit of “peace.” While OneVoice does not pass moral judgments, the OneVoice Principles for Engagement require a) mutual recognition (of the humanity and rights of both peoples), b) a recognition of the need for personal civic action to wrest back the agenda, and c) a recognition that civic action must be non-violent to achieve its goals.

11.05pm: Jaffa Gate, Old City, Jerusalem.
Far from the madding crowds flowing out of Jerusalem’s ancient stone walls, a white car was waiting at the bus stop down the hill, ready for the first leg of our journey to another holy city, one less trodden by tourists: Shechem (or Nablus, as it’s commonly known). Kever Yoseph, the Tomb of Joseph, son of Jacob, lies in the center of Nablus, which has a population of over 160,000 souls, making it the largest Palestinian city – and also one of the most hostile. In brighter days Jews could worship there freely but the Kever now falls under Palestinians Authority Area A and is thus forbidden for Israeli citizens to enter the city. The only way there is under cover of darkness – and with an army escort. So be it.

11.40pm: Ofra, West Bank.
Within seconds of getting out of the car, an American in his 20s ran towards us, gleefully waving a book in the air--On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society--whilst muttering clichés about wimpy ‘liberals’. Welcome to Ofra, one of the first West Bank settlements established by the messianic right-wing Gush Emunim movement in the 1970s. We were early for our bulletproof bus but, in true Israeli style, we had to wait an hour before boarding. On the pavement, the atmosphere was starting to get festive, with a mix of starry-eyed settler youth, mainly from the central and southern West Bank, whose knitted skullcaps and long peyos dangled alongside those of the Breslav Hassidim, some of whom sneaked into the Tomb in 2003 in defiance of the military, leaving seven with gunshot wounds. But not everyone had registered with the authorities, a necessary requirement for entering ‘enemy territory’, leaving dozens stranded. It was too much for one teenager, who threw himself under the bus, narrowly missing its wheels.

12.13pm: Tapuach Junction, West Bank.
Word had spread that there was going to be a knisah [entrance] to Joseph’s Tomb, and the Tapuach checkpoint was packed with over 100 people trying to get in. Some had given up hope and resorted to davening in the middle of the road, whilst some ingenious haredim attempted to hide in the luggage compartment of our bus. Things were getting serious. It had been several months since the last Knisah, and it seemed like Joseph had never been so popular; “There’s lots of pent up demand,” said the American rabbi sitting next to me, who had prayed at the Tomb twice before--once recently with an army escort, and another time more freely in the 1990s, before the days of checkpoints and intifadas (and with half as many Jewish settlers in the West Bank).

12.55pm, Huwara Village, south of Nablus.
After leaving Tapuach, we found ourselves in a convoy with three other buses flanked by army vehicles, all of which soon came to a halt at the next Palestinian village where Jewish pilgrims were trying to outsmart the bewildered border police. Aizeh balagan. We took a right past the notorious checkpoint to which the village lends its name, and that serves to keep would-be terrorists from Nablus at bay whilst maintaining a virtual siege on the rest of the city. We climbed the hill in the direction of the Elon Moreh settlement (not a place I thought I’d be returning to so soon after my last jaunt there).

01.24am: Army checkpoint, somewhere east of Nablus.
The 50 people on the bus burst into song and chants of “Od Yoseph Chai” and “Yoseph, Yoseph, Yoseph HaTzaddik” as soon as we burst through the checkpoint. “It’s nothing physical, they just want kesher [contact] with the Tzaddik,” said the Rabbi. “It’s ridiculous. This is our land and we have to sneak in at the middle of the night.” The irony escaped him that the Palestinians in Nablus/Shechem feel the same: This is their land, but are barred from traveling freely inside it whilst settlers zoom through the checkpoints and freshly-tarmaced roads and with ease.

01.39am: Joseph’s Tomb, downtown Nablus.
We officially arrived. The tomb itself is a shadow of its former glory, covered in ash and rubble after being partially destroyed by Palestinian riots in 2000, but that didn’t dampen the euphoria of the crowd, who filled the building’s central chamber with songs of exultation. Outside, the streets were deserted, save for our bus and two army vehicles straddling them. I get the feeling that if the locals wanted to take a potshot at us, it wouldn’t be too difficult.

