Sarah Kreimer's Moving on to 'Stage-two Zionism'

Sarah Kreimer, a former head of the Association of Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), and a pioneer in Jewish-Arab economic development, wrote an op-ed in the Jerusalem Post today, much of which I agree with, some of which I don't. We both made aliyah in the 1980's; we both consider ourselves liberals; we both look forward to an Israel which is not a state of the Jews, but a homeland for the Jews and the Palestinians.

What separates us is that whereas Ms. Kreimer insists upon a two-state solution, a Palestinian state with a Palestian majority alongside an Israel with a Jewish majority, I don't. I prefer the two-state solution (it seems more feasible, in principle, and it has the support of the Israeli and Palestinian peoples, as well as much of the world), but I have no rooted objection to some other solution, provided that the solution respects the national aspirations of Jews and Palestinians.

But more than that: Ms. Kreimer rightly wants Israel to become a state of all its citizens, yet in the same breath, she wants it to have a majority of Jews. I suppose that her desire in itself is all right -- a Christian may express a personal preference to live in a US with a majority of Christians. What I fear is that this personal preference becomes a national exigency. And that, I find, problematic.

Once Israel becomes a state of all its citizens; once there is an Israeli nationality (of which Jewishness is a big, though not exclusive, part), then, and only then, can we consider Israel a liberal democracy. A state like that won't be concerned with what percentage is Jewish, because it will be 100% Israeli. (See my post, "Zionism without a Jewish State") Counting Jewish heads should not be an issue. It is not the quantity of the Jews, but the quality of the Judaism, which will determine how much a Jewish state Israel is.

The issue is not one of "moving on to 'stage-two Zionism'", but rather of "moving on to 'stage-one Israelism'. Or, if you like, of returning to the non-statist Zionism of people like Magnes.

Still, Ms. Kreimer and I agree on so many things, that I thought I would show my readers that I am not the only crazy liberal American-Israeli out there who wants to see Israel transform itself into a liberal democracy.

Apr 29, 2008 22:52 | Updated Apr 29, 2008 23:30

Moving on to 'stage-two Zionism'

By SARAH KREIMER

'Make a decision - are you citizens of Israel, or of the Palestinian Authority?" Yisrael Beitenu MK David Rotem challenged the Arab citizens of Israel in a recent Israeli news interview. Sadly, on the eve of Israel's 60th celebration of independence, ongoing Israeli policy is pushing almost one-fifth of our citizenry - the Arab Israelis, or Palestinian citizens of Israel - into the corner of choosing between being Israelis or being Palestinians; when, in fact, they are both. This impossible choice plagues not only the million Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel - living in Ramle, Lod, the Galilee and the Negev. Rather, it poses an existential dilemma to the basic vision of our country.

I IMMIGRATED to Israel, in 1980, to be part of building a society of which I, a liberal Jew from America, could be proud. Often, I am proud of being an Israeli. When my kids and I push through the Hebrew Book Week crowds, eagerly choosing from among thousands of works of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, written in a language that was unspoken 100 years ago. When I go to my Kupat Holim HMO in Jerusalem, and my doctor is Armenian, our pediatrician is a Mizrahi Jew, and the eye doctor is a Russian immigrant. When I walk through the Knesset, and see ultra-Orthodox MK Eli Yishai, secular-Jewish MK Zahava Gal-on, and Muslim Arab MK Jamal Zahalka - all legislating for the State of Israel.

Today, Israel stands among the developed nations as a world leader in health care and technology. There is a lot to be proud of in Israel. A lot to be ashamed of, as well.

In the Negev, the Israeli government continues to refuse 70,000 Beduin citizens the right to settle on lands they have inhabited for centuries. In Israel's mixed Jewish-Arab cities, building permits are denied to rehabilitate Arab homes, while adjacent Jewish neighborhoods flourish. In the Galilee, rather than investing in developing Arab towns, the government continues to constrict their lands in order to expand Jewish towns. As a result, in modern, successful Israel, over 50% of Israeli Arab families live under the poverty line.

SIXTY YEARS ago, the young State of Israel, using the Absentee Property Law, appropriated hundreds of thousands of dunams of land, owned by Arabs who had fled their homes - in the Galilee, the Negev, the mixed cities of Ramle, Lod, Jaffa, Haifa and Acco. Over the coming decades massive government (and international Jewish) investment gave birth to scores of new Jewish development towns, kibbutzim and moshavim throughout the country - consolidating possession of the land. Meanwhile, the Arab towns and neighborhoods that remained continued to be restricted, receiving little public investment, and facing labyrinthine planning systems designed to limit their development, or even re-allocate their remaining lands.

In 2008, this ethnic approach - draconian, yet necessary in the 1950s and 1960s - still dominates national land use and development policy in Israel. Today, if we continue this approach to building the "Jewish democratic state" we doom ourselves to a non-democratic state, known to the world as "Jewish." But such a state will not be Jewish in ways of which we can be proud.

AFTER 60 years, it is time to re-design our current path, with the aim of building a society that fully belongs to both its Jewish and Arab citizens. This aim is not only just; it is in the overall Israeli interest. It also affects, and is affected by, any effort to achieve a two-state solution.

First, despite Yisrael Beitenu's demand to choose, Arab citizens of Israel are Palestinians. In some cases, they are the sisters or cousins of those who left in 1948, who are now living in Jordan, in Lebanon, and in Gaza. In all cases, one million Palestinian citizens of Israel maintain a constant balancing act - between their identification with their Israeli citizenship, and their identification with their Palestinian peoplehood. When their attempts to build a legal home or develop their neighborhood are rebuffed, their identification with Israel weakens. When their country bombs or shoots their people the balancing act becomes intolerable.

Second, failure in building a two-state future increases the national conflict among citizens inside Israel. Since the beginning of the Oslo process in 1993, until its violent interruption in October 2000, most Arab citizens of Israel sought their own civic aspirations in achieving equality in the state in which they lived - Israel. They sought, for their stateless Palestinian brethren, a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

As the prospect of a Palestinian state dims, and Israeli government policies and proclamations continue seeking to "Judaize" the Galilee and the Negev, Arab citizens of Israel turn increasingly to the idea of achieving Palestinian self-determination within the State of Israel. The more that mainstream politicians regard Arab citizens as a foreign element to be contained and later jettisoned in a "land swap," the more these same citizens withdraw from participation in Israeli democracy, and seek their future through increased autonomy - as a national minority within Israel.

AS WE celebrate Israel's 60th birthday, we need to make a paradigm shift, and to re-envision our society. Sixty years after the founding of the state, we must declare an end to stage one of Zionism - state-building - and move to stage two of society-building. We need to redefine our Israeli civic enterprise, not as a Jewish State, but as a Jewish Homeland, in a state with shared citizenship. Otherwise, in clinging to the visions that have guided Israel in the past, we will destroy what has been built.

Israel - within its pre-1967 lines - is a shared home. It is a Homeland for the Jewish people; but it also a home for the descendants of the Arabs who were living here and became citizens in 1948. Over these 60 years they, too, have worked, paid taxes, and built their future and their children's future here in the land of their birth.

At the same time, if our Homeland is to be genuinely democratic, with a Jewish majority, a viable Palestinian Homeland must be established alongside ours - with its own Palestinian majority and law of return for Palestinians. As Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said at the Annapolis conference in November 2007: without the two-state solution, Israel is "finished." As long as only one state exists in this Land (between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River), our Jewish national home will not be sustainable. Sixty years after achieving statehood, our national home awaits this completion.

