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

The Grim Weather Ahead for Palestinians

 

Thomas Friedman’s recent piece (Aug. 13), in the New York Times, “A Geopolitical Earthquake Just Hit the Mideast,” is an almost complete survey of the various effects of the Israel-United Arab Emirates on featured players in the Arab-Israeli conflict. “Just go down the scorecard, and you see how this deal affects every major party in the region,” Friedman writes, “with those in the pro-American, pro-moderate Islam, pro-ending-the-conflict-once-and-for-all camp benefiting the most and those in the radical pro-Iran, anti-American, pro-Islamist, permanent-struggle-with-Israel camp all becoming more isolated and left behind.

 

“It’s a geopolitical earthquake.”

 

Well, maybe, but I’m thinking a geopolitical earthquake would be something more like a Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement that included the creation of an independent Palestine sharing open borders with Israel. And a few other minor clauses that would redeem Israel’s biblical claim to be a light unto the nations of the world.

 

Ironically, Friedman’s scorecard showing winners and losers barely mentions Palestinians. Oh, yes, they dodged any further annexations of Palestinian territory for the moment.

 

Congratulations, all you lucky Palestinian exiles and refugees. It’s status quo for now. Worse, later, but I’m sure Thomas Friedman will get back to you about that.

 

Oh, wait. Friedman does assert that the UAE-Israel deal will force the Palestinian Authority and Mahmoud Abbas to the “negotiating table.” Friedman is not clear about what will be served to Abbas when he gets to the table, but it’s probably more of the same old, same old. So, again, not a win for Palestinians, but nothing ever is for a people yearning to be free, right?

 

Anyway, Friedman’s scorecard does grind on, but ends in a happy place. “The UAE and Israel and the U.S. showed—at least for one brief shining moment that the past does not always have to bury the future, that the haters and dividers don’t always have to win.

 

“It was a breath of fresh air. May it one day turn into a howling wind of change that spreads across the whole region.”

 

Wait. What?

 

Oh, this just in. It’s not a geopolitical earthquake. It’s the eye of a hurricane. And it’s coming through Gaza and the West Bank.

The Palestinian-Israeli conflict

Activist passion sometimes subverts peace and justice

More than thirty years ago, Richard Cleaver, a colleague at the American Friends Service Committee, led me to the realization that as a peace and justice advocate, I ought to have an elevated concern for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Ever since, I have maintained a focus of sorts on the issue.

After twenty years of some sort of activism on the issue, Henry, an old Ann Arbor friend--also Jewish, like me--signed on with a heightened concern of his own. After Sept. 11, it became his soul focus and, over a period of time, he and I began to develop diverging perspectives on the issue, on root causes, on strategic considerations, on tactical steps. Five years later, we had a pretty complete falling out. It has been about ten years since we last talked. 

A couple of months back, a journalist working on a story about Jewish activism on behalf of justice for Palestinians contacted me about Henry. He was trying to flesh out a story about Jewish activists facing considerable pushback from their own communities.

For part of our discussion, I went off the record. I think now that I did so because I still hadn't worked out an understanding of my conflict with Henry that satisfied me. But going off the record was a mistake. It was safe, I guess, because I wasn't sure exactly what I thought. But it was lazy, too, because it was my way of putting off careful reflection about why I had fallen out with Henry and the important lessons that could be learned from the experience.

But now, in the form of a letter to the journalist whose piece ran in al-Jazeera at the end of January, I've tried to get a handle on the whole episode. At any rate, the letter below captures what I'm thinking now.


Dear Dien,

Thanks for sending the link to your January article, "US Jews struggle in the fight for Palestinian rights." Nice piece.

I especially like the part that focuses on Rabbi Brant Rosen, whose support for Palestinian self-determination cost him his job as the leader of the Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation in Evanston, Ill. Rosen's experiences as a political activist and his continuing efforts to share his justice commitment with his Jewish co-religionists makes his experience a perfect example of the conflict between  Jewish belief and mainstream Jewish support for the state of Israel.

In one of our recent e-mail exchanges, I mentioned that I did have a bit of an argument to pick with the article, in particular the way in which my relationship with Henry Herskovitz is portrayed. Simply put, Henry and I did not fall out with each other because I, as a Jew, was somehow offended by his pro-Palestinian beliefs. In regard to an article about the way the Jewish community sometimes penalizes Jewish dissent, this is a crucial point, I think.

Unfortunately, I have been slow to follow up with an explanation for my objections. That, I have concluded, is because my problems with the article are really based in my own failure to explain my perspective on Henry properly. I have also repeatedly postponed writing my own full version of Henry's evolution as a pro-Palestinian activist and my perspective on his journey.

In our exchanges, I did not provide you with sufficient detail about how Henry and I grew apart politically. And, worse, I insisted that we discuss certain points off the record that should have been part of the story. Perhaps, if I had spoken entirely on the record, I might have had an improved grasp of exactly what I thought and needed to say.

