Brian J. Grieves

All ten dioceses that considered this resolution adopted it. We believe we have this broad grassroots support because it is a thoughtful and even modest resolution.  We deliberately wanted a resolution that would unify the Convention while, at the same time, recognize that our Church has engaged the pursuit of justice for all the peoples of the Holy Land for 33 years. Let me make some clarifying comments.

First: We know that our Church is deeply divided over the issue of Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions.  That is why this resolution doesn’t even mention the word divestment but embraces the existing policy of corporate engagement and calls for greater implementation.  We have a serious social responsibility as a Church to make sure that our significant equity investments do not contribute to the suffering of an oppressed people anywhere, including those living under the Occupation. That is our responsibility, no one else’s. That’s our money, no one else’s.  We ask whatever happens at this Convention, we remain faithful to the stewardship of our financial investments.  As stated, that policy is already in place, but what we are asking is not for reaffirmation of this and other advocacy policies, but rather we are asking for a deliberate plan of implementation of what already exists.  Take away the development of such a plan and the Convention might as well not have spoken at all.

Secondly: Those who say that reading or studying Kairos Palestine amounts to an endorsement of BDS are floating a red herring. BDS is one paragraph of a 16 page document.  Wordsmith this resolve anyway you like to make clear that reading or studying Kairos is not a call for divestment or an endorsement of its contents.  But it is a call to hear the cry of 2,797 Palestinian Christians who have signed Kairos as of July 2.  We show enormous disrespect by refusing to read what grassroots Palestinians have said.  And doing so will cause a deep hurt amongst those 1,000’s of Palestinians.  One of the authors wrote to us this week and said please tell us where we are at fault and we will respond.  But how can we do that if we refuse to read it. We can argue the contents after we’ve read it. Let’s not ignore the baptized.  Encourage the grassroots here to dialogue with the grassroots there.

Thirdly: In addition to developing a plan of advocacy, we believe the Church needs to engage this issue at every level through a program of study that will help us all move forward in an informed way.  Steadfast Hope is one resource.  But it is not meant to be exclusive.  By all means, name additional resources. And let interfaith dialogue be a part of that process.  But remember that Steadfast Hope consciously presents a Palestinian perspective, which is rarely heard in our nation’s discourse.  This is a gift our Church can offer.

Fourthly: We support completely the wonderful humanitarian work of the American Friends of the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem and also economic investment as long as it can be demonstrated that such investments do not further entrench the Occupation.

Lastly:  While C-067 avoids the issue of divestment, B010 outright rejects it. I appeal to you that this Church is too divided over this issue to either adopt or reject it.  Either way we know there would be great pain.  Let’s not hurt each other. Let’s honor one another and find a unifying way to move forward, boldly, on 33 years of faithful witness for justice by this Church on this tragic conflict. Thank you.

Mark Braverman

Thank you for welcoming me and allowing me to offer this testimony.

My name is Mark Braverman.  I am an American Jew.  I serve on the Advisory Board of Friends of Sabeel North America and the Board of The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions USA.  I come in support of resolution CO64 and the resolutions that follow that template.

As a Jew I pray that by the grace of God that my people will someday come to understand, repent, and forgive ourselves for what we have done to the Palestinian people in our pursuit of a national homeland and refuge.  But I have not come to talk about the challenge to the Jewish people. I have come to talk about the challenge to the church.

The church today is called to take a bold, prophetic stance for justice in Palestine, justice that alone will bring peace and security to all the peoples of the land.  The Episcopal church has a proud history of taking such stands on a host of urgent human rights issues confronting our society in recent history. It was one of the first to do so in the struggle against South African Apartheid.

The resolution before you commends two documents for study by members of the Episcopal Church: the Kairos Palestine document, “A Moment of Truth:  a cry of faith, hope and love from the hearth of Palestinian suffering,” and “Steadfast Hope:  the Palestinian quest for a just peace.” Both documents provide a vivid and faithful witness to the facts on the ground in Israel and Palestine, and make reference to the Palestinian call for Boycott Divestment and Sanctions as a legal and nonviolent method of resistance and change. To omit the reference to these documents, as the alternative resolution does, amounts to a silencing of the voices of the American Christian authors of Steadfast Hope and the Palestinian Christian authors of Kairos Palestine.  Particularly in the case of the Palestinian document, this direct and explicit omission amounts to censorship. Given the urgency, eloquence, and theological beauty of their call, I consider that this direct and intentional omission to be a sin.  I must also add that I challenge anyone to find anything in the Kairos document that attacks the existence of the state of Israel, questions the connection of the Jewish people to the land, or says that God no longer loves the Jewish people.

There is an elephant in the room and I want to name it. The reluctance to hear these voices and to advocate for even a hearing on the question of boycotts and divestment is not because of any question about the facts of the situation.  It arises, rather, from fear about the impact on Christian-Jewish relations on both institutional and personal levels.  This is the issue that has dominated the discussion, here as well as in the other denominations that have taken up the issue, notably the Presbyterian and Methodist churches.  It is the elephant in the room.

We must name this issue because it stands in the way of the church’s faithful action here.  This cause has nothing to do with the Christian project to reconcile with the Jewish people for centuries suffering at the hands of the church.  It is, rather about being faithful Christians.  It is about Jesus standing before the Temple and saying that this system of oppression must be replaced with God’s Kingdom of love, compassion, and equality. Vigilance against anti-Semitism, like fighting all forms of racism, continues to be important, and Christianity has much to answer for in this regard – but taking on the cause of justice in Palestine is not about loving the Jewish people.  It is, rather, about putting your own house in order.  It is, as those Christians who put their lives and fortunes on the line in the Anti-apartheid and Civil Rights struggles demonstrated, about being true to the fundamental values of their faith. Faced with injustice, they had to ask themselves, are we with Jesus or not?  And if not, what must we do about that?

If you would love the Jewish people, then love us properly.  Love us in the way you loved the people of South Africa, black and white both.  Tough love is not easy, and it is not comfortable.  Discipleship is not easy, and it is not comfortable.  It is in times like these that we do well to call to mind the words of Martin Luther King Jr. from his jail cell in Birmingham Alabama:

The judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century.

Michael Berg

Hello. My name is Michael Berg. I am a Jewish member of the St. Louis Palestine Solidarity Committee and I have come here to testify in support of all C resolutions titled: Pursuing a Just Peace in the Palestine / Israeli Conflict.

Last summer I had the opportunity to visit Israel and the Occupied West Bank. What I saw was a shocking system where land, water and basic freedom of movement were distributed according to race. I stayed in the Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem, literally in the shadow of a giant wall which separates the city from Jerusalem. Bethlehem is thirsty because its water has been stolen for use in Israeli settlements.

It is an Apartheid system in which Israeli Jews have privileges at the expense of the native Palestinian Christian and Muslim community. I am one of a large and growing number of American Jews who see it as my duty to speak resolutely against this unjust system that is perpetuated in our name.

This is why I support these resolutions that tackle the root causes of the conflict and promote the ideas of Palestinian Christians found in the Kairos document. The problems in the Holy Land are political. Investments and charity for Palestinians living under occupation at best helps a few people but does nothing to address these problems.

Palestinians need change, not charity. We need systematic change – this why I support of all C resolutions titled: Pursuing a Just Peace in the Palestine / Israeli Conflict.