The immediate steps on the path to this vision are clear. Jettison the settlement enterprise - both within the Green Line ("Judaizing" the Galilee, the Negev, and the mixed cities of Ramle, Jaffa, Acre and Lod), as well as beyond it (in east Jerusalem and the West Bank). Dismantle institutional discrimination - particularly in land-use, planning, and resource allocation - and develop the country for all citizens equally. Teach Hebrew and Arabic as the official languages they are; and teach the histories, narratives and poetry of both peoples in our schools. Pursue "complete equality of social and political rights to all inhabitants" - as proposed in Israel's Declaration of Independence.

After 60 years of independence, it is time to recognize that an Israel that attempts to neglect, dispossess or exclude its Arab citizens is not Jewish; and is not sustainable. It is time to stop defining the Jewishness of the state by the amount of land controlled by Jewish towns or citizens, but by the justice of our society. It is time to be guided by the vision of Israel as a decent, fair, democratic society for all Israelis -Arab and Jewish - as we pursue a two-state solution that will allow national fulfillment for both peoples.

Little Victories

This evening a comment was left on my post, Three Cheers for Adalah and the Israeli Supreme Court by an Israeli woman, who wants to be known as "sister of child of Abraham". I reproduce the comment (very slightly edited) because of its importance:

Jerry,

We recently had a similar "problem" in our community, a new yishuv for secular and orthodox jews (within the green line) I might have been naive thinking a place like this would be more tolerant, seeing as many people moved here to get away from homogeneous societies they had previously lived in. After what happened in Misgav, the question was raised: what would we do if an arab famiy wanted to join our community?

In the discussion that followed I used the word "racism" much to the dismay of my neighbours, adding that Jews wanting to live only with other Jews was racist as much as say, Germans wanting to live with only Germans. These double standards always amaze me!

In the end, it was decided that although no one would want a situation where Arabs would join the community, we wouldn't be able to not accept people on acount of there ethnicity.

So for now, my husband and I can keep living here....

sister of child of Abraham

Well, sister of child of Abraham, all decent human beings can be proud of your stance. I hope that your community will follow your family's lead. It has to start somewhere -- I assure you and them, that were an Israel Palestinian family welcomed in your committee, it would not only be a kiddush ha-Shem (a sanctification of God's name), but it would point the way for other communities like you. Look, let's face it: you can't force people to live with people they don't want to live with. But you can educate people to see why excluding people on the basis of the ethnicity, or religiosity, etc., is wrong. -- especially when the majority has no "separate but equal" facilities for the minority.

Shalom u-le-hitraot to "Harry's Place"

Here was my parting shot at the Brit blog, Harry's Place, where virtually everything I wrote was misunderstood by my ideological opponents.

The political Zionists are quite happy that they were allowed to represent the two-state solution at the Oxford Union instead of Norman Finkelstein. Pity that none of them really believe in it.

Indeed, as I have written here before, I know very few Israelis, and almost no diaspora Jews, who favor a true two-state solution in which one state neither dominates, nor is dominated by, the other, a solution in which there is real parity between the states.

Most Israelis I know who say they support two-states, basically support one state -- Israel -- and one 'state' -- a weakened Palestine in a neo-colonial relationship with Israel, what Bibi calls "medinat-minus" a "lesser state." The former will have one of the most powerful defence forces in the world, whereas the latter will be demilitarized, or non-militarized. Even the Geneva Initiative has the Palestinian's state security subcontracted out to a multi-national force.

Now, dear friends, imagine an Israel without a Zahal/IDF -- imagine such a Jewish state proposed to David Ben-Gurion in 1948 -- and what do you think he would have said?

Mind you, I am not a big fan of militaries, or the place the military has played in Israeli society. But as an ex-IDF reservist, and the proud father of four children who have served in the IDF -- and one combat officer who still serves in the reserves -- just as I cannot conceive of Israeli without Zahal, so I cannot conceive of a Palestinian state without a strong military force to protect it, and which serves as a source of its national pride.

If you are opposed to the creation of a Palestinian state that would be equal in power -- economically and militarily -- to Israel, then you are not in favor of a genuine two-state solution.

You would be in good company, by the way. The Palestinian negotiators were willing to give in on the army issue because of their weak negotiating position. They knew it would be a non-starter with the Israelis. That was unfortunate. Where there is no central army, there is inevitably a vacuum in which militias, terrorist organizations, and vigilante squads, rush in.

I don't expect most of the pro-Israel folks reading the blog to understand what I have just written. It took me thirty years to wean myself from the pro-Israel gut reaction: "Are you nuts? What would the Palestinians have to be afraid of? It is they who have been the aggressors since 1920's! Let them prove themselves first, and if they can stop terrorism for a few decades, then we maybe can consider allowing them to arm."

But if you answer like that, then you are not in favor of a two-state solution. You want one powerful state, which has virtual control over the land, resources, and borders of another people -- but without the headache of having to take care of that people, much less allowing them citizenship.

The question is very simple. If you believe that the Palestinians have a right to a state in Palestine, is it less a right, more a right, or the same right as Israeli Jews have? If it is less a right, then you are a one state-one 'state' person. If it is an equal right -- and I assume Jonathan Hoffman believes that it is -- then it is simply unfair for one state to be allowed to fulfill the first and most important function of any state -- protection of its people; whereas the other state is not allowed to fulfill that function. Ditto for other aspects of control.

So are the Zionist here willing to bite the bullet and sign a peace-treaty in which the other side has a modern army and not a mere police force, and a strong economy that could wreak the same damage on Israel as Israel's economy could on Palestine? Alternatively, are you willing, to join a federation in which there will be one federal defence force, a coordinated foreign and economic policy, and a federal board for the use of resources?

If you are not prepared for either alternative, then the irony is that the Palestinians who support the two-state solution are much more two-statist than their Israeli counterparts. Because they do not require of Israel that it disarm, or that it allow the Palestinian state to be equal in power. They are quite willing to have a powerful state like Israel, with which it enjoys a natural rivalry, on its borders.

On the Academic Boycott of Israel and the Current Georgetown Brouhaha

The Magnes Zionist has never written a post on the attempts of individuals in the United Kingdom to organize boycotts of Israeli universities, or of Israeli academics. That is because the matter has been endlessly discussed (a brief summary of the arguments appears below), and I have little to add. But events at Georgetown U have convinced me to weigh in.

In 2005 I heard the boycott discussed at al-Quds university in Jerusalem by a panel that included Hilary Rose, one of its main proponents, and activists and academics from Israel, Palestine, and abroad. (The event was sponsored by the Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, which organizes excellent fact-finding missions for faculty to Israel-Palestine; see their website here.) My impression was that most of the attendees were not convinced by Dr. Rose’s presentation. This was before the British Association of University Teachers issued a more focused boycott of Bar Ilan and Haifa Universities. The boycott resolution created an uproar, and was subsequently canceled. Last May, the congress of the newly-formed University and College Union in the UK, after condemning Israeli activities toward the Palestinian, decided to circulate among its members a call by Palestinian trade unions to boycott Israeli academic institutions. Last month, citing legal difficulties in implementing its decision, the UCU decided to shelve action on the boycott issue, while allowing for debate on Israel’s policies.