Given the limits that I created, I have to acknowledge that you told our story as thoroughly as you could. I give you props for respecting those limits.

But when it comes to the question of Palestinian human rights and the way some elements of the mainstream Jewish community police the boundaries of "acceptable" political perspectives, it has become obvious to me that everything I have to say about Henry and his advocacy for justice for the Palestinian people should be on the record. So, here, without restrictions, but as briefly as I can put it, is the version I wish I had shared with you.

Henry came to political activism after he retired from his nearly career-long employment as a research and development engineer at a brand-name manufacturing firm. We had become close friends years earlier in Ann Arbor in the late '60s. But though I was politically active against the Vietnam War, and continued to focus on social justice issues for the next 40 years, our intimacy was primarily based on our shared social life. We hung out together, we played in municipal softball and basketball leagues together, we partied together, travelled together, and I sometimes lectured him (at unbearable length, I'm sure) about why he needed to come off the sidelines and join the fight for social change. But during most of our friendship, though he seemed to be largely sympathetic to left perspectives on the country and the world, Henry was apolitical.

Then, in a few short years after his retirement, and with the Bush threat to launch a war against Iraq in 2002, Henry suddenly found himself a vocal advocate for peace. With his hands-on, engineer's soul, he decided that he needed to visit Iraq and see what the people and the place looked like to him. So, he went. By himself. Less than a year before the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

I don't remember how long Henry was there, or know where he went in Iraq, but he talked to Iraqis in Baghdad and elsewhere about the threatened war and about how they perceived America and Americans. He discovered that they were happy to meet him and welcomed him as a visitor to their country.

Some were freely critical of Saddam Hussein, but quick to point out how a decade of U.S. sanctions against Iraq had done little to hurt Saddam, but much to harm Iraqi civilians. A number of Iraqis told Henry that U.S. policy toward Iraq was most certainly a cause of the anger that fueled the 9/11 attacks, but many also noted that another important cause was Arab and Muslim anger over U.S. support for the Israeli state and the occupation of Palestinian territory.

In point of fact, the message that Henry heard repeatedly--that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was a significant cause of anger at the U.S. and the West--inspired Henry to take another trip; to go to Israel and the West Bank in order to better understand why the Palestinian-Israeli conflict loomed so large in the geo-politics of the Middle East and the world.

Henry visited a number of different Palestinian towns in the West Bank, enjoyed a great deal of Palestinian hospitality, and had several frank conversations with Palestinian political activists. Again, he discovered that the people who he talked to seemed unaffected by the fact that he was Jewish, except for their insistence that as an American Jew, he might have an opportunity to influence other American Jews to rethink their apparently absolute support for Israel and Zionism. During his visit, he listened to Palestinians who argued that if the American Jewish community was less generous towards Israel, and more critical in its support, the Israeli state would be more likely to seek a peaceful and productive resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Henry returned from that trip intent on discussing the conflict between Zionism and Palestinian self-determination with other Jews in Ann Arbor. Though he had always identified as a Jew, he had never been particularly religiously observant. In fact, Henry was one of those Jews (not uncommon) who show up at temple only during high holidays like Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur. Regardless, his emotional connection to his identity as a Jew was crucial to him, and he was certain that there would be no significant resistance to his effort to open discussion of the conflict within the Jewish congregations on which he initially focussed.

He quickly discovered that he was naively optimistic. At Beth Israel, the congregation that he eventually targeted with a continuing public protest, Henry made an initial approach to the rabbi. Their first private conversation was cordial, and included the rabbi's observation that his concern with and dissent from mainstream Jewish support for Israel and Zionism was well within the boundaries of tolerable opinion. But by the time of their second conversation, it was obvious that the rabbi would refuse to schedule a forum at Beth Israel.

Henry made further efforts to engage a broader portion of Ann Arbor's Jewish population. He went to Hillel, the leading University of Michigan organization for Jewish students, to see if he could rent space for a public forum. His early contacts with Hillel were positive, I think, but as the moment for commitment approached, Hillel representatives became uncooperative. Henry's other efforts to reach out were similarly stymied. He came to believe (rightfully so, I think) that some people within the mainstream Jewish community were letting it be known that the community should neither engage Henry or allow him a forum.

We talked a lot in those days about what was happening, and about our shared certainty that ending the silence within the Jewish community about the illegal Israeli treatment of the Palestinian people and the illegal occupation of their land could lead to a more vigorous American Jewish opposition to Israeli policy. Though I had always believed that Zionist organizations, and many leading Jewish figures, as well, actively and effectively narrowed the possibilities for dissent within the Jewish community (see my blog post "Adventures with Zionists," for instance), Henry was experiencing the phenomenon for the first time, and in excruciating detail.

