Risking failure in the accounting of the soul

On Sept. 17, the Trib published a letter from me responding to Shmuly Yanklowitz's message about ethical self-review over the Jewish New Year:

Editor,

I appreciate Shmuly Yanklowitz’s op-ed (“This Rosh Hashana, let’s commit to repairing the injuries of injustice,” Sept. 11) elaborating the Jewish New Year practice of moral and ethical self-evaluation. “Jewish or not, we all find ourselves asking the question: How do we make restitution for our complicity in injustices that were beyond our control?” Yanklowitz wrote.

 

The reminder that the moment has come for each of us to consider our own responsibilities in a world deeply in need of repair couldn’t be more timely. On the same day, the Trib ran an editorial about the challenge that thousands of recent migrants present to Chicago’s willingness to truly embody the values of a sanctuary city. Will we, as the Torah commands, welcome the stranger?

 

Nor should we, as Yanklowitz points out, limit our self-examination to harms directly caused by our own actions or inactions. “We’re all, to one extent or another, complicit in historical injustices that we’ve indirectly benefited from…we are obligated to do what we can to fix [the damage].” Specifically citing Christian nationalism and white supremacy, Yanklowitz continues, “directly or indirectly, we often benefit from ideologies and movements that press people down.”

 

Unfortunately, Yanklowitz’s op-ed ignores one area that most American Jews prefer to leave unexamined. If one is truly making a complete moral and ethical self-examination, failing to consider the fate of Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories, and the role of American Jewish congregations in supporting Israeli policies that oppress Palestinians, confiscate their lands, and subject them to lethal military occupation, means to fail in the “accounting of the soul” that the Jewish high holidays require of us.

 

Jeff Epton

Bronzeville

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.

Israel and the Path to Self-Destruction

Biden on Israel is a waste of everybody's time, even AIPAC

So Joe Biden wants the main pro-Israel pressure group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), to know that Barack Obama is serious when he says that he will do whatever is necessary to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons ("Biden seeks to reassure AIPAC of loyalty"). But what Joe Biden wants AIPAC to know falls far short of what Biden himself probably knows and definitely needs to say:

Israel is on a path to self-destruction and has been on that path since, oh, say, its founding.

Citing the opinions of four former directors of Shin Bet, Israel's security service, I described the problems with that path in "End the Silence" for the Nov. 21, 2003 issue of In These Times. The immediate stimulus for the piece was the publication by an Israeli newspaper of an interview with the former security chiefs.

At the time, Israel was in the process of building a security fence to separate the occupied Palestinian territories on the West Bank from Israeli settlements established in the territories. A quote pulled from Yedioth Aharanoth cited the opinion of Avraham Shalom, head of Shin Bet from 1980 to 1986: “[The Fence] creates hatred, it expropriates land and annexes hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to the state of Israel. The result is that the fence achieves the exact opposite of what was intended. … We must once and for all admit that there is another side, that it has feelings and that it is suffering, and that we are behaving disgracefully. Yes, there is no other word for it: disgracefully. … We have turned into a people of petty fighters using the wrong tools."

In 2003, when Shalom began to speak out, there were 401,820 Israelis living in the settlements. Ten years earlier, when Israeli and Palestinian representatives signed the first of the Oslo peace accords, there were less than 300,000 Israelis living on the West Bank, in East Jerusalem and Gaza. By last year that number had reached 550,000 and is still climbing.

But the former leaders of Shin Bet are still speaking out. In The Gatekeepers, a documentary directed by Israeli filmmaker Dror Moreh, the four Shin Bet chiefs originally named in the Yedioth Aharanoth article are joined by two others. The film lays out their critique of Israeli policy and the occupation of the Palestinian territories. As a group they are clear, Israeli policy must change.

Avrahom Shalom damns the occupation. "...it's a brutal occupation force," he says, "similar to the Germans in World War II.

Ya'akov Peri, head of Shin Bet from 1988 to 1994 said that being the chief security officer and enforcing Israeli policy in the Occupied Territories was deeply affecting. "These moments end up etched deep inside you and, when you retire, you end up becoming a bit of a leftist," he said.

The brutality of the Israeli occupation can't possibly be news to Biden, who served in the Senate for 36 years, part of that time as the chair of the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee. He is also likely to be quite familiar with the details of international law forbidding the establishment of settlements on occupied territories. Biden may even be aware that the state of Israel was created by the unilateral action of Jewish settlers living in Palestine after Palestinians and neighboring Arab states rejected a United Nations resolution that aimed to internationalize Jerusalem and create separate Jewish and Palestinian states.