It is difficult to get many academics, even strong critics of Israel, to support the boycott, both for reasons of principle (academic freedom, fear that it constitutes collective punishment) and of tactics (the ineffectiveness of the boycotts, which usually are canceled after prominent intellectuals and groups weigh in on the other side.) By stressing analogies with academic boycotts of South Africa, the boycotters invite two objections: first, that the situation in Israel is not sufficiently comparable to apartheid of South Africa, and second, that the academic boycott of South Africa was not really effective in helping to end apartheid. The response to this is that the situation in Israel-Palestine is as bad as or worse than it was in South Africa, and that academics as a guild should focus on academia, especially since Israeli universities are implicated in the machinery of the Occupation.

I do not support the academic boycott of Israel, mostly because I think it is a counterproductive tactic. I believe strongly in academic freedom, but I am not an absolutist; there are times when academic freedom can and should be restricted, if it will help stop the restriction of even more fundamental freedoms. Under certain circumstances, an academic boycott, like sanctions of all sorts, can be justified – the question is what circumstances, and whether the time is ripe. And my feeling is that the time is not ripe for an effective boycott. Perhaps it never will be.

Franz Rosenzweig, the Jewish philosopher, was once asked if he put on tefillin (“phylacteries”). His reply was, “Not yet.” That is the answer I give to people when they ask me whether I support the academic boycott.

On the other hand, I will not condemn supporters of the boycott or deny that they have done some good. They have drawn attention to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, and they have done so in the name of principles that I accept. I do not question their motives or the intentions, only the practical wisdom of what they are doing. I will, if necessary, express my objections to the boycott, but I will not vilify the boycotters.

Which brings me to the current Georgetown brouhaha…

Last summer, the American Jewish Committee sponsored an ad in the New York Times that included a statement by Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University, and which was endorsed by many other university presidents, including my own. The letter criticized the UCU for “advancing a boycott” (which it didn’t; it merely called for discussion of the boycott). Bollinger’s statement was seriously flawed in two ways: it said nothing of the context of the British protest against Israeli academic institutions, and, worse, it characterized the attempts at boycotting as “intellectually shoddy and politically biased.” Thus Bollinger went far beyond opposing the boycott on the principle of academic freedom; he implicitly took a pro-Israel stand, which is why the American Jewish Committee seized upon it and started to marshal support among other university presidents.

Note that the university presidents were asked to endorse Bollinger’s statement rather then sign a petition using Bollinger’s language. The difference is subtle, but the former allowed them to go on record opposing the boycott without having to be bound to the statement’s pro-Israel sentiments. But at least for one Georgetown university professor, the endorsement was bad enough. Louis Michael (Mike) Seidman, Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Constitutional Law at Georgetown Law School, has written an open letter to President DeGoia, criticizing him for endorsing the Bollinger statement. The full text of the Seidman letter is cited below. Seidman has not been allowed to disseminate his letter to the Georgetown community using the university email or materials. Now that all this is public, he won't need them.

There is a third way between boycotting and not boycotting – and that is the way of critical engagement. No, I am not talking about the type of engagement preached by the “Engage” crowd, a liberal Zionist group in the UK whose main task is to take on the “new anti-Semitism” (boogah-boogah). I mean engaging Israelis and challenging them to conform to their self-image of a civilized and humane democracy. I am always surprised when I meet critics of Israel who tell me that they have not been to Israel nor do they plan to go, on principle. That seems to me an easy way out, not Rachel Corrie’s way, or Jeff Halper’s way, or the way of Machsom Watch or Breaking the Silence.

Go to Israel and Palestine, witness for yourself the human rights violations, become an activist or support an organization – and then write, and talk, and spread the word – not just to the world but to the Israelis themselves. That is a lot better than an ineffectual and counterproductive boycott.

Here is Prof. Seidman’s letter:

Dear President DeGoia:

As an American, a Jew, and a member of the Georgetown faculty for over half my life, I want you to know how disappointed I am that you signed the full-page advertisement that appeared in the New York Times on August 8. I am even more disappointed in the way that you have behaved in the weeks since the advertisement appeared.

The advertisement criticized the boycott of Israeli universities in the most vitriolic and unbalanced fashion imaginable. Instead of reasoned debate about the issue, it resorted to name-calling, characterizing supporters of the boycott as "intellectually shoddy" and "politically biased."

My own view is that at this point in history, a boycott of major Israeli institutions might play a useful role in undermining disastrous Israeli policies, much as the boycott of major South African institutions did a generation ago.

I can nonetheless understand how reasonable people might disagree with this assessment, and your mere opposition to the boycott would not have caused me to write this letter. I do not understand how you could have signed a statement opposing the boycott without any acknowledgment of the actions that gave rise to it in the first place. The statement you endorsed makes no reference to the suffering of the Palestinian people, to Israeli defiance of international law and United Nations Security Council resolutions, to the racism that pervades Israeli society, to Israel's provocative and arrogant insistence that it, alone among Middle Eastern countries, has the right to maintain nuclear weapons, or to the way in which Israeli policies endanger international peace.

To sign a statement condemning the boycott without mentioning any of this is to take a side on a contested political issue. It is to ally oneself with those who deny that these things are true or who minimize their importance. It is analogous to signing a statement condemning the founding of the state of Israel without mentioning The Holocaust.

In the weeks following your signature on the advertisement, you generously agreed to meet with me about it. In our meeting, you stated that you agreed that the advertisement was unbalanced and that it did not accurately reflect your views. You also stated that you believed that corrective action on your part was necessary. You promised that you would get back to me about the nature of the corrective action within two weeks.

Today, I received a letter from you quoting from your statement at a town hall meeting. I can't imagine that you suppose that the statement does anything to undo the damage that you caused with your signature on the advertisement. The statement does no more than to reiterate in marginally more temperate language your determination not to support the boycott. Once again, it completely ignores the tragic suffering of Palestinians and Israeli responsibility for that suffering.

As I have already indicated, I believe that a boycott of Israeli institutions is the most forceful way to communicate our disapproval of Israeli policies. I can understand why a person might believe, as you apparently do, that engagement with those institutions, would be more productive. If we are going to engage, however, I would have thought that we have a special responsibility to frankly and vigorously confront our engagement partners with our disapproval of their conduct. Surely, engagement is useless or worse if it consists of nothing but support for the oppressors against the oppressed. I am afraid this is what your statements so far have amount to. Such support is unworthy of the President of this great University. I strongly urge you to reconsider.

Sincerely,

Louis Michael Seidman

Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Constitutional Law

"Breaking" News -- "Breaking the Silence" Launches New Website; Plans February Trip to the US

"Breaking the Silence," the IDF veterans group that collects testimonies from soldiers about inappropriate behavior towards Palestinian civilians, has launched a new website. Please take a moment to check it out here.

"Breaking the Silence" may be coming to the States in February. Stay tuned for details.

Some of you may remember that the last time "Breaking the Silence" visited the US, the Zionist Organization of America unsuccessfully tried to get the Union of Progressive Zionists ousted from the Israel Campus Coalition because the latter sponsored the group on several campus. I reported on the trip in the Magnes Zionist's first post, here. Heck, the controversy even made Walt and Mearsheimer's book on the Israel Lobby.