But the resistance served only to inspire him to seek other ways to make his point. It was then that he conceived the idea of beginning a silent vigil outside Beth Israel congregation's Saturday morning services. Henry showed up wearing a suit at that first vigil, a kippah (skullcap) on his head, holding a sign that read, simply, "End the Silence." On his car windshield, parked nearby, another sign said something like "End the Israeli Occupation of Palestine."

That first Saturday, Beth Israel congregants responded in a variety of ways. Some were incensed. It was the Jewish sabbath, they reasoned, and Beth Israel a house of worship that ought to be off-limits for political protest.

Other congregants, who shared at least a portion of Henry's political perspective, acknowledged his presence and, in some instances, spoke with him. Though Henry was careful to stay on the public right-of-way, one congregant turning into the synagogue driveway went out of his way to drive as close as he could to where Henry stood. It would be only the first of dozens of angry gestures and implicit, or explicit, threats aimed at him over time. Such extreme hostility was an over-the-top response to the moderation of his early protests, and likely contributed to how adamant and hardline Henry became subsequently.

Regardless, Henry kept showing up on Saturday morning and the vigil grew. Among the first to join him were other Jews who believed as he did that the Jewish community was generally closed to discussion of the most perplexing ethical issue the community faced. Area peace activists, who felt that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was a major cause of a number of political conflicts in the Middle East, also joined the vigil; some of them becoming regulars.

Meanwhile, within Beth Israel, itself, some members argued that Henry should be allowed to convene a forum on the issue within the temple. Others agreed that the issue needed to be widely discussed. But most of the congregation remained strongly supportive of Israel. Some accused Henry of being an anti-semite or, at the very least, an enemy of Israel.

Though disputes grew within the congregation, a new unity also began developing around the idea that the divisions in the congregation were largely Henry's fault and that the protest at Beth Israel was inappropriate. Some argued the Henry's protests should be declared illegal on the grounds, however dubious constitutionally, that it was a violation of the congregation's religious freedom. Even some of those who were critical of Israeli policy began to call on him to stand down.

But that was the last thing Henry was willing to do. The vigil and the signs condemning Israeli policies and Israel, itself, began spreading beyond the side street entrance to Beth Israel and on to the side walk bordering the four-lane road that ran along the property in front of the temple.

As the attitude of Beth Israel congregants became almost exclusively hostile or coldly indifferent, people driving by began to honk in apparent support of the growing and increasingly visible protest, which at some point had become an official activity of the new political group, Jewish Witnesses for Peace and Friends (JWPF), formed by Henry and his most enthusiastic supporters.

Though I was living in Chicago for much of this time, I had lived in Ann Arbor for more than 20 years and my daughter still lived there. This made me a regular visitor to the city and allowed Henry and I ample opportunity to discuss his activism and political strategy.

As a former member of the Ann Arbor City Council, I had a sort of limited celebrity in the area that Henry wanted to exploit to better promote the vigil. Though the characterization of me as a "celebrity vigiler" made me mildly uncomfortable, solidarity with Henry and the announced perspective of the vigil--to foster open discussion within the Jewish community--encouraged me to show up when I was in town. But when I did so, I was always careful to hold a sign like "End the Silence" or "End the Occupation;" phrases that I believed were simple, clear and not obstacles to further discussion between people with differing viewpoints.

But the protest signs, like "End Israeli apartheid," or "Boycott Israel," became more openly critical, often stridently so. The orientation of the protest away from the temple and towards passers-by became points of contention between Henry and I. We would often disagree about whether or not it made good tactical sense to rely on slogans that suggested that Israel was an apartheid state, or that Israeli policy was the first steps toward a Palestinian holocaust, or that Israel had no right to exist.

I believed that the truth was more nuanced than the slogans suggested, arguing in a subsequent piece on my blog (Painful Truth: Israeli Apartheid") that "if anything defines the difference between the South African and Israeli apartheid states, it is that the South African version named itself. Israeli apartheid is the apartheid that dare not speak its name. It is understandable that large numbers of American Jews cannot concede this truth, Richard Cohen among them. Israel was created at a moment of celebration and hope for Jews around the world. Freshly scarred by the Holocaust, and still fearful that history might repeat itself, [the vast majority of] Jews were inclined not to notice that their [joyful achievement] might be the occasion for the suffering of others."

Though it took me many years to get to that sort of a full articulation of my own position on the question of Israeli apartheid--a position much influenced by Henry--I maintained that phrases like "End Israeli Apartheid" were an obstacle to open discussion, that they provoked stiff opposition, and polarized the discussion. That result, I observed repeatedly, would lead to a vigil that never ended and, ultimately, render it ineffective.

Indeed, by that point, when I would ask Henry what his endgame was, what it would take to end the protest, he would respond that it would end when the congregation voted to join the BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) movement. Henry was fully aware, of course, that the congregation would never take such a position. I expressed strong objection to a strategy that publicly advocated dialogue, but privately had no real commitment to further engaging Beth Israel congregants, the ostensible audience for the vigil.