Michael Davis

Shalom Aleichem, Peace to you from the Rabbinical Council of Jewish Voice for Peace. I am Cantor Michael Davis, clergy in the Jewish Reform synagogue. The Rabbinical Council of Jewish Voice for Peace is a growing community of Jewish clergy committed to the rabbinic tradition of peace.

To be a rabbinic Jew   – to be a Jew – is to embrace the path of peace in our communities here in the U.S. as in the Holy Land. The Talmud teaches us to turn away from the wars of the Bible, from Joshua’s battles of conquest of the Land of Canaan. Jewish tradition spurns the warlike Maccabeans.

I speak as an Israeli. I did military service in Israeli army. I was stationed on a military base on the West Bank outside the Palestinian village of Anata and the Jewish settlement of Anatot on the West Bank. I guarded convoys in the Gaza Strip.

I was a settler. I grew up within walking distance of Jesus’s birthplace in Bethlehem.

As an Israeli soldier and as a settler, I know the occupation from within. I know as you know that it is evil. It is racist. It is not Jewish. And I call on you to proclaim today that it is not Christian.

At the request of Archbishop Theodosius of Jerusalem I translated Kairos Palestine document into Hebrew. I urge you to study this Christian message of peace and justice that unifies Palestinian Christians. I urge you as leaders of the Episcopal Church to join with Israelis and American Jews in standing in solidarity with Palestinians * Christians and Muslims * in their quest for justice and peace.

Jewish Voice for Peace calls on you to take the strongest position you can to align the Episcopal Church with the path of peace – to act in solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Cotton Fite

My name is Cotton Fite.  I am a priest associate at St. Luke’s Church, Evanston in the Diocese of Chicago. I am a strong supporter of the Diocese of Jerusalem’s missions and ministries and a passionate advocate for the courageous non-violent struggle for justice being waged by Israeli Jews and Palestinians, Palestinian Muslims and Christians. With them I believe this continuing Occupation of another people is sinful, and I believe we are complicit.  I see support of the Diocese of Jerusalem’s ministries and a robust advocacy for justice as entirely complimentary commitments.

My experience is that most Episcopalians lack a full understanding of the Palestinian narrative, the destructive nature of the Occupation and the reasons it persists.

The heart of this resolution is education — to convey as full and complete a picture of the situation as possible — so Episcopalians can make up their own minds about who and what to support financially and what strategies for advocacy will most effectively fulfill our baptismal vow to strive for justice and peace among all people.

There are many educational resources available. None are devoid of a “point of view”, and we should draw upon many.  We commend the study of Steadfast Hope because it is honest, describes the strong presence of the Anglican church in the Middle East and presents a narrative few Episcopalians have heard.  Upon reading it, a priest in the Diocese of Chicago testified at our diocesan convention, “the scales fell from my eyes.”

We commend the study of Kairos Palestine because it is the voice of Palestinian Christians devoted to justice and peace.  In response to Kairos, Bishop Suheil and the Patriarchs and Heads of Churches in Jerusalem formally acknowledged they heard “the cry of hope that our children have launched in these difficult times.”  We should do no less.

We will not all share the same “point of view,” but, given the chance, Episcopalians will become a more effective witness with a fuller understanding of the injustice that grows more entrenched, more destructive every day.

Stephen Denny

Judith Leder has done us the enormous favor of reviewing and summarizing Peter Beinart’s important work, The Crisis of Zionism.  There are so many books to be read on many of our lists that this summary may either convince you to read the book or lead you to think you have gotten the the essence from her summary.  Judith is a former Catholic nun, now retired English professor, living in Fullerton, CA, and a good friend of EPF/PIN.   RCF

 

Peter Beinart’s The Crisis of Zionism is the cry of a voice in the wilderness–a passionate call by a contemporary prophet.  Written primarily to and for the Jews of America, it is a devastating analysis of how and why liberal Zionism (Zionism in the tradition of Abraham Heschel) and illiberal Zionism (Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s revisionist Zionism) bifurcated.  It is Beinart’s conviction that American Jews must save liberal Zionism and thereby save Israel as a democratic state.

The Crisis of Zionism has been in the news since its publication, bearing out the truth of the Booklist reviewer’s comment that the book is likely to “evoke intense debate.”  Positive reviews have ranged from the lukewarm (“The sentiment is noble, and the message deserves to be heard.” The Economist) to the enthusiastic (“Peter Beinart has written the outstanding Zionist statement for the twenty-first century.” Naomi Chazan, New Israel Fund).  The New York Times couldn’t make up its mind.  In April of this year, Jonathan Rosen pilloried the book in his review:

[Beinart] sets out to save [Israel] by labeling many of its leaders racist, denouncing many of its American supporters as ­Holocaust-obsessed enablers and advocating a boycott of people and products from beyond Israel’s 1967 eastern border.  While saving Israel, Beinart hopes with evangelical zeal to save America from a handful of Jewish organizations that in his view have…hijacked American liberalism. (NY Times, 4/13/12; see also the Letters to the Editor 5/26/12.which include Beinart’s response to Rosen’s review)

Two months earlier, Roger Cohen, Rosen’s colleague at the NYTimes, had written a far more thorough and astute assessment.

Peter Beinart’s The Crisis of Zionism is an important new book that rejects the manipulation of Jewish victimhood in the name of Israel’s domination of the Palestinians…Beinart, a prominent liberal journalist, is right to invert the treacherous victimhood trope.  Israel is strong today…and the Middle East’s only nuclear-armed state…[T]he greatest danger by far to Israel is that it will squander the opportunities of power…through excess of victimhood…[A]s Beinart chronicles, major American Jewish organizations…have in general made uncritical defense of Israel the cornerstone of their policies and [have] viewed deviation from the ever-refreshed victimhood narrative as unacceptable dissent…Such prescriptions worked for an embattled little Israel and a generation of Holocaust survivors; they fall short today. (NYTimes, 2/13/12)

In the words of Rabbi Brant Rosen, Beinart’s book is “a passionate effort that came twenty years too late.”  Still, it is a book that anyone interested in the Israel/Palestine problem should read.  Since most of us have too much to read and too little time, I set about summarizing The Crisis of Zionism.  I didn’t expect to like it at all. (Which tells more about me than about Beinart, perhaps.) The index doesn’t mention Pappe, Tutu, Finkelstein, Halper, or other voices I’m familiar with.  The only map in the book gives no indication of the current Bantustand character of the West Bank.  Beinart’s creds (The New Republic and The Daily Beast) put my teeth on edge.  As read, I found myself arguing with him about many points.  Still, on the whole, I found the book both reasonable and persuasive; with respect to Beinart’s riveting account of the 2011 contretemps between Obama and Netanyahu, it was heartbreaking.

What follows is a summary of what I believe to be the meat of Beinart’s chapters.  I held the summaries–almost entirely direct quotes from the text–to one page per chapter.  Anything in brackets is mine.  Naturally, cutting out 95% of what a writer has written is unfair and can be lethal.  Still, I believe that this exceedingly foreshortened version of the book will give many readers a sense of Beinart’s arguments and an adequate overview of what he has written.   JRL

The Crisis of Zionism

Peter Beinart

Summarized by J. R. Leder

 Introduction

We Jews begin our stories with victimhood and end them with survival.  Many American Jews think the lesson of Jewish history is “they tried to kill us; we survived; let’s eat.” But the Jewish condition has fundamentally changed.  The shift from Jewish powerlessness to Jewish power has been so profound, and …  So rapid, that it has outpaced the way many Jews think about themselves.  We need a new American Jewish story, built around the idea that we Jews are not history’s permanent victims.  Today our challenges stem from power not weakness.  Perpetual victimhood can’t answer two important questions

1.  how to sustain Judaism in America and

2.  how to sustain democracy in Israel.

