Adventures with Zionists

An experience not to be missed

The last six weeks of escalating Palestinian-Israeli calamity has introduced me to a whole new adrenaline-driven experience, to wit, confronting others on Facebook with whom I have a fundamental disagreement about what Israel has been doing to Palestinians since its founding.

I won't say that the sometimes intractable nature of my differences with others persuades me that there is no hope, but it has convinced me that I don't have the skills to negotiate some of the vast differences of opinion that I've encountered.  I'd like to keep responding to their arguments, but by now I have the feeling that with some of them a lot of what I say is falling on deaf ears. I can't deny that our continuing and repetitious verbal disputes are tiring.

Perhaps I flatter myself excessively when I say that I think I'm pretty good at focusing on substance, but I am aware that many of the people with whom I disagree feel that I'm the problem. Some have quite purple feelings about who I am and what the f*ck I'm saying. But it's not like I haven't run into an absolute buzz saw of opposition before about my position in favor of Palestinian self-determination.

Natan Sharansky comes to town

In Ann Arbor years ago--the summer of 1986 to be exact--I was approached by a representative of the UM-campus branch of Hillel, a national Jewish youth organization which could legitimately be described as Zionist. He wanted me to participate in a program featuring Natan Sharansky, at the time (and forever after) the most famous of Russian refuseniks.

Sharansky was regarded by the Reagan administration and by many American Jews as both a symbol and exemplar of human rights activism. He had suffered through harassment and long imprisonment in the Soviet Union and had finally been released and allowed to leave that country in February, 1986.

American Jewish organizations had managed to get Sharansky to tour the U.S. and appear in a months-long series of events designed to focus on the plight of Russian Jews as an international human rights issue and to highlight Israel's willingness to accept any number of Russian Jews who might be willing to make a new home there. It seems a safe assumption that the sponsoring organizations also believed that Sharansky's story would play well in the media, in general, and keep the mainstream of American Jewry invested in Israel as a second home for Jews around the world.

As a member of the Ann Arbor City Council at the time, and a staff member of the American Friends Service Committee, I was publicly identified with a wide variety of human rights issues, among them equal rights for lesbians and gay men, free access to reproductive services for low-income women, and an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. My version of human rights seemed unlikely to win friends among an audience gathered to greet Sharansky. I said so to the young man from Hillel who invited me to the event.

Under almost any circumstances, I should have been pretty low on the list of likely suspects for introducing Sharansky. But it was summer, and Michigan Senators Carl Levin and Don Riegle were out of the state at the time. Equally unwilling to help was Ann Arbor's representative in the House, Republican Carl Purcell, whose staff didn't know who Sharansky was and who were easily alarmed by phrases like "human rights."

In desperation, the well-intentioned Hillel kid had called the mayor of Ann Arbor, Jerry Jernigan, another Republican. Given that Sharansky had celebrity bona fides on an international scale, the mayor's office was pretty much the bottom of the celebrity barrel. But when the kid mentioned human rights, Jernigan couldn't see his way clear to help out, either. "Epton," Jernigan said. "You need Epton. He's into that stuff."

So there it was. I tried to explain to the young man, who was shouldering the organizing load for the event because Hillel's director was also out of town, that his idea of pairing me with Sharansky wasn't going to work out well, but he insisted. "I think the Jewish community is mature enough to respect differences of opinion about human rights," he said.

I told him that I didn't think he fully understood what might happen and invited him to my house for a beer and a more detailed discussion about the can of worms he proposed to open. He accepted the invitation, showing up with a second member of his group. We made a congenial threesome and drinking steadily and to great and positive effect--I was anyway--I repeated in detail what I had told him before. My recitation went something like this:

"The audience that's going to show up to see Natan Sharansky, is not only not going to be interested in me or my expansive definition of human rights, they're going to be pissed off by a lot of what I say, and they're going to be pissed off that I'm standing there between them and Natan Sharansky and pissed off that they're not going to see him or hear him until I shut up and go away."