In response, Henry argued that the vigil's effectiveness could be measured by the fact that some drivers going passed would honk, raise fists and flash peace signs in obvious support. Henry began, then, to formulate the notion that it was actually American Christians, opposed to Israeli policy toward Palestinians, but silent because they were afraid of being branded as anti-semites, who could play an even more pivotal role in changing U.S. policy toward that favored the Jewish state at the expense of justice for Palestinians. That, he concluded, meant that maintaining the vigil at Beth Israel served the larger goal of justice for Palestinians, even if the idea that the vigil was a sincere attempt to open discussion within the Jewish community became nothing more than a pretense. Such insincerity, I contended, meant that Henry's strategy was flawed and that he could not be an effective advocate for justice for Palestinians on that basis.

In a 2009 blog post (American Jews and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict"), I followed up on this disagreement with Henry:

"It is a further irony that the polarization in Ann Arbor has come to resemble the deadlock in Palestine. But both situations seem a symptom of a larger problem in the politics of the US. Our inability to move toward reasonable and just outcomes in virtually all policy areas, health care, climate change, quality public education, market regulation, reliable public transit and reduced dependence on fossil fuels to name just a few, seems endemic. And ultimately traceable to the politically expedient marriage of religious fundamentalism and corporate interests. When oil companies, weapons manufacturers, Big Pharma, insurance interests, hospital corporations and the Southern Baptist Convention find themselves working together against broader social interests, we are all in trouble."

Ultimately, those disagreements with Henry marked a turning point in our relationship. But we remained in contact, and continued to spend time together when I visited Ann Arbor. I should note that our growing disagreements did not keep me from appreciating both the intensity of Henry's commitment and how extensively educated he had become about the history and politics of the conflict. Though I had always been an advocate of the two-state solution to the conflict, his position persuaded me to look harder at the realities, the facts-on-the-ground, of Palestinian disenfranchisement.

By then, it was clear to me that after 40 years of occupation (and the continuing forcible takings of occupied Palestinian territory) that a Palestinian state created on Israeli terms would not be viable, but I had not backed off of support for the two-state solution. Discussions with Henry eventually convinced me that it made no sense for me to continue to support a non-solution masquerading as the way to resolve the conflict; the creation of a Palestinian state, with borders enforced by Israel and with limited access to water and other resources, would only cement the injustices that Palestinians had suffered since the creation of the Jewish state.

These conclusions moved me to advocate an eventual, single, secular state that would be the home of Arabs and Israelis, Muslims, Jews and Christians. But even then, it was impossible for me to go forward with Henry.

To me the path to a single state had to begin with a two-state solution with equal access to resources, like water, and with borders guaranteed by an international force, not by Israel. This would not be a process with much to assure the eventual outcome, but to Henry it was a simple sell-out.

Though I had sometimes been characterized as a "self-hating, Israel-threatening" Jew (a web-based "S.H.I.T. list" had once named both Henry and I as enemies of Israel on that basis), Henry's feeling that I was a sell-out wasn't new, either.

At a Detroit teach-in on the conflict, I had been on a panel with filmmaker Michael Moore, whom I had known from his days as an activist and publisher in Michigan. Based on my experiences and discussions in Israel and the West Bank at the time of the first Palestinian Intifada, I advocated an end to U.S. military aid to Israel and a repurposing of those funds toward joint Palestinian-Israeli development projects, particularly in the West Bank and Gaza. But Moore blasted me directly for suggesting that there was a gradual way to wind down the conflict, characterizing my position as "constructive engagement," a phrase that Ronald Reagan had first used to describe his policy toward South Africa, which emphasized working with the white South African government to "phase out" apartheid. Coming from Moore, the suggestion that my proposals were simple appeasement resonated with the audience (and to some extent, with me) as a stinging indictment.

But criticisms like Henry's and Michael's notwithstanding, the stipulation that I supported a single state in the area was a position that I believed had to be nuanced by a concern for both the process and the speed by which the goal was reached. Though I maintained that the privileged position of Jews in Israel must also change, and that Israel had to become a truly democratic, not a theocratic state, this could never happen without an open and continuing discussion among Jews in both the U.S. and Israel. Adopting such a position without acknowledging how threatening the idea was to both Israeli and American Jews would make it impossible to move further, I believed.

Yes, my perspective had and has a distinct air of unreality, but then so does every other proposed solution to the conflict that began brewing more than one hundred years ago during the days of the British Mandate in Palestine and almost a half-century before the Nazi holocaust. The idea that Israel can continue to exist indefinitely as a Jewish garrison state in the Middle East (without the eventual elimination of the Palestinian people as a national group) ought to be regarded as at least as fantastical as my notion that an Israeli state can cease to be a theocratic state and that Jews would have a secure future in a democratic Palestinian-Israeli state that evolved over time.