Today we are failing both challenges.  Ours is a community that builds better memorials than schools.  Our message has become “Honor the dead by preventing another Holocaust, this time in Israel’ whereas it should be “honor the dead by acting justly toward those non-Jews who live under Jewish rule.”

Young American Jews are more conscious than their parents of the degree to which Israeli behavior violates democratic ideals.

Anti-Semitism does exist, but ascribing criticism of Israel to a primordial hatred of Jews fails to grapple with Israel’s role in its mounting isolation.

Jewish texts connect sovereignty over the land to Jewish behavior in the land of Israel.  Thus, Israel’s physical survival is bound up with its ethical survival.  I don’t want Jewish sovereignty to fail.  A nation that pursues “freedom, justice, and peace as envisioned by the Hebrew Prophets” is the patrimony of the Israelis.  [It is a] dream that must not die.

 Chapter 1:  Crisis in Israel

Abraham Herzl, the founder of Zionism, wanted to establish a Jewish state that cherished liberal ideals:  “We don’t want a Boer state but a Venice,” he said.  Unfortunately, the conflict between the desire to build a Jewish state premised on liberal democratic principles and the temptation to flout those principles in the name of Jewish security and power runs throughout the Zionist enterprise.  The Israeli Declaration of Independence grants “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race, or sex.”

The gap between the Zionist ideal of a safe homeland for the Jews and liberalism (respect for all people) was closing [in Israel] before the Six Day War (1967) when the trajectory [toward liberalism] was upended.  For the past 44 years, on the land on which Palestinians might establish their state, secular and religious Jews alike have forged an illiberal Zionism that threatens to destroy the dream of liberal Zionism.  In part, the disregard for liberalism is the result of the Israelis’ refusal to admit that they have been victimizers as well as victims in Israel/Palestine–this is so despite the fact that Israeli historians have documented the victimization of Palestinians.

What has developed since the Six Day War is a vicious cycle in which the illiberal Zionists beyond the green line destroy the possibility of liberal Zionism inside the green line.  Today, the boundary between a nation where Jewish power is restrained by democratic ideals (Israel proper) and a territory (the West Bank) where Jewish power runs wild is called the green line.  Israel is not unique in its favoring of a dominant ethnic group.  Nor is it alone in its misuse of power.  No country has any cause for sanctimony.  Americans, for example, must reflect on their treatment of American Indians.

Violence is the most obvious way in which antidemocratic culture of the West Bank menaces the culture of democratic Israel.  Another is racism.  In 2008 Ehud Olmert said “an evil wind of extremism, of hate, of maliciousness, of violence, of losing control, of lawbreaking, of contempt for the institutions of the state is passing through certain sections of the Israeli public.”

The terrible irony is that even as Israel’s leaders defend the Jewish state against international isolation by invoking its liberal democratic character, their own policies are eroding it.  If Israel occupies the West Bank without granting citizenship to the Palestinian inhabitants, it will remain a Jewish state but become an apartheid one.

The Israelis most committed to liberal democracy see Herzl’s dream slipping away.  The American Jewish Establishment insists on seeing almost nothing at all. 

Chapter 2: The Crisis in America

At home in America, we are losing the struggle for Jewish survival and ensuring that Israel loses the struggle for Jewish democracy.  The Jewish establishment denies that Jews can use power not merely to survive but also to destroy.  By superimposing the Jewish past on the Jewish present the American establishment is failing the challenge of a new age.

How did a Jewish community famed for its liberalism create a communal leadership so reluctant to defend liberal democracy in the Jewish state?  Today’s American Jewish establishment was born as a reaction against American Jewish liberalism.  Most early American Zionist leaders did not focus on how to meld their democratic vision with the national aspirations of the local Arab population.  They were too focused on the struggle to help Jews escape Europe.  For Brandeis, Wise, and Silver, Zionism was one component of a broad liberal agenda.  It seems they saw the direction in which American Zionism was headed, however, for, as early as 1935, Wise denounced Jabotinsky’s revisionist Zionism.

After the Six Day War, American Jewish liberalism and organized American Zionism began drifting apart.  When Israel occupied the West Bank, American Jewish leaders began insisting that to acknowledge the misuse of Jewish power was to deny Jewish victimhood and thus to victimize Jews anew.  By the 1970’s, victimhood had supplanted liberalism as the defining ideology of organized American Jewish life.  In its embrace of victimhood as a strategy for dealing with gentiles and younger Jews, the American Jewish establishment was turning away from the universalism that had defined it for half a century.  Liberalism was out; tribalism was in.

Many American Jews removed their liberalism from an explicitly Jewish context, leaving Jewish organizations in the hands of those who believed that gentiles didn’t care about Jews and therefore that Jews had little obligation to care about them.  In actuality, the mass of American Jews are to the left of the organizations that speak in their name.  Donors to the establishment organizations (they are largely Palm Beach retirees who think there’s an anti-Semite behind every door) are inclined to see Israel as perpetually besieged by Jew haters.  They are disinclined to wrestle with the occupation’s impact on Israeli democracy.

Today there are two kinds of mainstream American Jewish organizations:  those whose tolerance for the occupation is warping their historic commitment to democratic ideals and those with no commitment to democratic ideals.  The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the President’s Conference support the Israeli government rather than Zionism as a set of ideals.

One hundred years ago, when America’s major Jewish organizations were battling child labor, or fifty years ago, when they were battling segregation, the leaders of American Jewry would have been horrified to imagine a day when the most powerful Jewish organizations were indifferent to whether democratic values governed American life and whether those values governed the Jewish State.  For the framers of Israel’s Declaration of Independence, Jewish sovereignty was precious not only as a means of Jewish survival but as a means of achieving liberal ideals.

Chapter 3: Should American Jews Criticize Israel

American Jewish leaders offer several arguments when asked whether or not they have the right to criticize Israel:

a)     They can’t criticize Israel because they don’t live there

b)     They can’t criticize Israel because Israel is a democracy and American Jews should respect the procedural legitimacies of Israel’s policies.  There is something perverse about citing Israeli democracy in order to condone an occupation that imperils Israeli democracy.

c)     They can’t criticize Israel because Israel’s existence is being delegitimized around the world, and American Jews must stand in its defense, rather than join the lynch mob.

But no government has questioned Israel’s right to exist; the American Jewish Establishment should learn that Israel’s legitimacy is bound up with its democratic character.  The less democratic Zionism becomes in practice, the more will Zionism itself be questioned.  Not all critics of Israel are anti-Semitic or anti-Israel.  If Israel is held to a “higher standard,” it is because it is regarded as a Western nation.

It is important for the Jewish Establishment to realize that Jews not only can use power to survive, but they can also abuse power.  It is true that Israel faces threats and that anti-Semitism exists, but Jews today wield power in Israel and the US.  With power comes the temptation to abuse it, and using the charge of anti-Semitism to shield Israel from criticism about the way it uses power is the best way to ensure that Israel does misuse its power.

Chapter 4: Is the Occupation Israel’s Fault

The Occupation is thought by many Israelis to be either a moral right or a security necessity, a burden Israel would love to relinquish but cannot.  This “burden” has drawn Israelis into strange positions; for example, defining Jerusalem as Israel does currently is like extending the borders of Rome all the way to Naples and then insisting that because of the city’s sanctity to Catholics, the entire territory must remain under Vatican control.