Despite all this, Biden chose to appear before AIPAC and pander. "We will continue to oppose any efforts to establish a state of Palestine through unilateral actions," Biden said, referring to Palestinian efforts to seek U.N. recognition that the United States has staunchly opposed. "There is no shortcut to peace."

Of course, there is nothing unique about Biden's refusal to address what is really at stake in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Supporters of Israel routinely focus on the hostility and alleged anti-semitism of Arabs, in general, and Palestinians, in particular. But the hatred of people who consider themselves to be conquered, subjugated and dispossessed should come as no surprise to the conquerers, however far events may have receded into history. That the occupation of Palestinian territory continues is a fresh and daily reminder of injustice. That Palestinians frequently conflate Jews and Israelis in ways that supporters of Israel suggest is evidence of anti-semitism should not be a surprise, either. After all, Israelis and Jews frequently describe the theocratic state of Israel, which in law and in practice treats Arabs and Jews differently, as a democracy.

But misrepresenting the reality will not make a theocracy and a military occupation the path to a safe harbor in the Middle East. That way lies only pain and loss for Israelis and Palestinians alike.

Post Editorial Way Wrong on Israel

Clueless in the Capitol

Today's Washington Post editorial: "Rash Rhetoric (as it is titled in the print edition)" pretends to balance in blaming both Israelis and Palestinians for creating significant obstacles to peace negotiations. The subtitle for the print version of the editorial cites "harmful words from all sides on proposed Israeli settlements" for the current stalemate.

Apparently in order to make it clear that the Post plays no favorites, the piece kicks off with a shot at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his tactics in the current Israeli election campaign; he has pursued "a familiar tactic: a flurry of announcements of new construction in Jewish settlements in Jerusalem and the West Bank." Criticism of Israel and Netanyahu for announcing further construction plans is "appropriate," the Post grudgingly admits, "but the reaction is also counterproductive because it reinforces two mistaken but widely held notions: that the settlements are the principle obstacle to the deal and that further construction will make a Palestinian state impossible."

And how do we know that the two "widely held notions" are wrong? Because, the Post says so. "...the Jerusalem neighborhoods where new construction was announced last month were conceded to Israel by Palestinian negotiators in 2008." Never mind that the negotiations were stillborn, the deed is done. The editorial also notes that the vast majority of Israelis living in settlements established on Palestinian territory could be added to the current state of Israel with the additional transfer of "just more than 4 percent of the West Bank."

The paper apparently sees 4 percent of the West Bank as a mere quibble and is ultimately untroubled by the notion that Netanyahu's announcement is a campaign ploy. The rhetoric that really bugs the Post is U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon's despairing observation that further expansion of Israeli settlements may doom peace talks. British Foreign Secretary William Hague's quite similar comments are equally offensive to the Post.

"If [U.N.] Security Council members are really interested in progress toward Palestinian statehood, they will press [Palestinian President Mahmoud] Abbas to stop using settlements as an excuse for intransigence--and cool their own overheated rhetoric," the editorial concludes.

The problem here is that the Post's pretensions of journalistic objectivity, which allow them to call for cooler rhetoric on both sides, actually require nothing from Israelis and everything from Palestinians. After all, the establishment of the settlements on occupied Palestinian territory are and have been unequivocally a violation of international law. And, though continuing expansion of the settlements may not "make a Palestinian state impossible," as a continuing provocation they do come dangerously close to making negotiations impossible.

Who Is In Charge of US Israel Policy?

Letter to the Washington Post

By my count, I've written 24 letters to the Post, one has been published so far. This is letter #23:

I know people who believe that US foreign policy is substantially determined by Zionists. I don’t share their opinion and frequently argue that it is counter-productive to focus on a Zionist “cabal” as the driver of American policy.

But two articles in Saturday’s Post provide substantial basis for argument that our Middle East policy is in the hands of people who are exceedingly deferential to Israeli wishes. “Israel Finds Strength in Its Missile Defenses” outlines the way advanced US military technologies are made available to Israel. In addition, the two countries conduct joint military exercises focused largely on Israeli needs and US readiness to “...stand behind Israel if it came under attack.”

All of this aid is only a small portion of the billions of dollars Israel (the number one US foreign aid recipient) receives annually in the form of grants and loan guarantees. It also occurs in the context of Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territory and the relentless Israeli annexation, in the form of settlements, of Palestinian land. As “Envoy’s Mideast Trip Ends Without Accord” reports, George Mitchell’s recent diplomatic visit ended “…without reaching an agreement with Israel over limits on Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank.”

The spectacle of the world’s sole superpower giving Israel billions of dollars a year while begging fruitlessly that Israel end its occupation of Palestine, end its annexations, and end its violations of international law, inevitably raises questions about who is in charge of US foreign policy. It should come as no surprise that the easy answer for some is “Zionists.”

Jeff Epton