As Henry began seeking ways to work around American Jewish resistance to his message, he came across Norman Finkelstein's controversial book, The Holocaust Industry, in which Finkelstein makes a distinction between the historical event that he refers to as the Nazi Holocaust, and the subsequent use that Israel and major Zionist organizations made of "The Holocaust." Finkelstein contends that major Jewish figures in the United States and the organizations they led used the tragedy to obtain settlements on behalf of Holocaust survivors with Switzerland and other European countries, while actually enriching their own organizations and positioning themselves to more powerfully influence U.S. policy in the Middle East.

The book is a well-documented and persuasive read, written by the son of Holocaust survivors. But as Henry began to see how powerful the Nazi holocaust was as a tool in defending and advancing Israeli interests, he began to question historical accounts of how and, particularly whether the Nazis had proceeded with genocidal intent. To me, Henry's entire discourse on the issue reflected how he had become emotionally captured--at a high cost to his ability to proceed strategically--by the idea of fighting all comers on behalf of justice for Palestinians.

Because Henry had the sense not to embrace Holocaust revisionism publicly, I had always believed that it was not up to me to "out" him and would only talk off the record about that to you. But I take that step now because I have reached the conclusion that a journey that began with the honest belief that American Jews could have an awakening to the injustices suffered by Palestinians beginning with the creation of the Jewish state morphed into a devotion to the Palestinian cause that no longer required him to believe what he was publicly proclaiming.

I believe that effective dissent requires dissenters to proceed ethically precisely because lies and misrepresentation are frequently the tools of those who defend the status quo. As Henry became increasingly focused on tactical effectiveness, he lost perspective on the social justice goals of the struggle he had engaged. To me such a disconnect between devotion to principal and tactical success (measured, for instance, by Henry's belief that he would be "...even less popular the next time you talk to me...") made him willing to embrace any position that undermined support for the Jewish state. Thus, his embrace of "Holocaust revisionism."

My point in sharing that information off the record was to further drive home my argument that Henry faced virulent opposition from the Jewish community not because he was a dissenter, but because he attacked the community and made it a prop in his Kabuki play of political activism; unlike, say, Brant Rosen, who had lost his job within the Jewish community precisely because of his advocacy for Palestinian self-determination.

Unfortunately, my decision to do so left you in a position where you had to choose between telling a story based on on-the-record sources, about a Jewish activist who has taken plenty of flak from the Jewish community, or not telling the story merely because I maintained that the secrets I wouldn't allow you to share should be sufficient reason to leave Henry's story out of your piece. My bad, I know, and I apologize.

I take the central point of your article to be that activist American Jews who think that true justice is best served by vigorous opposition to Israeli policy toward Palestine and Palestinians (and American support for that policy) often face significant challenges from fellow Jews, in some cases becoming pariahs in their own communities. Of course, this is often the fate of dissenters. To persist in the face of that opposition frequently requires a sort of heroism that deserves our respect. But, as I have noted, I do not consider myself (or the withering of our friendship) as an obstacle that I created and that Henry had to overcome. Indeed, I sometimes wonder if I was an enabler, encouraging Henry as he went through a transformation so rapidly that balanced response to setbacks became increasingly difficult.

Henry's commitment to justice for Palestinians and his persistence in that effort may be heroic, but I would contend that his political immaturity exacerbated confrontations, escalated conflict, polarized discussions, and defeated the goal of productive debate. If, in the face of such a debacle of action/reaction, Henry's persistence required courage and inspires admiration, so be it. But that seems to me to have led to a situation where the fate of the Palestinian people is no longer the central question.

In that respect, Henry's decision to go to virtual war as a way to create justice for Palestinians reminds me of the fatal decision by a small percentage of anti-war activists to choose violence as a strategy to end the Vietnam War and to defeat the foreign adventures of the American war machine. Groups that resorted to violence at the time also linked their fight to the domestic repression of African Americans and other minority groups.

The perception that only violence, a left revolution, could overthrow a corrupt American government serving the interests of the wealthy, was shared by a significant part of the anti-war movement at the time. But only a tiny minority of them ended up advocating "armed revolution."

The decision by that tiny minority to resort to domestic terror, helped instigate a repressive counterattack by the authorities at activists of all sorts, including non-violent activists. Certainly, there were other factors at work in provoking the counterattack. Black nationalists, militant workers within and outside of unions, feminists and counterculture organizers were, indeed, threatening corporate control of the economy, and work and social life.

But I have to say that the decisions people made then, to abandon dialogue and advocate confrontational strategies at the expense of smaller victories that could be won and could be the foundation for further victories, seemed ego-driven to me. They had ceased to be about the goals of progressive social change and became about the delusions of people who considered themselves to be working-class heroes.

Henry calls the end of our friendship "the 'most painful break-up' as a result of his activism."  I can't agree. My contention is that Henry allowed his own role as a political activist to become a cause in and of itself, an obsession, a delusion, that long ago lost its connection to justice for Palestinians. The end of our friendship was simply collateral damage.