The rest of the conversation went more or less like this: me, socialist and avid supporter of Palestinian self-determination; Sharansky, refusenik, also Zionist hero and, in my humble opinion, Reaganite tool.

The kid, who was actually the president of the Hillel U-M campus chapter, was cheerful, positive and optimistic. He seemed to love how worked up I was, though it was obvious that neither he nor his friend had not heard all that many dissenting views about Israel from other Jews. He insisted that  Sharansky and I, our political differences and shared values, would be great for fostering discussion within the local Jewish community. His buddy concurred.

"Okay, then."

I came up with a speech 12 minutes long. It was going to exceed my slot on the agenda by two minutes, but I figured I would get away with it. I was wrong.

At the appointed time I appeared on the stage at U-M's Hill auditorium and began speaking. I had gotten about as far as "the concept of human rights should be seamless..." maybe two minutes into my speech when a scattering of coughs erupted around the theater. A little confused by the interruption, I stopped, but the coughing grew and spread. An epidemic.

I kept speaking, even backtracked out of a concern that some in the audience might have missed what I had been saying. That this was a completely clueless assessment of the situation became entirely obvious within the next minute as some people in the audience began standing and yelling for me to get off the stage.

Finally tuned in to the fact that reactions I had predicted earlier had manifested, I was still mildly surprised. At that point, after all, I hadn't yet mentioned Palestinians. I was still building a case for a definition of universal human rights, but the crowd had already accurately intuited where I was heading.

Someone approached me from behind as I stood at the podium. It was the Hillel kid. "You should wrap it up," he said, in a polite indoor voice. I could hear him, but the crowd had come down with a coughing fit and wouldn't have heard him if he had been screaming at me.

"You invited me to be here. You should be telling them to be more courteous," I said as he turned and walked away.

Looking back out at the audience, which had already transitioned to crowd on its way to becoming a mob, I jumped ahead to my commitment to self-determination for Palestinians and my belief that no definition of human rights that included Soviet Jews and excluded Palestinians was valid. At this point, the mob was screaming for metaphorical blood, people were standing. Faces contorted with anger, they were shaking their fists.

I wasn't frightened; I felt oddly detached, but also believed that even though the rage in the auditorium was a palpable thing, I was in no real danger. I recognized a Hillel board member who had legally changed his name to an Israeli-style name intended to convey his fierceness and his descent from Judah Maccabee, or some other legendary Jewish fighter. In the performance unfolding before me, he was definitely a lead actor.

I was again approached from behind. "You should leave," someone said.

I did. I walked off the stage into the audience. The crowd quieted, parted enough to let me through, and watched me leave.

Outside, it was still summer, still light. The broad stone stairway down from Hill Auditorium was empty. I felt somehow liberated. Three friends, who had been in the auditorium but had left before me were waiting at the bottom of the stairs. One of them, Rose Hochman, was crying. She hugged me. We all agreed that I had done what I had to do.

The next day, the debacle was a front-page story (below the fold) in the Ann Arbor News. I do regret that I never saved a copy of the story, or of the headline, at least. I'd like to get a t-shirt made emblazoned with "Epton driven from lion's den" positioned dead center on the shirt.

Jennifer Rubin's confusion has consequences

Conflating opposition to Israeli policy with anti-Semitism is a very big error

Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, hired to fill a gap in the paper's outreach to young, "hip" conservatives, never gets much more than a 300 word space on the Post's print edition op-ed page. This is a virtue, since that limit appears to be congruent with the limit of her ability to sustain a written rationale for her opinions. Rubin's little bits also provide a certain amount of insight into whatever issue might be exercising young conservatives these days. Overall, it's not much of anything that might be helpful to the Republic.