Israel’s greatest external threats will come from rockets and terrorists.  Occupying the West Bank is a poor way to guard against those threats.  Sophisticated missile systems are the best way to combat the threats Israel does face.  Occupying the West Bank offers less protection at a higher cost.

The less likely the establishment of a Palestinian state appears, the more Palestinian security officers will be seen as lackeys of the Occupation. Palestinians will do a better job of safeguarding security if they have their own state.  The more that individuals enjoy the benefits of peace, the easier it is to combat those who jeopardize it.

American Jews say that it is reckless to push Israel to relinquish the West Bank when fury is mounting against the Jewish state; however, the key driver of that fury is the Occupation.  Making the Occupation permanent will destroy the dream of a democratic Jewish state.

The settlement issue was probably the single most important destroyer of the Oslo agreement.  The Second Intifada erupted because Israelis believed that Barak was trying to end the Occupation, but Palestinians felt it closing in on them.  Israel doesn’t want to end the Occupation and doesn’t want to stop the settlements.  According to Israeli scholar Yaakov Or, without tangible steps toward Palestinian self-determination “an explosion could be expected.”

The Gaza evacuation was not meant to create a Palestinian state, but to forestall one.  According to Dov Weissglass [Ariel Sharon’s bureau chief], the significance of the disengagement plan is that it freezes the peace process. “When you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and you prevent a discussion about the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem.  Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda.”

Sharon’s preferred solution to the Israeli conflict was drawn heavily from apartheid South Africa.  He envisioned ten non-contiguous Palestinian Bantustans [his term] with Israel occupying the rest of the West Bank.

To say that Israel’s embargo of Gaza caused the rocket fire of Hamas would be unfair, since Hamas had been killing Israeli civilians since the 1990s, and launching rockets since the start of the second Intifada in 2001.  But, while Israel’s policies did not cause the rockets, they provided Hamas a rationalization to keep launching them.

Accepting the ethical responsibilities of power requires accepting the way that the Occupation has shaped the behavior of [Israel’s] adversaries.

Chapter 5: The Jewish President

If Stephen Wise [one of the founders of American Zionism] were transported to the Oval Office to witness a meeting between the leaders of the American Jewish establishment and the President of the United States, he would find only one person whose view of Jewish identity, and of the Jewish state, approximating his own.  He would find only one person who espoused the liberal Zionism that he championed in his own time.  And it would be the black man with the Muslim name: Barack Hussein Obama.

Abraham Heschel said “Above all, the prophets remind us of the moral state of a people: Few are guilty, but all are responsible.”  After serving as Heschel’s secretary, Arnold Jacob Wolf followed in Heschel’s footsteps and challenged the narrative of perpetual victimhood that underpinned American Jewish institutional life.  He believed that American Jewish leaders were using “the Shoah as the model for Jewish destiny” with the result that “Never again” came to mean nothing more or less than “Jews first–and the devil take the hindmost.”  For Wolf, Zionism was not an alibi for whatever Jews did with power; it was a test of whether Jews love Israel as the prophets did.

When Obama returned to Chicago after law school, he settled in Hyde Park–Hyde Park was intellectual, racially integrated, heavily Jewish and hegemonically liberal.  The rabbi of the local synagogue was Arnold Jacob Wolf.  When Obama ran for the Illinois state senate in 1996, Wolf was one of his earliest and most prominent supporters.  By the time he ran for president twelve years later, the synagogue took a proprietary interest in his campaign.  Arnold Wolf stood at the geographic center of Obama’s Jewish world.  One of Obama’s mentors at Harvard was Martha Minow.  It was she who urged her father, Newton Minow, a partner at the Chicago firm of Sidley and Austin, to give Obama a job.  Obama spend only a summer at Sidley, but Newt became a key mentor.  During the Lebanon war, which he opposed, Minow told a meeting of the American Jewish Committee that while American Jews should donate to Israel, they should also “tell Israel our opinions about world affairs.  Where did we get this idea we needed to keep our mouths shut?”  The crowd almost threw him out.  Minow never attended another AJC event.  Obama was also profoundly influenced by other liberal Jews like Abner Mikva, Bettylu Saltzman, David Axelrod David Grossman and Amos Oz.  He has great affinity for the idea of a social justice that was embodied in the early Zionist movement and the Kibbutz.

During his run for president, Obama’s public statements on Israel grew more conventional, and so did the ideological character of his Middle East advisers.  Daniel Kurtzer (who had alienated American Jewish leaders by confronting the Israeli government about settlements during his ambassadorship) gave way to Dennis Ross (who believed that reassuring Israel, rather than pressuring it, would prove more successful in advancing Israeli Palestinian peace).  Obama muted his criticisms of Israeli policy and the American Jewish establishment.  Many of his longtime Jewish backers were euphoric.  But theirs was a discordant note.  Wolf was somber.  “He’s going to go very cautiously and not do anything that shakes up the Jewish community…  I’m not sure I agree with that, but that’s what’s going to happen.”

Chapter 6: The Monist Prime Minister

Obama, steeped in the Heschel/Wolf tradition of liberal Zionism while Netanyahu is firmly in the tradition of Ze’ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky, the spellbinding, romantic, brutal founder of revisionist Zionism.  What Jabotinsky didn’t like about Jews was their belief that they carried a moral message to the world.  In 1910 he said: “The Bible says ‘thou shalt not oppress a stranger; for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.’  Contemporary morality has no place for such childish humanism.” Jabotinsky denied that there was any universal moral benchmark against which Zionism could be judged.

Herzl, the founder of Zionism had hoped for a Venice, not a Boer state for Jews.  Jabotinsky praised the Boers.  For revisionists, wielding power without shame was the key not only to building a Jewish state, but to reclaiming the true, long-suppressed spirit of the Jews.  By crushing the Arabs, revisionists believed, Jews would also crush a malignant part of themselves.  For revisionists, wielding power without shame was the key not only to building a Jewish state, but to reclaiming the true long-suppressed spirit of the Jews.

Benzion Netanyahu (Benjamin Netanyahu’s father) served as Jabotinsky’s private secretary.  Benzion has said that Jabotinsky’s greatness lay partly in his willingness to cast off the prophetic shackle and assert the justice of [Jewish] claims irrespective of broader moral concerns.  Benzion admired the more radical Revisionists who disparaged the very idea of liberal democracy.  While he reviled the Arabs for their warlike “essence,” he urged Jews to recapture that essence themselves.  By mimicking gentiles and recasting Jewish history, Benzion hoped to realize the revisionist dream: a dream in which Jewish ethics no longer hindered Jewish power.  The influence of the father on the son is unmistakable.

Today, Benjamin Netanyahu subordinates external moral considerations to radical Zionism.[1]  Maintaining Israel’s Jewish majority by whatever means necessary is Zionist and thus beyond reproach.  Those who believe in Jewish majority but are restrained in their pursuit by universal principles like non-discrimination are “emasculated by moralism.”  At Oslo, Netanyahu’s plan was to give Palestinians four cantons (equal to about 40% of the West Bank) where they would enjoy not statehood, but autonomy over education, health care, and the like.  He was not seeking Palestinian acceptance; he was seeking Palestinian submission.  To the question, “Would the Palestinian Arabs accept autonomy?” he answered, “[T]hey would accept it if they knew Israel wouldn’t give them an independent state.”  In other words, once Israel crushes their spirit, the Palestinians will take whatever they get.   As a monist, Benjamin Netanyahu is allied to the settler movement and has helped to forge close ties to the American Jewish establishment.  Netanyahu destroyed the Oslo trust by demanding that Palestinians meet their obligations while he consistently minimized Israel’s own.  Netanyahu is his father’s son.