Best,
Jeff

Palestine and Israel, 10 Points to Remember

Religious belief leads to bad policy, but remembering when we were slaves in Egypt might work

I've blogged about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict 38 times during the past six years* and I keep repeating (I think, I hope) pretty much the same fundamental points. Particularly these:

1. It is unproductive to insist that Hamas has to stop firing largely ineffectual rockets or drop its propagandistic opposition to the existence of Israel before real peace and justice are achieved. To get to such a state, Israel must negotiate with enemies.

Further, it is not merely unproductive, but fundamentally unethical to argue that Hamas' feeble rocket attacks on Israel somehow justify Israel's lethally disproportionate attacks on Gaza, which cause thousands of civilian casualties.

2. The record of the last 65 years suggests that Israel's survival cannot be secured by force of arms unless the Israeli government intends to annihilate the Palestinians. This, of course, would completely destroy the moral integrity of the Jewish faith (even though Israel and Judaism are not at all the same thing).

3. Other than continuing upheaval, which creates mortal danger for themselves, or complete surrender (and, barring an improbable, nearly universal, non-violent, sit-down strike in both Palestine and Israel), Palestinians are not in a position to lead the way. It is Israel, the occupying force in possession of a nearly absolute monopoly on power, that must move the furthest, must make the most changes and the frankest confessions, before peace and justice and real security come into being.

But until Israel decides to change, to transform itself dramatically, in the interests of true safety and security for Israelis, the best thing Palestinians can do is to be ungovernable.

4. It makes no sense to blame the Palestinians for "never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity" for peace (or a Palestinian state, or whatever). No true peace can be achieved that doesn't include an acknowledgement that many Palestinians living in the West Bank or Gaza today were pushed out of their homes or off their land in Haifa, or Jaffa or elsewhere, as part of the process that created the Israel we know today. Acknowledging such a fact doesn't create an insurmountable barrier out of a "right of return." It creates a basis for negotiation, and compensation, and a removal of some of the settlements to which many Israelis are understandably attached.

A stable peace will require that Palestinians get a state with borders as contiguous as possible, a state with borders guaranteed and secured by something other than overwhelming Israeli force, a state which shares equally in the regions resources (like water and arable land and efficient and unobstructed access to the region's transportation resources).

5. The claim that Israel acts only in self-defense deceives no one, except perhaps Jews in Israel and around the world who would like to believe it. Given the absolute certainty that noncombatants will die, bombing Gaza isn’t self-defense. It is assault on a civilian population. It does not make Israelis safer. It creates more enemies, more enemy combatants, perhaps more suicide bombers.

6. Palestinians must acknowledge that Israeli Jews are justified in their fear for themselves. The perception of Arab hostility to Israel's survival is rooted in reality. But it does not make much sense to compare Israeli fear to the status of Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories. By every measure of suffering—combatants killed, innocents killed, homes demolished, families separated, family members imprisoned, jobs and businesses lost—the consequences for Palestinians are intense, pervasive and unrelenting.

But Israeli suffering is also real. The psychological and physiological damage Israelis suffer from tensions and explosions and hostility and deaths and and military call-ups and jobs lost and sleep interrupted shortens lives and causes illness.

As it becomes clearer and clearer that the cycle is both self-replicating and intensifying, Israelis (and American Jews) must begin to recognize that ending the cycle will take a complete reassessment and positive moves by Israel. When that reassessment comes, full Israeli recognition of Palestinian grievances will be a huge step toward peace.

7. Palestinians living in Israel will need more than de jure guarantees of equality, they will need de facto equality. A Jewish state that legalizes a “right of return” for Jews who never lived there and refuses to acknowledge a right of return for Palestinians who lost homes and property must stop privileging Jews at the expense of Palestinians. How long it will take to get there is a wide-open question, but it will be very, very hard. It will require that at some point Israel cease to be a "Jewish" state and become a more inclusive democracy. When that point is finally reached (100 years, maybe? 200? never?), Israel and Palestine might find themselves a single state, a true light unto the world.

8. The biblical story of the Exodus undergirds the argument in favor of the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.

One summary phrase from the Passover service expresses the hope that the seder will be held "next year in Jerusalem." Indeed, these last many years a good number of seders have been held at various locations in Jerusalem (one wonders how the phrase is turned when the seder is, in fact, in Jerusalem).

Stories that Jews tell each other for religious reasons, during ritual meals and otherwise, are not a good basis for making policy. Establishing a theocratic state on land occupied by others based on a history of events that didn't actually happen was, and is, an undemocratic and unethical way to proceed. (More on this in my essay "Monotheism and the Accidental God.")

9. All the available archaeological and documentary evidence places the development of Jewish states in the area somewhere between 1500 and 1200 BCE. These states, Israel and Judah, were descended from hill tribesmen who may have called themselves Ibaru (Hebrew) and who, over time, exerted increasing political control over the relatively barren highlands in the area of present-day Jerusalem. The northern state of Israel, larger, more prosperous and more cosmopolitan than Judah, was smashed by Assyrian conquerors around 800 BCE.