Now, Rubin has put us on notice that Chuck Hagel, President Obama's nominee for Secretary of Defense, is an anti-Semite. This, Rubin tells us in "The Hagel litmus test," is because Hagel uses phrases like "the Jewish lobby," and has declared "that he is not 'the senator from Israel.'" Such statements by Hagel, Rubin adds, amount to the "embrace [of] the world's oldest hatred."

Actually, I agree with one likely implication of Rubin's comments: that Hagel shouldn't have used the phrase "Jewish lobby" when he was referring to those who lobby on behalf of Israel. To call them the Israel lobby is no less descriptive than "Jewish lobby," and it has the added advantage of being focused on policy.

I have a one-time friend, Henry Herskovitz, born and raised Jewish, who spends most of his waking hours making whatever argument he can on behalf of self-determination for Palestinians to whatever audience is available to him. In the past I have counseled him against referring to the "Jewish lobby." But he has been, and is, adamant that the phrase captures the truth: it is American Jews who are the bulwark against any shift in U.S. policy that would include an acknowledgement of the continuing injustices suffered by Palestinians during and after the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel.

I don't disagree with that point. But my argument is that it is not enough to be right. It is just as important to be heard and to take a position that does not drop the nuances. And there are plenty of those.

Israel is by far the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid, historically. Current aid, over $3 billion annually, is mostly military aid (go here, to read a discussion of then larger cost to the U.S. of more than a half-century of support for Israel). And, unlike other recipients of military aid, who must use the whole amount to buy weapons systems and other war materials from American military contractors, Israel has the right to use a portion of that aid to buy from its own weapons manufacturers, a gift that has allowed Israel to build a military export industry of its own.

Such American generosity to Israel is a constant, and could be delayed or withheld to force Israel to stop building settlements on Palestinian territory and, even, dismantle some of the settlements that have become "facts on the ground" and are, themselves, huge obstacles to peace negotiations. Despite the obvious nature of the leverage the U.S. could apply to change Israeli policy, a little research could turn up plenty of editorials arguing that the U.S. has no ability to force the Netanyahu administration to bargain.

American aid to Israel also comes under less political fire than did, say, foreign aid to the now-deposed Mubarak regime in Egypt or to the current regime, headed by the Islamic Brotherhood; these governments, the argument goes, are undemocratic and/or fundamentalist, and not worthy of American aid. But the truth is that Israel, too, is a theological state, albeit a Jewish one, and provides far more privileges, both de jure and de facto, to its Jewish citizens than to its Arab citizens.

Indeed, it is AIPAC (American-Israel Political Action Committee) and other Jewish organizations that seem to wield the most clout in support of such an unbalanced policy toward Israel and the Palestinians. At least in that respect, Herskovitz's position on the Jewish lobby makes sense. Further, he has argued, it is the use of the Holocaust by Jews to justify the creation of Israel and to shield Israel from criticism that has silenced non-Jews in the U.S. who might otherwise oppose Israeli policy.

But this position ignores two very important factors. One is that apocalyptic Christians in this country, and there are far more of them than there are Jews, are themselves quite keen on the return of the Jews to Palestine. That, after all, is a necessary prerequisite to the return of the Messiah. These Christians may not care what actually happens to Israel and the Jews in the final reckoning, but it is important to them that some Jews be where they are now, in their biblical homeland, regardless of what their presence might mean to Palestinians. Some such Christians are elected members of Congress. The exclusive focus on the activity of Jewish lobbyists is a strategic error--it allows others who support the Jewish state to completely evade responsibility for policies they wholeheartedly support.

The second factor is that a large number of American Jews, perhaps a majority, do not support Israeli policy without regard to the consequences. Many Jews, this one, for example, even recognize that the creation of the state of Israel, in absolute violation of international law, is the original sin that poisons Palestinian-Israeli relations.

But when the Chuck Hagel's of this world use "Jewish lobby" instead of blander, but equally precise, language, the Jennifer Rubin's of this world get to shift the discussion from Israel's aggressions against Palestine to contemplation of anti-Semitism. That's when justice for Palestinians gets gaveled off the agenda.