What was heartening about the whole affair was that mainstream Jewish organizations strongly backed the position of the UPZ. The truth is that "Breaking the Silence" is not a bunch of off-the-wall draft resisters, but veterans and reservists of the IDF, some of them combat officers. Unlike Senator John Kerry, who, as a decorated officer, was one of the leaders of Vietnam Vets Against the War, the group "Breaking the Silence" takes no official stance on the question of withdrawal from the West Bank. They simply want to provide Israelis and their supporters the truth as they see it about some of the Israel's activities of the IDF on the West Bank.

Anyway, don't take my word for it. I am neither a member of, nor a spokesman for, the group. Please check out their website

The Israel-Palestinian Victory at Bil'in -- A Sweet New Year

There are some small victories, small points of light in the dark night of occupation. But this will be a big one, if the army and the government obey the High Court of Justice.

For the last several years, Israelis and Palestinians have been protesting about the route of the separation wall in the area of Modi'in. The route was designed primarily to provide Israeli real estate developers more land to sell to Jews, to annex more land by the State of Israel, and to destroy the lives of villagers in Bilin so that there would be more land. Security, as usual, had little, if anything to do with the route of the security fence.

Does the above description sound outrageous? Not to the High Court of Justice that decided this week to direct the government to make a security fence around Modi'in, instead of the planned Lebensraum wall (the Hebrew equivalent of "Lebensraum" -- merhav mihyah -- was used by Nachum Barnea, Israel's most respected and read journalist, in his shabbat column in Yedi'ot to describe the wall. I hope, God willing, to report on what he wrote.

This is a victory for a gallant band of non-violent protesters (the rock-throwing Arabs in their midst were long ago revealed to be General Secret Service provocateurs, but that's another story).

While older Jewish supporters of the good-old-moral-Labor-Zionism have been writing their polemics in the Diaspora, a young group of protesters -- they call themselves "anarchists" mostly as an inside joke; they have no ideology besides fighting for Palestinian rights -- have been risking their lives facing the rubber bullets of the IDF.

Please read the article below, especially if you are a Peace-Now, knee-jerk, opponent of the Occupation -- the sort of person who thinks Tom Friedman knows what he is talking about. The next time you write out a check for the New Israel Fund, try to think of ways also to support the activists who are sanctifying God's name in public. (And keep writing the checks for the New Israel Fund....)

They, and other groups like Children of Abraham, Ta'ayush, Breaking the Silence, ICAHD, etc., are the future of Israel. May God grant them the strength to continue in their struggle.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/901786.html

A victory for the anarchists

By Meron Rapoport

"I remember the moment I marched among a crowd of Palestinians," said one of the Israeli activists who participated in the ongoing demonstrations near the village of Bil'in, this week. Those demonstrations led to a High Court decision a few days ago ordering the rerouting of the separation fence near the village. "I served in the army, and my first instinct was to look for the signal operator and to check if we were marching properly spaced. The Palestinians shouted 'Allahu Akbar,' which is supposed to be the nightmare of every Israeli soldier, but I suddenly realized that I was with them, that they weren't my enemies."

One must understand. Anyone who went to demonstrate in Bil'in knew that he stood more than a small chance of getting hurt somehow by "his" army: by clubs, tear gas, rubber bullets. Undoubtedly, there were a few who sought out this violence, but it also befell those who did not seek it out. It was part of the deal. The violence that the soldiers and Border Police officers employed against the Israeli demonstrators on an average Friday in Bil'in surpassed that used against the settlers during the entire evacuation of Gush Katif. Nevertheless, a few hundred Israelis made this trip every Friday, without fail, for the last two and a half years. Not all of them at once. Sometimes five, sometimes 50, sometimes 100. But they came.

Most of these people were young, sometimes very young, and they gathered under the rubric of "Anarchists Against the Fence." The Zionist left had no presence there. Not Peace Now and not Meretz (some Meretz MKs sometimes assisted the arrestees, but no more than that) - and certainly not Labor. Older organizations from the non-Zionist left were supportive, and provided logistical assistance, but the initiative still came from the anarchists. They led the struggle.

Without question, it was a rather small group. Not everyone, even the most devout leftist and vigorous opponent of the occupation, is prepared to come and take a beating, to run up and down hills, to breathe tear gas, to be arrested. But it wasn't an insignificant number either, this group of people prepared to come to blows with the establishment. In Bil'in their goal was simple and tangible: to restore the lands to the Palestinians.

It will be interesting to see what their next goal is.

Tough Jewess -- Wisse's "Jews and Power"

Because of the well-orchestrated media hullabaloo, I went out and bought Ruth Wisse's new book on "Jews and Power." My expectations were low. A book that advances a grand theory of "Jewish power" by a literature professor who is neither trained in Jewish history, nor, judging from the bibliography, conversant with scholarly literature in any language besides Yiddish and English, in a series aimed for popular consumption, should be judged differently than a work of a specialist. Still, some of the previous books in the Nextbook series are useful as introductions to their topics, despite their flaws(I am thinking mainly of Nuland's Maimonides and Goldstein's Spinoza.) And the idea of a series of short, intellectually challenging books for the "educated layperson" sounds promising.

Unfortunately, "Jews and Power" is a tendentious mix of personal biography, Zionist historiography, and cherry-picking of Jewish literature and history,in the grand tradition of Zionist polemics. Somewhere halfway through the book, Wisse completely loses the train of her argument about power and just provides a ZOA-approved guide to the establishment of the State of Israel through the Oslo accords, the sort of thing that Netanyahu, Dershowitz, and Bard could do in their sleep.

Wisse repeats uncritically the narrative of "Exile and Return" that has been debunked time and time again by serious scholars; she manages to get around to David Biale's "beguilingly contrarian" thesis of Jewish power and powerlessness, which is a direct challenge to her book, on p. 174, ten pages before its conclusion. She does not give Biale's book any serious attention; on the contrary, she seems to think that his point is that Jews in the diaspora glorified powerlessness, whereas Biale showed that the Jewish experience in political power had not ended as good for the Jews as the Zionist historiography pretended.

It is not just the tendentious of the material on Zionism -- Wisse completely omits mention of Zionists like Magnes, Buber, Scholem, etc., who don't fit into her master narrative, much less intellectual and liberal opponents of Zionism. (Cultural Zionist Ahad ha-Am get a nod, but is immediately criticized, of course, for failing to realize the need for Jewish power in a hurry.) It is not just the failure to cite, much less refute, any book on Israel-Palestine that does not fit into her mold (Has she even read Morris, Segev, Shlaim, and Kimmerling? As for Khalidi, she argues with a comparison he makes between Palestinians, Kurds, and Armenians, and then proceeds to ignore entirely the main argument of his book on Palestinian identity) She passes over Kimmerling and Migdal on Palestinian identity in silence, preferring to give her own arguments against their being a Palestinian people united by anything except "its antagonism to Israel and its usurpation of Jewish symbols, history or identity." To prove this last assertion, Wisse refers to the fact that "the Palestinians commemorate the birthday of Israel as their nakba, or catastrophe." But it is not the birthday of Israel that is their nakba -- it is the uprooting of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes, the destruction of their lives, and the thwarting of their political aspirations

In any event, I could understand Wisse if she were upset at the Palestinians for whining over the loss of Palestine ("self-pity, self-punishment, and self-destruction at the hands of Israel," whatever that last phrase means) without standing up and resisting. As the advocate of people power, she should be the first to praise the PLO and Hamas for armed resistance, as she does the parallel Jewish organizations, the Haganah and the IZL ("functioning as a good boxer's two fists" (p. 126) -- fist that also killed innocents)

No, it is the mind-numbing shallowness of the book -- as if a professor, any professor, can write a short book on Jewish power and powerlessness that takes in (I quote from the jacket) "everything from the Kingdom of David to the Oslo Accords." When Baer wrote his work on Galut, for all of its Zionist tendentiousness and superficiality, at least he had some grip on Jewish history.