After the disappearance of Israel, scribes in Judah, in the service of a likely real-life Judean king by the name of Josiah, wrote what would become the Book of Kings, a story attributing the destruction of Israel to the failure of the Jews there to properly honor Jehovah, a particularly intolerant and demanding god who found himself unable to abide the proximity of other gods.

Telling a story about how the northern state of Israel broke faith with Jehovah, with the added implication that Judah had kept faith, made for good propaganda [at the time].

As it happens, Biblical accounts of such things still make good propaganda.  Almost 3,500 actual years after the supposed events of the Exodus, the justification for the establishment of Israel and its maintenance as a Jewish (theocratic) state is frequently based on the notion that the Jews were promised the land of Canaan.

10. Yes, Jews have lived in the area a good, long time. But their presence there was as a small minority (sometimes only a few hundred families) among a much larger and diverse population, who also regarded the area as their own ancestral homeland. The historical presence of Jews in the Middle East is a legitimate basis for a "right of return" for Jews in much the same way that history justifies a right of return for American Indians and Armenians and Tibetans and Palestinians. But it does not justify the establishment of a state that privileges Jews on land most recently occupied by Palestinians.

Passover seders should be reminders that "next year in Jerusalem" has arrived, and some of us are celebrating religious feasts on land and in homes taken from Palestinians by force. We are also commanded to "remember that we were slaves in Egypt.” However legendary the memory that we Jews were once enslaved and oppressed by a mighty and pitiless enemy, it ought to expand our understanding of "never again."

*No one should read them all, but what would be the point of maintaining my own blog and not linking to myself once in a while?

Benjamin Netanyahu's singular achievement

His cluelessness somehow makes dissenters out of Robert Kagan and Richard Cohen

Critical as I am about Benjamin Netanyahu, I must acknowledge that he does have the virtue of bringing out the best in op-ed writers with whom I ordinarily disagree. Robert Kagan, somewhat of a militarist to my mind, wrote a nice piece, "At what price Netanyahu?" in the Washington Post a couple of days ago.

Kagan noted that Netanyahu's speech was not going to add much, if anything, to what the U.S. government and the public already knew about his thoughts about Iran. Neither was Netanyahu's appearance likely to prove beneficial to the U.S.-Israel relationship, Kagan noted. (As it happens, Kagan was correct. Nothing Netanyahu had to say advanced the discussion about how to deal with Iran.) But he made both of those points on the way to the larger observation that "the precedent... set [by Speaker John Boehner's partisan invite of Netanyahu] is a bad one."

The invitation creates another opportunity to exacerbate political divisions, when they exist, between congress and the president, Kagan observed.

"Is anyone thinking about the future?" he wrote. "From now on, whenever the opposition party happens to control Congress — a common enough occurrence — it may call in a foreign leader to speak to a joint meeting of Congress against a president and his policies. Think of how this might have played out in the past. A Democratic-controlled Congress in the 1980s might, for instance, have called the Nobel Prize-winning Costa Rican President Oscar Arias to denounce President Ronald Reagan’s policies in Central America. A Democratic-controlled Congress in 2003 might have called French President Jacques Chirac to oppose President George W. Bush’s impending war in Iraq."

Would that Democrats had found a way to be more forceful in their resistance to both Reagan and Bush. Regardless, it may turn out that Kagan worries too much here about the likelihood that Boehner's ill-advised move will be the first of a future series of insults to the president that use foreign leaders as ceremonial props. Still, it is nice of him to worry.

Following up on Kagan, the Post's Richard Cohen also expressed real alarm about Netanyahu's appearance. In "Israel's moral argument is on the line", Cohen made a point about Israel's lack of strategic importance to the United States that I found surprising coming from him.

"Israel may be beloved, but for American security, it is not essential," Cohen wrote. "The fact is that the United States does not need Israel. Our special relationship was not forged, as it was with Great Britain, in two world wars, not to mention a common language and, in significant respects, culture. It is based on warmth, emotion, shared values — and, not to be dismissed, a potent domestic lobby. But these ties are eroding. Support for Israel remains strong, but where once it was universal, it has increasingly drifted from left to right. In the liberal community, hostility toward Israel is unmistakable. Some of it is openly expressed, some of it merely whispered."

There's plenty to argue with in Cohen's piece. He has always refrained from anything but the most mild criticism of Israel, and there is nothing here that is harshly critical of Israel, either. Indeed, Cohen applauds Harry Truman for disregarding advice and being the first country to recognize Israel.

"To be clear, Truman did the right thing — and he did it with commendable alacrity. (The United States was the first nation to recognize Israel.) Truman acted for a number of reasons. He was an inveterate Bible reader and he thought Jews had a powerful moral claim to what was then Palestine; he was aware that Israel was not some sort of post-Holocaust compensation package for worldwide Jewry, but a necessity for their survival. And, lastly, Truman needed the Jewish vote, particularly in New York state," Cohen wrote in the Post.