 Chapter 7: The Clash

The clash between Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu began before each was even elected.  Obama criticized the pro-Likud approach, and Netanyahu clearly favored Obama’s opponent, John McCain.  “McCain’s priorities are not likely to ruffle the US-Israel relationship, Obama’s are liable to strain the alliance,” said Michael Oran, whom Netanyahu later appointed ambassador to the United States.

But Obama won 78% of the Jewish vote in the election–a remarkable testament to the gulf between American Jewry and many of its communal leaders.  This win led Obama to believe that he could risk a public confrontation with the Israeli government and still retain the support of American Jews.  Obama’s appointment of George Mitchell as peace envoy was perceived as a break with the Clinton and Bush administrations’ deference to Israel.

Netanyahu refused to endorse the idea of a Palestinian state and made it clear that he considered negotiations aimed at creating one to be a waste of time.  Netanyahu’s hard line helped convince the White House to push for a settlement freeze.  When Obama declared “Settlements have to be stopped in order for us to move ahead,” Netanyahu was livid.  Israeli and American Jewish officials immediately marshaled arguments against the proposed freeze.

Obama and his advisers thought that Netanyahu would simply acquiesce to pressure from the United States, but Netanyahu helped deflect American pressure when he endorsed a Palestinian state by insisting 1) that Jerusalem remain the united capital of Israel 2) that the Palestinian leaders recognize Israel as a Jewish state, and 3) that Palestinians be granted no right of return).  Netanyahu’s father asserted “[My son] doesn’t support a Palestinian state, he supports the sorts of conditions that the Palestinians will never accept.”

Under heavy international pressure to utter the words “Palestinian state,” Netanyahu had simply affixed those words to his old map.  Buoyed by Netanyahu’s apparent moderation, American Jewish and right-wing Christian groups pushed back hard against Obama’s call for a settlement freeze.  Given the response, and the probability that this freeze wouldn’t happen, Obama could have exempted settlement goods from the US-Israel free trade agreement, or closed the IRS loophole that allows Americans to receive tax deductions for money they donate to settler groups.  But Obama retreated from the views he actually held and Netanyahu saw that Obama was a “paper tiger.”  The White House then tried to bribe the Israelis.  In exchange for a three-month extension of a partial settlement freeze, the administration reportedly offered to sell Israel twenty F-35 jets, to veto a declaration of Palestinian statehood at the UN, to offer long-term security guarantees in the event of a peace deal, and to never request another extension again.  In 2010, the Obama administration was focused on making amends for pursuing the policies in which Barack Obama actually believed.

A White House that had taken office determined to take a harder line against settlements than its predecessors was now offering to reward Israel for them in a way no administration ever had.  For Barack Obama, the retreat from the liberal Zionism he had learned in Chicago had only just begun.

Chapter 8:  The Humbling

By November 2010, both the peace process and the Obama administration’s Israel policy had collapsed; the White House abandoned its effort to bribe the Netanyahu government into extending the partial settlement freeze.  Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives.  The White House ultimately vetoed a UN resolution to cease all settlement activities that echoed Obama’s own beliefs.  In May 2011, the Arab League announced that the Palestinians [bypassing the US] would go to the UN in September to request international recognition of a Palestinian state along the 1967 lines.

On May 19, Obama made a speech that the White House officials did not believe was saying anything new.  The Israelis believed that the speech represented a dramatic shift in US policy.  At the heart of the Israel section of Obama’s speech lay a classic liberal Zionist formulation:  “The dream of a Jewish and democratic state cannot be fulfilled with permanent occupation.”  It also included a warning to Israel about the Palestinians’ efforts to win statehood at the UN:  “The international community is tired of an endless process that never produces an outcome.”

Abbas called Obama’s speech “a foundation with which we can deal positively.”  Netanyahu declared diplomatic war.  His office announced that “Prime Minister Netanyahu expects  to hear a reaffirmation from President Obama of US commitments made to Israel in 2004. …  Among other things, those commitments related to Israel not having to withdraw to the 1967 lines which are both indefensible and which would leave major Israeli population centers in Judea and Samaria beyond those lines.”  This was the beginning of one of the most extraordinary humiliations of a president by a foreign leader in modern American history.

On Friday, May 20, Netanyahu bluntly reprimanded the president saying, “We can’t go back to indefensible line, and we’re going to have to have a long term military presence along the Jordan.”  Obama was enraged, but publicly the White House had no choice but to endure the abuse.  Two days later, Obama went before AIPAC and said “The parties themselves–Israelis and Palestinians–will negotiate a border that is different than the one that existed on June 4, 1967.”  AIPAC was not responsive.  When, on 24 May, Netanyahu addressed the joint session of Congress, he insisted that

• Jerusalem must remain unified under Israeli control
• the Palestinians must recognize Israel as a Jewish state
• Israel must maintain a long term military presence along the Jordan
• Israel would annex the vast majority of settlers
• Israel would retain other places of critical  strategic and national importance

Although he said that a Palestinian state must be “big enough to be viable,” he did not suggest that it would be contiguous in the West Bank.  About 90% of those in the House gallery were AIPAC members.  Netanyahu was given 29 standing ovations.

The May 2011 clash proved to be the last time President Obama publically articulated the liberal Zionism that he had learned in Chicago.  After that, he effectively adopted Benjamin Netanyahu’s Zionism as his own.  In 2009, he had said “America does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements.”  In 2010, he had called for “extending the settlement freeze.”  In 2011, Obama went before the UN and publicly abandoned his critique of Israel’s occupation; he did not mention settlements at all.  Rabbi Arnold Wolf’s prediction about his old neighbor had proven correct.  Ultimately, Obama’s personal views had proven irrelevant.  When it came to Israel, he had accommodated himself to American political reality, a political reality largely created by American Jews.

Chapter 9: The Future

American Jewish politics remain dominated by an establishment that defines support for Israel more as support for the policies of the Israeli government than as support for the principles in Israel’s Declaration of Independence.  But the American Jewish establishment is dying.  The generation-crisis facing Jews today is a product of the different life experiences of older and younger American Jews.  Older Jews’ beliefs are built on stories of Jewish victimhood.  Young American Jews are far less likely to build their identity around victimhood.  They are not redefining Zionism, they are abandoning it.

Young American Jews can be divided into three groups:  a) the Orthodox, b) the secular, and c) the religious Jews who are not Orthodox.

a) While the Orthodox constitute only around 10% of American Jews, they constitute 21% of families affiliated with a synagogue, and 40% of the children in such families.  The massive surprise today is to realize that Orthodox Judaism has the brightest future.  Orthodoxy insists upon high standards of both secular and Jewish learning but Orthodox Jews are less likely to define their devotion to Israel as devotion to democracy.  While there is no evidence that most American Orthodox Jews hold bigoted views of Palestinians, Muslims, or Arabs, there is ample evidence that Orthodox institutions indulge in such bigotry.  Mordechai Eliyahu, a close associate of Meir Kahane, declared, “A thousand Arabs are not worth one yeshiva student.”  Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira declared it religiously permissible to kill gentile children because of the future danger that will arise if they are allowed to grow into evil people like their parents.  This sort of thinking produces a schizophrenic view of the Israeli government that is considered holy when it aids the settlement process and potentially satanic when it impedes it.  Some extremist Modern Orthodox rabbis in Israel and the US speculated that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin might be a traitor to the Jewish people [a crime] punishable by death under Jewish law for his willingness to cede parts of the West Bank to the Palestinians.