Most of the historical errors reveal the secular Zionist prism through which she views the data. Every Israeli knows where the city of Yavneh is located, but for Wisse it is "abroad" (p. 29), where Ben Zakkai took the first steps "to reconstitute Jewish religious and political authority outside the Land of Israel" (emphasis added.) Yavneh, no less than Jerusalem, is within the Land of Israel, and it became for a short time the center of the Jewish communities of the Land of Israel and the Diaspora. Of course, this mistake is telling: for the Zionists, the tragedy of 70 ce was the loss of political sovereignty and exile, to which the development of rabbinic Judaism was a response. But it was not the loss of sovereignty and exile that bothered the rabbis at Yavneh. Virtually none of the tannaim even mention "exile", and for good reason, they lived in Israel. Rather, it was the loss of the cult of the Temple, which stood at the center of Palestinian Judaism up until time.

As I have written elsewhere, there was no exile following the destruction of the Temple or the Bar Kokhba revolt; there was, according to Baron, increasing voluntary emigration of Jews over centures because of the depressed economic state of the country. The Zionist narrative of exile, founded on Christian and Jewish myths, is like them -- a myth. This is not to say that later there was not a consciousness of living in exile, or a messianic hope for a restoration which waxed and waned. But to reduce Jewish history to: first, the Jews put their faith in Divine power, and then they decided, before it was too late, to bring about their own rededemption through their own power is Zionist poppycock. And what's worse; it is stale poppycock, the sort of propaganda that one finds emanating from Zionist circles a half a century ago.

Will the State of Israel be good for the survival of the Jews? Only time will tell, although the initial results are worrying. Over the last half-century, many more Jews have found violent death in the Jewish state (one might say partly as a result of their being a Jewish state) than in the diaspora. Antisemitism waxes and wanes according to the rhythms of the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians and their lands, proving Brian Klug's wise observation that nowadays, most antisemitism is really disguised antizionism, and not vice versa.

Still, as long as self-styled "liberal nationalists" like Ruth Wisse make their home in the diaspora, we can be assured that at least some Jews will survive. It is becoming harder and harder to find neocons of her ilk in Israel among the younger generation of Israelis -- they have to be imported from the diaspora like Michael Oren and Yoram Hazony. This is not a problem, since the growing Israeli diaspora in the US and Europe ensures the requisite level of guilt among the emigres to produce neocons among their offspring. And let us not forget the Russian aliyah...

In a rather odd conclusion, Wisse writes as the thesis of her book:

Jews probably could have endured in the Diaspora had theirs been the only type of political organization in the world. But their political system was not basically structured to defend itself against outside enemies seeking it annihilation.

In fact, Jews and Judaism have survived in the Diaspora, and they are doing rather well at that. It is hard to see how a series like Nextbook, despite its occasional amaratzes, dilletantism, and rightwing slant, could have been produced in Israel (unless some rich American Jewish neocon donated money to the Shalem Center). Wisse should ask why no Israelis are writing Hebrew versions of "Jews and Power," and why there is no public in the Jewish state for such books. Or why nobody in Israel under the age of sixty writes the history of the Israel-Palestinian confilct the way she does, unless associated with the Shalem Center or Bar Ilan.

But wait -- the story gets better. It turns out that the above quotation is an adaptation of Jean-François Revel's prediction in 1983 about the "imminent demise of democracy". Oh, boy, was that "Chicken-Little" wrong! Wisse has the honesty to admit that "the implosion of the Soviet Union proved his fears groundless in this instance" but this "by no means lessens the value of his insights."

That's odd. I would have thought that historical facts have a direct bearing on the value of one's insights. They do for historians.

But not, apparently, for professors of literature, where the perception and interpretation of facts are what matters.

Singling Out Israel for Moral Opprobrium

I am a tribalist at heart. I really care about my tribe, or, I should say, the various tribes of which I am a member. I care about them in ways that I don’t care about other tribes. Kant forgive me, but it’s true – there are other tribes that I really couldn’t care less about. When I sense that I am becoming heartless and apathetic to the sufferings of others unconnected to my tribe, I try to work on my “human” side, or my “living being” side, or my “creaturely” side – in order to make a new tribe in which I am a member with whatever Other has a claim on me. But, usually, it’s only about me and my tribes.

So, when critics say to me, “Why are you always harping on Israel when there is genocide in Dafur, or vast suppression of human rights in China?” my answer is that I simply care more about Israel because I am part of the tribe. And just as I would be more upset if I found out that my brother, and not a total stranger, were a murderer, or even a thief, when there are lots of more vicious criminals out there, because he is my brother, so I am more upset about my country perpetrating human rights violations against the Palestinian people for generations, than about the genocide in Darfur. For one thing, I am much more implicated in what Israel is doing than what is going on in Darfur, although I guess we also have responsibilities there as human beings, and as people who can do something about it. But Israel is my country, and its crimes are mine. I know that some will say that this excessive concern for my own is “racist.” But there you have it, I am a tribalist.

Ah, but you will say, that’s all well and good for you. You are an Israeli; you are a traditional Jew; you have a right to criticize. But what about criticism from folks who are outside the tribe entirely, like from some of those British and German leftwing intellectual-types? Shouldn’t they be more concerned with Darfur than Israel? And if they aren’t, isn’t that a sign that they are unreasonably fixated on Jews?

Not necessarily. Even though such people are not part of my Israeli Jewish tribe, they may be part of another relevant tribe (say, the Palestinian tribe, or the Friends of Palestine tribe, or even the People-who-Expect-the Countries-That-Present-Themselves-as Civilized-Should-Act-in-a-Civilized-Fashion tribe). Whether they feel themselves to be perpetrators or victims, they are perfectly right in focusing their attention on whatever tribe they belong to, as long as they hold that tribe to a justifiable ethical standard. To demand of them to spend that much energy on other tribes may be Kantian, but it ain’t human. We selectively reward and punish all the time. Speed cops certainly do.

What, then, would bother me? Well, if people criticized Israel for behaving in ways that they excuse, or worse, approve of, in others, without further justification, then that would raise my suspicions. If an American of Irish descent would see nothing wrong in the IRA killing innocents and then would blame Israel for doing the same thing, then I would question that person’s consistency, sincerity, and motives. If a person criticized Israel’s actions because she felt that they embody the negative qualities of Jews everywhere, then she would be a member in good standing of the Antisemite tribe.

I think that the Israel advocates understand the tribalism thing. Because they are always singling out Israel for special consideration. They don’t criticize the massive amount of foreign aid that Israel gets from the United States, although, as Kantians, they should be against such preferential treatment. No, they support the preferential treatment because they are, like me, tribalists. I am sure they give good reasons for their position, but why don’t they spend the same amount of time lobbying for other worthy, even worthier causes, than Israel?