For once, I found myself in agreement with the rabbi: The situation was ridiculous. As exhilarating as it is to visit the resting place of our forefathers, the price to pay is steep: soldiers putting their lives on the line, whilst Nablus and the rest of the West Bank are on lock-down. No one wins. It’s a similar story at the resting place of Joseph’s mother, Rachel, sliced out of Bethlehem by the ominous separation wall, and the Cave of the Patriarchs in the walking Kafka novel that is present-day Hebron. Jews should have access to our holy places, but it makes me wonder if the apparatus of checkpoints and settlements encircling them help ensure our rights to them or the opposite? The experience of the last 41 years is less than conclusive.

02.27am: Evacuation, Joseph’s Tomb. Soldiers with loudhailers round up the excited worshippers, no easy task when half of them are tucking into the steaming cholent that appeared from nowhere (via Bnei Brak). After a pause at Tapuach, a hitchhike arrives and we’re homeward bound.

04.19am: Jerusalem, Israel. The car pulls in near King George Street, passing Israeli teenagers wandering home after a night on the town. I glide up the four flights of stairs, take off my Nike Air trainers, painted black by the soot from the Tomb, and head to bed to ponder the night’s surreal events.

Chicago’s Jewish museum, the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, is currently showing an exhibit called Imaginary Coordinates that focuses on maps of Israel and the Middle East. The Spertus website has this to say about Imaginary Coordinates:

Imaginary Coordinates is inspired by antique maps of the Holy Land in Spertus' collection. The exhibition juxtaposes these maps with modern and contemporary maps of this region, all of which assert boundaries. It brings these together with objects of material culture and artworks that question national borders, as a way of charting new spaces, fostering conversation, and imagining new communities.

Imaginary Coordinates: real controversy
Included in the exhibit are antique maps, a two-minute video-loop of a naked Israeli woman hula hooping with barbed wire, and video of a woman in Jerusalem asking people for directions to Ramallah.

Imaginary Coordinates opened on May 2nd, and closed after a week for “building maintenance.” Since the Spertus museum is a brand new facility opened in December after a $55 million renovation project, it seems unlikely that maintenance was really the issue. The exhibit reopened on May 15th, but now you can only be admitted to the exhibit as part of a guided tour every hour. The exhibit has also been rearranged, in order to “shift fragile items away from harsh light” according to the Chicago Tribune.

The exhibit presents both Israeli and Palestinian ideas about land ownership, cultural capital, and borders of all kinds. Predictably, there are elements of the Jewish community that are upset by the inclusion of Palestinian artifacts and art. These elements are pushing the Spertus to close the exhibit again, and are threatening to withhold funding if Imaginary Coordinates remains open.

I’ve been on one of the guided tours of the exhibit, and didn’t find the material to be particularly upsetting. Yes, there are pieces that imply that Palestinians feel a strong connection to Israeli land, and even a sense of ownership over land in Israel, but so what? In the immortal words of Marriage Encounter ‘Feelings aren’t right or wrong, they just are.’ What would be the point of denying that Palestinians feel strongly about land, that they miss the towns they used to live in, or that they don’t think Israelis have proper respect for their land? You can still think their political ideology is bad or wrong, you can hate their methods and call them stupid, but failing to acknowledge how they feel about the situation is just willful ignorance.

If you live in Chicago or are planning a visit soon, I encourage you to plan a trip to Imaginary Coordinates, and to leave your hopefully positive feedback for the Spertus curatorial staff. Admission is free on Tuesdays from 10 am-12 noon and Thursdays from 3-7 pm. At other times general admission is only $7, and $5 for students and seniors.

If you don’t live near Chicago, and don’t plan on seeing the exhibit, please email Rhoda Rosen, the museum’s curator, and give her your support. Here’s a sample email:

Dear Ms. Rosen,

Thank you so much for reopening Imaginary Coordinates. I’m glad to hear that Spertus is tackling issues of land ownership, mapping, and patriotism is such a balanced and thoughtful way. I know that you worked on this assembling this exhibit for three years, and I applaud your efforts.

I hope that you will keep the exhibit open to the public for its full run, through September 7th so that the community has plenty of opportunity to see these important pieces.

Sincerely,
Your name

Read reviews for Imaginary Coordinates here, here and here.

 

*** Update: Spertus seems to have closed the exhibit on the same day this post went up on the blog.  I encourage you to still email Rhoda Rosen, as it shouldn't be too late for it to be reopened.