Many modern Orthodox leaders in recent decades have abandoned intellectual openness in favor of an insularity that bespeaks both fear and arrogance.  The fact that some leading rabbis teach that Jews and non-Jews are intrinsically different [engenders] indifference to non-Jewish dignity.  As things stand, it is the Illiberal Zionism of young Orthodox Jews that seems increasingly likely to define organized American Jewry in the coming years.

b)  Many young American [secular] Jews feel little Zionist attachment at all.  This group cares less and less about Judaism.  It is common to find older American Jews who rarely set foot in synagogue but feel an intense tribal bond to their fellow Jews.  Among younger non-Orthodox Jews, secular tribalism is in steep decline.  Secular Jewish culture has become less distinct from broader American culture.  What remains of secular Jewish identity is a set of values and tastes that other Americans–especially well-educated, secular, blue-state Americans–share.  Young secular Jews don’t have one standard for Israel and another for all other countries.  The same belief in equality under the law that makes them sympathetic to gays and lesbians in the US makes them sympathetic to Palestinians in the West Bank.

c) The third camp [consists of] young Jews who care deeply about being Jewish and find Israel’s policies agonizing.  Outside of the Orthodox world, it is these young women and men who will lead American Jewry in the coming decades.  They are not assimilating; they are reconciling liberal values and Jewish commitment in remarkable ways.  They are creating institutions that fuse religious commitment and liberal values.  Minyanim, for example, are communities of Jewish prayer and study that are led by the participants.  Many participants grew up Reform or Conservative but they want a style of worship that is more demanding and more participatory than is found in many synagogues.   Independent minyanim also attract young men and women who have been raised Orthodox but wish for greater intellectual openness and equal participation for minorities.  As second kind of institution to which committed young non-Orthodox Jews are flocking is to Jewish social justice groups.  The minyanim seek religious commitment that honors liberal ideals; the social justice organizations see their good works as an outgrowth of religious commitment.

Young Jewish leaders accept the reality of Jewish power and its ethical responsibilities.  Their efforts to meet the moral challenge of Jewish power are proving more effective than the holocaust rhetoric.  What ensures Jewish continuity is not victimhood, but Jewish knowledge as a vehicle for Jewish meaning.  Outside the Orthodox group, young Jews are finding that meaning by not evading the obligations that come with power but by facing them head on.  Acting ethically in an age of Jewish power means confronting not only the suffering that gentiles endure but the suffering that Jews cause.

Chapter 10: Conclusion

In its founding document, Israel pledged not merely to safeguard the Jewish people but also to cherish democratic ideals.  The document promised a Jewish state that, in the shadow of the greatest assault on human dignity in Jewish history, promised equal dignity to all of Israel’s inhabitants.  The day of the death of that state is not far off.  We tell ourselves that Israel is a democracy, but the West Bank is an ethnocracy.[2]  We have evaded this painful truth by evading Palestinians.

In the past, the character of the Jewish state mattered less than the fact that, at the end of the day, a despised and threatened people had somewhere to go.  Younger American Jews are less likely to see Israel as a refuge.  They are more likely to believe that what justifies Zionism is Israel’s democratic character.  For young American Jews, Zionism is what Israel does.  The less democratic Israel becomes, the less liberal American Jews will support it.

Resisting [illiberal Zionism] will require a deepening of two different kinds of commitments: the commitment to universal principles of democracy and human rights and our particular commitment to the Jewish people.

Defending Israeli democracy requires ensuring that the American Jews most committed to democratic values remain Jews and pass Judaism on to their children.  The biggest reason that American Jews care less about being Jewish is that we are ignorant of Judaism.  The best antidote to assimilation is education.  Better Jewish education is essential to American Jewish survival, but its impact will be slow, perhaps too slow to stop the settlement process that menaces Israel’s future.

In the short term, preserving Israeli democracy will require direct action against the occupation.  [Boycott, Divest, Sanction (BDS) is such an action.]  As a nonviolent movement, it turns the world’s attention away from terrorism, which has long undermined sympathy for the Palestinian cause.  The Israeli government is trying to stop the BDS movement by improving Israel’s image.  But Israel doesn’t have a public relations problem; it has a moral problem.  The challenge for Zionists who cherish Israeli democracy is to delegitimize Israel’s occupation while legitimizing Israel itself.  A boycott of the Israeli settlements is not enough.  A boycott must be twinned with an equally vigorous embrace of the people and products of democratic Israel.  We should oppose efforts to divest from all Israeli companies with the same intensity with which we support efforts to divest from companies located in the West Bank.  Boycotting anything inside the green line invites ambiguity about our ultimate goal, about whether we oppose Israel’s occupation or Israel’s existence.

The struggle to help the Jewish state return to its founding ideals is not a struggle for Israelis alone.  It is a struggle that calls all Jews because Israel is the great test of Judaism in our time.  If Israeli democracy falls, it will fall for all of us.  No matter where we live, we will spend our lives sifting through the political, ethical and theological rubble.  If, on the other hand, we help Israeli democracy survive, we will have met our obligation to those who come after and those who came before.  And like Stephen Wise, we too will be able to say, when we take the full measure of our lives, “I have lived to see the Jewish state.  I am too small for the greatness of the mercy which God has shown us.”

This week the Palestinian community and those who stand in solidarity with them commemorate the Nakhba — the Catastrophe — when 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced from their homes in Palestine.

Edward Said spoke eloquently that the Palestinian community’s permission to narrate their own story had been taken from them.  This continues a series in which we hope to lift up Palestinian voices which are less frequently heard in US circles.

Samia Khoury, whom many of us know from her work with Sabeel in Jerusalem, recently circulated a letter from her sister-in-law Laura* written in response to a letter to the editor in the Time Magazine issue of 16 April 2012.  The letter writer (Jeremy Slomnicki), says Samia, “emphasize[d] the need for Israel to defend itself because of ‘Palestinian Terrorism.’”  Laura, Samia says, did not respond to Time because “she wanted to say more words than allowed, yet she is hoping that in one way or another her letter will reach [the original letter writer].”

 I am writing this to remind [those who perceive that Israel needs to defend itself against ‘Palestinian terrorism’] that the first perpetrators of “Terrorism” in our region were the Jewish underground in Palestine during the British Mandate.  Israel did not exist then, but Jewish terrorism started before 1948.  I do not know how old you are, Mr. Slomnicki, but if you are under 60 years you probably need to learn about the bombing of the King David Hotel Wing of the British Secretariat in July 1946 in which one hundred Palestinians were blown up. Ironically the man behind the bombing was Menachem Begin who later became prime minister.  King David  was just the beginning followed by many other terrorist acts, such as the Semiramis hotel when a whole Palestinian family perished and the Palestine Post Offices. The list is endless, but fortunately it has been recorded by many historians and ironically some Jewish ones of conscience who had the courage to expose the truth.  But surely you must have heard of the “calculated” massacre of Deir Yassin, a peaceful village near  Jerusalem when a defenseless population was massacred, mostly  women and children. A gruesome sight that triggered a scare that led to the fleeing of many Palestinians from their homes.  After 1967 ‘The Jerusalem Post’ quoted Mr. Menachem Begin regarding Deir Yassin: “It was a blessing in disguise because it helped create the State of Israel.”  Of course those who did not flee were driven out at gun point in other parts of Palestine. 