So when somebody argues against the academic boycott of Israel as follows:

"The singling out of Israel for special punishment is not about achieving a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It can only stigmatize the Jewish state for being particularly malevolent. This, whatever the intention, feeds negative historical stereotypes and can fuel anti-Semitism." (italics added; see here)

I reply as follows: First, I appreciate that the speaker, unlike others, does not call the “singling-out of Israel for special punishment” in itself morally wrong or anti-semitic. There may be good reasons for singling out Israel on this point; whether Israel is deserving of an academic boycott needs to debated on its merits. Suggest to the Israel Lobby, who single Israel out for preferential treatment, that their actions can fuel antisemitism, and they will respond that antisemites will be be antisemites whatever the Lobby does, and that the preferential treatment is deserved because of Israel’s strategic importance to the US, etc.

And, ribono shel olam, isn’t it time to give the “the possible fueling of antisemitism” canard a rest? How many times has that one been used to stop us orthodox Jews from reporting to the police wife-beaters and rabbinical child-molesters?

On one point I agree with the speaker: the singling out of Israel for special punishment is not about “achieving a peaceful resolution of the conflict”. Rather, it is about achieving justice and dignity for a group that has been without it for too long a time, and, incidentally, for those of us who care, about taking care of Israel’s soul. The punishment is to rectify an intolerable situation that has festered since 1948, and especially since 1967, namely, the thwarting of the Palestinian's people right of self-determination, and the hell that they have had to endure as a result. The fact that other peoples, including my own, have suffered hell in the past, is entirely without relevance to this part of the story.

Speaking of stories, here is one I leave you with:

Once upon a time, two small boys, Pete and Paul, were fighting over a garment. Pete grabbed the garment, wrestled Paul to the ground, and sat on him, at first for days, then for months, finally for years. Pete had nothing against Paul personally. He even made sure that he had enough to eat and drink to stay alive. But Pete was afraid to get off Paul’s stomach, because whenever he did, Paul would start clawing at him, and Pete was scared, for himself and for the garment. He was even willing to share a bit of the garment with Paul – he certainly did not stand to gain by having to take care of Paul -- but how could he be sure that Paul wouldn’t use the opportunity to grab the garment from him, or worse, sit on him?

Whenever an onlooker started to rebuke Pete for sitting on Paul, he would say, “Why are you picking on me ? I am only sitting on the kid; he’s not dead or nothin… If you turn around, you will see plenty of people doing worse things.” And he was right; it was an awful neighborhood. Pete began to suspect that anybody who criticized him was really a friend or relative of Paul, or at least unwittingly gave him support. Because if he really cared about crime, why was he just going after Pete?

Pete was also right to be afraid of Paul. You see, Paul hated Pete and, aside from his getting his freedom and the garment, he would love nothing more than to see Pete dead for what he had suffered all these years. But instead of sending somebody for the police, or seeking outside help, of which he was always suspicious, Pete just kept sitting there on Paul.

And there he sits, to this day: holding on to the garment and defending himself from the accusations of the onlookers by saying, “Hey, I am willing to let the guy up, provided that he….”

"Wiping Palestine off the Map"

Coming posts for the Magnes Zionist include a continuing series of responses to arguments on behalf of the Law of Return. I promised that two weeks ago, and I have yet to get back to it, but I will.

But first, a reply to a comment to A Talmudic Precedent for a Just Solution to the Israel Palestinian Conflict that was posted when I was recently stranded in cyberspace.

I wrote in that post

"...even though one hundred years of Zionism teaches us that the Palestinians have much more to fear from the Zionists than vice-versa. Only one side has ever actually wiped the other’s country off the map – and it wasn’t the Palestinian side."

I am glad to take the opportunity to clarify what I meant by the assertion that Israel wiped Palestine off the map. I was not trying to compete with Iranian President Ahmadinejad, who said that Israel should vanish from the pages of time (which apparently did not mean that the Israeli people should be obliterated. He seems to have been speaking, Reagan-like, of regime change that would replace the current state of Israel with another state. As far as I know, he did not call for the death or expulsion of Israeli Jews.)

What I meant was that the State of Israel, during and after the 1947-8 war, deliberatedly changed the map of Palestine when it systematically destroyed Palestinian villages, renamed existing Arab place names with Hebrew names, and diminished the Palestinian presence in Palestine by expulsion of Palestinians and mass immigrations of Jews.

What I did not mean was that Israel nuked Palestine or mass-murdered Palestinians. "To wipe a country off the map" means simply that one country is totally (or almost totally) replaced by another country. And indeed, if you examine maps of Palestine before 1947 and maps of Israel after 1952, say, you will find radical alterations.

Presumably, part of the reason why the Zionists erased the Palestinian presence was to present Israel as a state that arose, if not ex nihilo, than out of a desert, with only a few picturesque native villages. That way, the natives who had been expelled would have no claim to places which no longer existed, and Zionists could argue that there never was a significant Palestinian presence in Palestine.

Now, it is true that many states wipe their predecessors off the map when they become independent and conquer territory. Lviv was Lwow, and before that, Lemberg, and before that Lwow, etc., depending upon who was in charge. And states do that mostly for the same reason that Israel did; to obliterate the immediate past. Israel went further than this and literally obliterated villages and neighborhoods, but other states have done this, too. I am not, obviously referring to all of Palestine, but only to that part of mandatory Palestine that was under Israel's control by virtue of the armistic agreements.

Of course, not only were villages destroyed, but sites were renamed with Hebrew names. Sometimes, the official Hebrew names never stuck. Few people even in Jerusalem know that the official Hebrew name of the neighborhood of Baka is "Geulim", and that the post office there is called the Geulim post office. Everybody refers to it as Baka, perhaps because the original Arab neighborhood was used to settle Arabic-speaking Jewish refugees from Arab countries.

As for the claim that there was no country of Palestine -- well, that is really silly. There was no modern state of Palestine, but the peoples of Palestine (including the small Jewish communities) had every reason to expect that in time there would be a state, and that given the principle of self-determination, that state would have the character of the majority of its inhabitants. This happened throughout the middle east, and indeed, throughout the world, with the breakup of empires.

Anyway, for those interested in pursuing this subject beyond the information on Palestinian websites, one can consult Meron Benvenisti's Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948, and Salman Abu Sitta's Atlas of Palestine 1948, if you can get a hold on it.

And please look at the website of those Israelis who are trying to bring to the Israeli consciousness the tragedy of the Nakba, the Israeli organization Zochrot. One of their activities is to go around the country posting signs with the old Arabic place names, sometimes in English and transliterated Hebrew.

Counter the $60 Million Gift to Birthright (Taglit) With a $60 Gift to "Encounter"

According to Haaretz today, Sheldon Adelson, a wealthy Jewish republican, has earmarked 60 million dollars for Birthright (Taglit), the program that gives a free trip to Israel for Jewish college students. Read about it here.

As a college professor on a major university campus, I have been following Birthright from its inception. I endorsed the program then, and I endorse it now, with reservations. I know that some have been afraid that Birthright brainwashes college students into mindless "advocates" for Israel, i.e., rightwing zombies spouting some Dershowitz or Bard nonsense. Tain't necessarily so.

To do that effectively, you would need to get the students way before college.