Never mind that however powerful the Jewish "moral" claim to Palestine might have been, to secure that claim required ignoring the fact that Palestinians had a quite defensible claim of their own. Nor is there anything especially ethical in recognizing Israel as a means to securing the support of Jewish voters.

Still, Cohen is generally not in the habit of conceding that the U.S. and Israel, at this point in time, have quite divergent strategic interests. The credit for Cohen's observation should be regarded as the joint achievement of John Boehner and Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Moral Challenge of Palestinian Rockets

I’m planning to write a long piece about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and my personal journey from Bar Mitzvah boy and teenage Zionist to an eventual supporter of Palestinian self-determination. But to even begin to understand that political transformation, I figure that I also need to look at how I grew up believing that no fate could be more noble than dying in the defense of the United States, the world’s greatest democracy, but by the time I was nineteen, arriving at the conclusion that the U. S. was waging a war of terror in Southeast Asia that I could not support.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, my freshman year at college (in 1965) was the beginning of dramatic personal change. I spent the latter half of that academic year sporadically attending classes at the University of Michigan and hanging out in coffee shops with anti-war activists for extended periods. I began, then, to move away from my youthful patriotism to a more critical view of American militarism and the war in Vietnam.

In the process, I was greatly influenced by the writings of Noam Chomsky, particularly individual essays that were later collected and published in the book American Power and the New Mandarins.  I’m rereading the book, now, trying to understand some of the emotional intensity of my political transformation some 40 years ago. And though I have every intention of following through with the aforementioned long piece about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I am discovering anew the power of what Chomsky wrote so long ago, and how resonant his book seems now. In particular, there are two quotes from the introduction that I would like to cite and explore here.

First: “No one who involved himself in antiwar activities as late as 1965, as I did, has any reason for pride or satisfaction. This opposition was ten or fifteen years too late. This is one lesson we should have learned from the tragedy of Vietnam.”

And this one: “By entering into the arena of argument and counterargument, of technical feasibility and tactics, of footnotes and citations, by accepting the presumption of legitimacy of debate on certain issues, one has already lost one’s humanity. This is the feeling I find almost impossible to repress when going through the motions of building a case against the American war in Vietnam. Anyone who puts a fraction of his mind to the task can construct a case that is overwhelming… In an important way, by doing so he degrades himself, and insults beyond measure the victims of our violence and our moral blindness. There may have been a time when American policy in Vietnam was a debatable matter. This time is long past… The war is simply an obscenity, a depraved act by weak and miserable men, including all of us, who have allowed it to go on and on with endless fury and destruction—all of us who would have remained silent had stability and order been secured. It is not pleasant to use such words, but candor permits no less.”

Here Chomsky calls himself out twice. In the first quote he says that he was unconscionably late in his opposition to the Vietnam War. “Ten or fifteen years too late,” he writes.

In the second quote, Chomsky raises the possibility that despite the essential wrongness of the war, had the U.S. been able to secure “stability and order” in Vietnam, he might well have remained silent. Had the “fury and destruction” been transient enough, he might never have been moved, he suggests, to speak out against the war, at all.

The concept that Chomsky develops here still resonates and seems to apply decently well to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. After all, if Palestinians did not continue to resist Israeli occupation, if they did not engage in acts of “terror,” if they did not lob rockets from Gaza into Israel, if Israel were able to exercise greater control of the Palestinians, “had stability and order been secured,” others might not raise issues with the circumstances surrounding the creation of the state of Israel, might ignore the blockade of Gaza, might remain silent about the Occupation of the West Bank, might excuse the continuous process of expropriation and settlement on occupied territory. How unconscionable would that silence be?

Do some Palestinians lob rockets from Gaza into Israel because they want to awaken our conscience? Do they do so because they want revenge for dispossession, or revenge for the slaughter of innocents? Or because they hate Jews and wish to kill them? For an awakened conscience, aroused by the mortal threat and explosive power of the rockets, which questions have a higher priority? Do we condemn the rocket attacks and look away from the dispossession of Palestinians?

The biggest problem that I can see with the certainty that seems to characterize the two quotes from Chomsky is the apparent assumption that there comes a time when the moral question has been settled, a time when everyone must conclude that to argue any further that the dispossession of Palestinians is debatable “insults beyond measure the victims of our violence and our moral blindness.”

That statement is too absolute, too sweeping to be true. There were lots of reasons why people had not yet begun to oppose the Vietnam War in 1965, though Chomsky may be right in not excusing himself for his own too-long delayed opposition. And there are lots of reasons why supporters of the state of Israel remain unwilling to question the circumstances surrounding the creation of that state and all the violence against Palestinians that has happened since. But in my mind and heart we ought to be thanking the Palestinians who continue to resist because without that resistance the rest of us would almost certainly look away.

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.