With regard to your letter that Israel has the right to defend itself, we are really tired of this cliché.  Surely Israel has the right to defend itself and so does every nation, but not when Israel is the aggressor, the occupier, the oppressor and the fifth  strongest army in the world loaded with a stockpile of nuclear weapons.  So from whom is Israel defending itself?  From a defenseless, dispossessed, and occupied population separated by walls and check points while their homes are demolished and their farms and olive trees are razed.  Are you comparing a resistance of an area under siege by the use of  crude home-made missiles that might have injured a few people but  hardly caused any damage to the Israeli air strikes of populated Gaza that killed hundreds?  The attack on the Jenin camp was another act of “terrorism” and not by underground militias, but by the regular and sophisticated Israeli army.  So it is ironic that you should really be so worried about “poor” Israel’s need to defend itself.  And so is the implanting of the settlers and settlements on Palestinian land an act of terrorism, especially that those settlers are there as colonizers with the sole aim of driving  away the Palestinians. They raid their homes, block them from reaching their farms and groves and  use every means to deprive them from living a peaceful life. 

Because we Palestinians live under Israeli occupation, because our territories have been surrounded by separation walls, separating us from our Palestinian families and communities, and because we cannot move further than 20 miles without having to go through an Israeli military check point it is we Palestinians who have the right to defend ourselves.

*Laura’s personal story: “My family had to leave our home because the Jewish militias were making it difficult for us to stay.  We moved to an area which was strictly Palestinian and one of the more posh areas in Jerusalem.  Then one day at dusk in January 1948, an armored car carrying Haganah Zionist terrorists was announcing that all Arabs in the area have to leave now, now, now.  We panicked of course and moved again to another quarter also densely populated by Palestinians, only to find ourselves terrorized again and shot at by the Jewish militias.  I for one escaped a bullet while walking home one evening, but for the Grace of God.  Eventually things got worse for all of us, especially after the Deir Yassin massacre and many other terrorist acts.  So my father, worrying about our safety decided to leave and we took refuge in Birzeit where the family of my mother’s sister lived. We then moved on to Gaza where my father’s sisters were.  And eventually went on to Beirut because my brother was already studying at the American University there.”

 

The Christ at the Checkpoint Manifesto

March 5 – 9, Bethlehem, Palestine

This Statement and Manifesto were presented to the 600 conference participants at the Christ at the Checkpoint Conference, March 5 – 9, 2012, Bethlehem Bible College in Bethlehem, Palestine on the last day of the conference but were only agreed upon and endorsed by the Conference Organizers: John Angle, Alex Awad, Bishara Awad, Sami Awad, Steve Haas, Munther Isaac, Yohanna Katanacho, Manfred Kohl, Salim Munayer, Jack Sara, Stephen Sizer.

The Kingdom of God has come. Evangelicals must reclaim the prophetic role in bringing peace, justice and reconciliation in Palestine and Israel.

Reconciliation recognizes God’s image in one another.

Racial ethnicity alone does not guarantee the benefits of the Abrahamic Covenant.

The Church in the land of the Holy One, has born witness to Christ since the days of Pentecost. It must be empowered to continue to be light and salt in the region, if there is to be hope in the midst of conflict.

Any exclusive claim to land of the Bible in the name of God is not in line with the teaching of Scripture.

All forms of violence must be refuted unequivocally.

Palestinian Christians must not lose the capacity to self-criticism if they wish to remain prophetic.

There are real injustices taking place in the Palestinian territories and the suffering of the Palestinian people can no longer be ignored. Any solution must respect the equity and rights of Israel and Palestinian communities.

For Palestinian Christians, the occupation is the core issue of the conflict.

Any challenge of the injustices taking place in the Holy Land must be done in Christian love. Criticism of Israel and the occupation cannot be confused with anti-Semitism and the delegitimization of the State of Israel.

Respectful dialogue between Palestinian and Messianic believers must continue. Though we may disagree on secondary matters of theology, the Gospel of Jesus and his ethical teaching take precedence.

Christians must understand the global context for the rise of extremist Islam. We challenge stereotyping of all faith forms that betray God’s commandment to love our neighbors and enemies.

 

 

 

Judith Leder– academician, poet, potter, photographer, living in Fullerton, CA–wrote this summary of Mustafa Barghouti’s recent presentation in La Mirada, CA.

On March 2, 2012, Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, candidate for President of the Palestinian National Authority (2005), Nobel Peace prize nominee (2010), and founder the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees (1979), spoke to a packed house in La Mirada, a suburb of Los Angeles.  His disturbing and inspiring talk, “Consolidating Apartheid:  Current Facts on the Ground in Palestine,” touched on the Israeli  creation of Bantustands in the West Bank, the ineffectualness of the Palestinian Authority, and the social and economic deterioration of Palestine.  The current situation tells us what we knew all along: “The Oslo peace process produced no peace.”  Our response to the failed peace process should not be violence–which reveals emotional weakness.  Instead, our response should be passionate non-violence.  We need, said Barghouti, “a strategy that will make the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands unprofitable.”  Israel has stolen much of the Jordan Valley and is now making millions on the products that the Valley produces.  A world-wide commitment to BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions), coupled with an  effective and unified Palestinian leadership, would show the moral authority of the Palestinians as nothing else has. Only a day after Israeli troops raided two private Palestinian television stations in the West Bank city of Ramallah, seizing transmitters and other equipment, Barghouti said, with great composure: “Now is not the time for despair, but the time for work.”  Read “Peaceful Protest Can Free Palestine,” Barghouti’s powerful opinion piece in the NY Times of Feb 21, 2012: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/22/opinion/peaceful-protest-can-free-palestine.html

These articles were printed in the Philadelphia Inquirer 01/29/12

Point Counterpoint: Aim to promote human rights of the Palestinians.
By Ali Abunimah
READER FEEDBACK

I am coming to the University of Pennsylvania this week to incite violence against the State of Israel – pro-Israel groups and commentators have contended – and, along with hundreds of students and other speakers who will attend the 2012 National Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Conference, to engage in an “act of warfare.”
Nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, we are coming together to push forward an inclusive movement that supports nonviolent action to promote the human rights of the Palestinian people, because only full respect for these rights can lead to peace. Today, millions of Palestinians live without basic rights under Israeli rule. This intolerable situation is at the root of problems that affect the whole world.
People everywhere, whether they consider themselves “pro-Israel” or “pro-Palestinian” or both, want to see justice and peace. Yet, in recent years, the U.S.-brokered peace process has seen failure after failure.
Amid election-year politics, President Obama and his Republican rivals are pledging ever more unconditional support for Israel, even as Israel openly flouts U.N. resolutions and U.S. policy by building Jewish-only settlements on Palestinian land and depriving Palestinians of their rights, including hundreds of children who languish in Israeli military prisons.

There’s no chance that the United States will use the billions of dollars it gives Israel in aid as leverage to compel an end to these practices and respect for Palestinian rights. So should we just give up?
The answer from Palestinian civil society is a clear “no.” All of us can play a role in ending this terrible situation and securing equal rights for Palestinians rather than superior rights for Jewish Israelis.
In 2004, the International Court of Justice in the Hague, Netherlands, ruled that the wall Israel built across Palestinian lands in the occupied West Bank was illegal and was aimed at confiscating more land. Frustrated by the inaction of governments, 170 Palestinian civil society organizations, including labor unions, student groups, and cultural and social organizations, came together to issue the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) on Israel in 2005.