The truth is that Birthright hits different people in different ways; in fact, there is not one Birthright program, but there are several, run by different organizations with different agendas.

The good news about Birthright is that many people return from it energized about Israel, but not always in a mindless way. Take an intelligent college student and try to brainwash her, and she will know what is going on. Have her come back to campus and engage her about the Palestinians, and it will be easier than somebody who is apolitical and apathetic.

Still, I have reservations, and that is because the "sophisticated" Birthright programs -- like the adult UJC "missions" they try to emulate -- expose students to a wide variety of opinions within the Jewish consensus, from the Meretz left to the settler right. They do not meet with human rights activists (though they may meet with activists for Jewish minorities Ethiopian Jews, etc.), and they do not meet with people outside the political Zionist camp.

Even a program run by an Ivy League Hillel like Yale two years ago had students meet with liberal Zionist dinosaurs like Amos Oz and Aharon Barak. Hardly cutting edge.

So how can we counter those Jewish Republican dollars? By backing programs that take college students to the West Bank and show them what life is really about behind the separation wall.

One such excellent program is Encounter. No, this is not Birthright Unplugged, which also does a good job, and is worthy of your support. Encounter takes students who are spending a year studying in Israeli institutions, universities, yeshivas, etc. and gets them invited into the homes of Palestinians on the West Bank so that they can see for themselves the effects of the occupation.

You won't see people like Adelson forking over money for justice or understanding between Israelis and Palestinians. But you and I should. And this is a great program. You can donate to Encounter here, and they accept Paypal.

Hebron Watch -- Beginning of the Redemption?

Worth quoting in full...

Last update - 09:34 09/08/2007 Evacuation orders issued to settlers in four Hebron stores

By Nadav Shragai, Haaretz Correspondent

The Civil Administration has issued evacuation orders for four more Hebron stores where settlers squatted two years ago. The stores are located in the "triangle market," not far from the wholesale market from where two Jewish families were evacuated by Israel Defense Forces on Tuesday.

The evacuation order, which was issued following a petition by Peace Now, will not take place immediately as the settlers have appealed to the Judea and Samaria Appeals Committee, and their case will be heard in two weeks.

The stores in question are on Jewish-owned land that was inhabited by Jews until 1929, when Arabs massacred many members of the local community and the survivors fled.

But the settlers argue that aside from being on Jewish-owned land, the stores are an integral part of the Jewish Avraham Avinu neighborhood: They share common walls with the houses on the edge of the neighborhood, and the neighborhood's access road passes between them.

Between 1948 and 1967, when Jordan controlled Hebron, the stores were managed by the kingdom's custodian of enemy property. After Israel captured the territories in 1967, it upheld the leases that Palestinian shopkeepers had signed with the Jordanian body and gave them the status of protected tenants.

In 1994, following both Baruch Goldstein's massacre of Muslim worshipers at the Cave of the Patriarchs and a stabbing in the area, the IDF closed both the wholesale and triangle markets and forbade Palestinian merchants to enter. Some time later, after the squatters moved in, two of the merchants who had rented the stores asked Peace Now to approach the Civil Administration for an eviction order on their behalf.

The Civil Administration granted the order, ruling that the army's closure of the market did not cancel the tenants' rights to the stores, and that the Jewish squatters had no rights to the property. "This was a deliberate, planned and illegal act that challenged the rule of law in the city of Hebron," it wrote in its submission to the appeals committee.

Orit Struk, one of the leaders of Hebron's Jewish community, said the army prepared a defensive plan for the Hebron settlers "whose goal was to reduce to a minimum the number of [closed] Palestinian stores in the vicinity of the Jewish community," and this plan was approved by the military prosecution, the state prosecution and "every professional and political echelon."

Hagit Ofran of Peace Now retorted that the squatters were following the settlers' well-known recipe for "taking over properties in Hebron. The authorities see everything and know what has been done, but choose to ignore it and do nothing until a complaint is filed. Only when we threatened to go to the High Court of Justice did the system begin to move, and I hope that in the end, the squatters will be evacuated, as happened in the wholesale market."

Principles of Torah Morality according to Tony Soprano (Dov Lior, Moshe Levinger, Shlomo Riskin, Mordecai Eliyahu, Hanan Porat, Elyahim Levanon, etc.)

In my previous post, I talked about how one should go about doing Jewish ethics, and I suggested to look for the broad ethical assumption behind specific Jewish legal rulings. But the broad ethical assumptions are also subject to debate.

Consider the following statements that are much-cited by rightwing rabbis and that Tony Soprano could enthusiastically endorse

1. Get the other guy before he gets you.

2. Don't take pity on your enemies.

3. Only take care of your own folks.

The classical statements,in Hebrew, go as follows:

1. Ha-Kam le-horgkeha, hashkem le-horego

2. Kol ha-merahem al-ha-akhzarim, etc.

3. Aniye Irkha Kodemim.

All three principles are found in rabbinic sources. The first one is the rule of self-defence. If somebody rises up to kill you, get up early to kill him. The discussion in rabbinic sources tells us how to apply the specific law of when somebody sneaks into your house, but it does not address the question where or how to apply the broad ethical principle behind the law. What is legitimate self-defence? There is, of course, legal discussion -- but what of the ethics behind it?

The second principle says, "Whoever has mercy on the cruel people, will end by being cruel to merciful people." Let us call this a conservative defence of retributive justice -- letting criminals off without punishment is bad for the society. While the principle is prima facie reasonable, questions of definition and application also inevitably arise.

The third principle says that when you have to choose between giving charity to the poor of your own city, and those of a foreign city, you should first take care of your own. A fine statement of preferential morality, and, again, in accordance with common sense morality.

Now, Tony Soprano has his good points, but on the whole he is not a moral person. If he lives his life according to the aforementioned Jewish principles, does that mean that they are unethical? But we have seen that they seem reasonable according to common-sense morality.

The problem, of course, is that these are Soprano's only principles, the one he constantly appeals to, and the one he constantly interprets according to his own unethical desires. The problem is not in the principles themselves, but in the way they are used by an immoral agent.

And so we come to the the aformentioned West Bank rabbis, who have reduced Torah morality by their selective reading and overemphasis, based on their perverse ultra-nationalism and religious fundamentalism, to mafia morality.

You see, it may come down to personal morality after all. If the person applying a moral principle herself possesses a vicious moral character, the application of the principle is perverse.

Maimonides notes that physically ill people taste sweet things as bitter and bitter things as sweet. So, too, people who are sick in the soul, i.e., have vicious character traits.

The Jewish ethical and legal tradition can indeed be sweet, but in the hands of a hard-hearted rabbi the illiberal elements can triumph, and then Torah becomes a sam ha-mavvet, a potion of death.

Egoistic ultranationalism and an inability to understand the other has poisoned these rabbis. Whenever they open their mouths on questions of Israel/Palestine, they desecrate God's name in public.

Jewish Ethics and the Question of Justice for Palestinians and Israelis -- Part One

How does one do Jewish ethics? That is, how does one appeal to the Jewish tradition for ethical guidance? Of course, one needn’t be interested in doing so, but if one is – then what is a good way of going about it?

Ask most orthodox Jews, especially rabbis, about Jewish ethics and they will answer you with Jewish law. You want to talk about the morality of abortion according to Jewish sources? Euthenasia? Homosexuality? The rabbis will consult what other (orthodox) rabbis have said about these topics in their law books and responsa. They will try to convince you that Jewish law (halakha) and Jewish ethics (musar) are not only coextensive, but that the latter is reducible to the former.