Modeled explicitly on the tactics used to help end apartheid in South Africa, Palestinians urge that Israel be sanctioned until it respects Palestinian rights and international law in three specific ways: an end to the occupation of all Palestinian lands seized by Israel in 1967; full equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel; and full respect for the rights of Palestinian refugees.

This call doesn’t prescribe a specific political solution – for example, a single democratic state, or a two-state solution – but it recognizes that full rights have to be at the core of any resolution. And implementing these rights does not threaten any legitimate rights of Israelis, unless one considers discrimination against Palestinians simply because they are not Jews to be a “right.” In just the same way, granting full legal and political rights to African Americans in the United States did not threaten any legitimate rights of white citizens.
The all-too-frequent claim that the BDS goal is to “destroy Israel” or “incite violence” – rather than win rights – or that it is motivated by “anti-Semitism,” is just as offensive and simplistic as saying that participants in the Montgomery bus boycott wanted to “destroy Alabama” and simply “hated white people.”

And just like that celebrated bus boycott, BDS is not an end in itself; it is a tactic designed to bring about change. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote in support of a divestment effort on behalf of Palestinian rights, “We could not have won our freedom in South Africa without the solidarity of people around the world who adopted nonviolent methods to pressure governments and corporations to end their support for the apartheid regime. Faith-based groups, unions, students, and consumers organized on a grassroots level and catalyzed a global wave of divestment, ultimately contributing to the collapse of apartheid.”

But let us remember that in the 1980s, not everyone supported sanctions on South Africa. President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher were strongly opposed to sanctions and insisted on “constructive dialogue” that went nowhere, just like the U.S.-brokered Middle East peace process. What helped turn the tide in the United States was a young member of Congress who broke ranks with Reagan to support boycott and sanctions on the apartheid regime. His name was Newt Gingrich.

Tragically, Gingrich today notoriously contends that the Palestinians are an “invented people” – a way of suggesting they have no rights, and certainly no claim to the land they’ve tended since long before Israel existed.
As the growth of such extremist rhetoric diminishes the chances for a constructive U.S. role, it is all the more important that we as citizens take action. That’s what our conference is about, and everyone who shares a belief in human equality is welcome to attend.

Ali Abunimah is the author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. The BDS conference is scheduled for Friday to Sunday at the University of Pennsylvania. To attend Ali Abunimah’s keynote address at 7 p.m. Saturday, visit http://pennbds.org. Admission is free to members of the Penn community; $5 for others.

Point Counterpoint: Anti-Israeli agenda expected at Penn conference
By R. James Woolsey and Jonathan Schanzer
READER FEEDBACK

The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a complex issue, one that deserves serious scholarship and open, civil debate. Expect to see none of that next weekend on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, where the Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) movement is staging a “conference.”

Instead, as we should have learned from many past BDS events at colleges around the country, this will be an exercise in disinformation and propaganda, a call for political and economic warfare, and an attempt to foment hatred of Israel. That is obviously bad for Israelis. It is – perhaps less obviously – bad for Palestinians as well.
One simple fact that will be avoided next weekend: Almost all Israelis agree, in principle, to a “two-state solution.” They favor the Jewish state and a Palestinian state living as neighbors and living in peace. Palestinian leaders have explicitly rejected that approach.

Hamas, which rules Gaza, is openly committed to annihilating Israel. The Hamas Covenant states clearly that there can be “no solution . . . except through Jihad,” adding, in case there is any misunderstanding, that the goal is to “obliterate” Israel.

The Palestinian Authority, which rules on the West Bank, is generally thought of as more moderate. But PLO official Nabil Shaath said clearly: “The story of ‘two states for two peoples’ means that there will be a Jewish people over there and a Palestinian people here. We will never accept this.” Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas recently added: “Don’t order us to recognize a Jewish state. We won’t accept it.”
Also, as the Arab-Israeli journalist Khaled Abu Toameh recently reported: “Abbas’ Fatah faction has declared war on all informal meetings between Israelis and Palestinians.” The Abbas/Fatah objection to such meetings, Toameh explained, is that they promote ” ‘the culture of peace’ and are designed to ‘normalize’ relations between Israelis and Palestinians.” Palestinian leaders can’t have that, can they? You think any of this will come up at the Penn BDS conference?

The timing of this event makes it especially jarring: At this moment, just across Israel’s northern border, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad is slaughtering Syrian dissidents. Since March, as many as 6,000 people have been killed. Both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have said that Syrian forces have committed “crimes against humanity.” The United Nations reports “patterns of summary execution, arbitrary arrest, enforced disappearance, [and] torture, including sexual violence.”

Even the Arab League, long known for inaction when member states violate international laws, has sent observers into the country in an unsuccessful effort to halt the violence and, finally, suspended Syria’s membership. For years, Assad has been host to Hamas and patron of Hezbollah. Assad has used Hezbollah mercenaries from Lebanon against Syrian soldiers who refuse to fire on unarmed civilians. Do the BDS advocates support international sanctions against the Assad dictatorship? Will such issues even be discussed next weekend? Why not?

Also conspicuously absent from the BDS agenda is the regime that rules and oppresses Iranians. After blatantly fraudulent elections in June 2009 handed a second presidential term to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, security forces violently suppressed Iran’s opposition, the Green Movement, whose members poured into the streets in protest. The regime’s storm troopers – the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – arrested at least 4,000, while authorities executed hundreds. Unknown numbers of protesters were beaten, raped, and tortured. The reason we don’t know the exact numbers is because Iran has a stranglehold on its media.

Iran represses religious minorities, ethnic minorities, gays, and anyone who dares challenge the country’s extremist religious code. Iran has been designated as a state sponsor of terrorism since 1984. Its government supports, arms, and instructs Hamas and Hezbollah – to an even greater extent than Syria.

The government in Tehran is responsible for training, arming, and financing groups in Iraq and Afghanistan that have killed and maimed hundreds of American soldiers. It has ordered a series of terrorist attacks against Americans and other Westerners over the last 30 years, not to mention the assassinations of Iranians in exile abroad. Recently, the Iranian government was implicated in a failed plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States while he dined in a restaurant in Washington.

And then there is the issue at the core of America’s current crisis with Iran: the government’s unwavering efforts to build a nuclear weapon in violation of agreements it has signed, all the while threatening genocide against Israel and vowing that “a world without America . . . is achievable.” Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently said he was convinced Iran’s rulers would have “no hesitation of using nuclear weapons if they see them achieving their religious or political purposes.”

The United States has tried everything from “engagement” to passing oil sanctions, and it is now implementing sanctions against Iran’s central bank. Do those who advocate sanctions against Israel support such measures against Iran’s rulers?

Why is it, do you think, that the BDS movement is unconcerned about Arab victims when the oppressors are Arabs, and Muslim victims when the oppressors are Muslim? Why do they focus only on Israelis who would like nothing more than to achieve peace with their neighbors and who are willing to make painful sacrifices to achieve a lasting settlement of the conflict?

R. James Woolsey was director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 1993 to 1995 and now is chairman of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD).
Jonathan Schanzer is vice president for research at FDD.
Contact the writers via www.defenddemocracy.org.