The halakhicization of Jewish ethics is a recent development in the history of Jewish literature. Alongside the extensive Jewish legal literature, there is an even more extensive Jewish ethical (musar) literature, which, if one looks at the number of manuscripts and printed editions, reached a much larger audience than the small, professional class of jurists that read the legal literature. To consider contemporary issues in light of classical Jewish ethical sources, one needs apparently to take into consideration this literature.

Unfortunately, the musar literatue is of little help in dealing with social and political morality. Most of the classical manuals of Jewish ethics deal with personal morality, specifically, with the virtues an individual should seek and the vices she should avoid. Personal morality is not immediately relevant to determining the rightness or wrongness of social acts, practices, or principles.

But if we leave out both halakha and musar, what do we have left for doing Jewish ethics?

Well, we could take the route of non-orthodox Jewish thinkers, which is to try to appeal to broad ethical imperatives from the Jewish tradition (“Seek peace”; “Pursue justice”; Sanctify God’s Name”). The problem here is that these principles are vacuous without some sort of specification; they can be enthusiastically upheld by people with moral sensibilities as disparate as those of Martin Buber and Meir Kahane. How does one pursue justice? How does one sanctify God’s name? How does one adjudicate conflicts between principles?

Again, to achieve specific Jewish ethical guidance, the orthodox will reach for their law codes and rabbinical responsa. As an orthodox Jew, I have no problem claiming that Jewish law can and should be a source of Jewish ethical reflection. This does not mean adopting the modern orthodox fallacy (heresy?) of reducing ethics to law. Rather it means that precedents can be brought from the Jewish legal tradition not only to determine Jewish law, but also to uncover the broad ethical assumptions on which that law is based. In most cases, these broad ethical assumptions will have nothing specifically “Jewish” about them. Derekh eretz kadmah le-Torah General morality precedes Jewish morality. But how they are specified may be instructive about how we can go about doing Jewish ethics.

In a subsequent post I will apply these general reflections to the question of justice for Israelis and Palestinians.

Time to learn some Mishnah…

No, Rivkele, The Jews Weren't Driven into Exile by the Romans

"In A.D. 70, and again in 135, the Roman Empire brutally put down Jewish revolts in Judea, destroying Jerusalem, killing hundreds of thousands of Jews and sending hundreds of thousands more into slavery and exile."

Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, May 5, 2006

"Well, now: We were expelled from the land and taken into captivity in the year 70 of the Common Era."

Leonard Fein, The Jewish Daily Forward, May 11, 2007–07–23

"After Bar Kochba…Jewish emigration, a more or less permanent feature of ancient Palestinian demography, now assumed alarming proportions."

Salo Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews (New York/Philadelphia, 1952), vol. 2, pp. 122-3.

Despite their ideological differences, what unites columnists like Charles Krauthammer and Leonard Fein, and what distinguishes them from Salo Baron,the greatest historian of the Jews in the twentieth century, is inter alia their acceptance of the myth that the Jews were forcibly expelled from the Land of Israel, and taken into captivity by the Romans. To this day, most lay people, Jews and non-Jews, accept the myth of the exile, whereas no historian, Jew or non-Jew, takes it seriously.

This post will look at the disconnect between popular and scholarly belief and try to examine the origin of the myth several centuries after the event occurred. I will follow pretty closely the first part of a comprehensive article on the subject by Hebrew University professor, Yisrael Yuval, which is available here . Because this article is under copyright, I can’t quote more than a few passages, and so I will just be paraphrasing him. But I urge you to read the article, especially his copious footnotes.

The myth was not invented by the Zionists, although it was greatly used by them, in part, to justify the return of the Jews to their ancestral homeland. For the tacit assumption of the Zionists was that if the Jews had left the land willingly, if they had merely “emigrated” because they found opportunities beckoning in the Diaspora, then they would have betrayed their allegiance to the land, and their return would have been less justified. That is one of the reasons why Zionists argued for years that the Palestinians left Palestine of their own free will – if they were forcibly expelled, then somehow their claim to the land would be stronger. Of course, the putative expulsion by the Romans was not the only claim of the Jewish people to the land – many peoples have been exiled from their lands, and the Zionists were not claiming that all of them had a right to return -- but it dovetailed nicely with the historical view of the wandering Jew that finds no rest outside of his native place from which he was expelled.

The first point to make is that well before the revolt against Rome in 66-70 c.e., there were Jewish communities outside Palestine, most notably in Babylonia and in Egypt, but elsewhere as well. References to the dispersal of the Jewish people throughout the civilized world are found in the book of Esther, Josephus, and Philo. There is no indication that these communities were small, satellite communities.

Second, there is no contemporary evidence – i.e., 1st and 2nd centuries c.e. – that anything like an exile took place. The Romans put down two Jewish revolts in 66-70 c.e. and in 132-135 c.e. According to Josephus, the rebels were killed, and many of the Jews died of hunger. Some prisoners were sent to Rome, and others were sold in Libya. But nowhere does Josephus speak of Jews being taken into exile. As we shall see below, there is much evidence to the contrary. There was always Jewish emigration from the Land of Israel, as the quote above from Baron indicates.

The first mention of the exile of the Jews occurs in remarks attributed to the third century Palestinian rabbi, R. Yohanan that are found in the Babylonian Talmud, a work that received its final recension several centuries later (c. 500 c.e.): “Our House has been destroyed, our Temple burnt, and we ourselves exiled from our land” (Gittin, 56a). The editor/s of the Talmud referred this statement to the Roman exile. Similar statements can be found elsewhere in the Babylonian Talmud attributing to rabbis living in the Land of Israel the view that the Romans were responsible for the destruction of the House, the burning of the temple, and the exile from the land. But if one examines other Babylonian sources, and most sources from the Land of Israel, the statements most likely refer to the First Temple, and the exile by the Babylonians. There is, after all, something odd in having rabbis living in the Land of Israel bemoaning an exile from the Land of Israel. Yuval summarizes the sources as follows:

“In other words, it seems that the triple expression—destruction of the House, burning of the Temple, exile from the land—originally (in the sources from the Land of Israel) referred to the First Temple and were applied to the Second Temple only in Babylonia.10 In the Tannaitic and early Amoraic sources, Rome is accused only of destroying the Temple, not of exiling the people from their land.11 A broad historical and national outlook, one that viewed the “Exile of Edom” (Rome being identified with the biblical Edom) as a political result of forced expulsion, did not survive from this period. Nor would such a view have been appropriate to the political reality and the conditions of Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel, which were certainly very well known to the members of that generation.”

In fact, Chaim Milikowsky, professor and past chairman of the Talmud department at Bar Ilan university, has argued that in 2nd and 3rd century tannaitic sources, the Hebrew term rendered as “exile” has the meaning of political subjugation rather than physically being driven from the land (cited in Yuval, p. 19, n.1) This, by the way, dovetails nicely with the Zionist historiography that emphasizes the loss of political independence, rather the physical removal of the Jews from the Land of Israel. For Zionists were somewhat at a loss to explain how Jewish rabbis could create the Mishnah and subsequently the Talmud of the Land of Israel if there was a mass exile.

This much of Yuval’s essay is uncontroversial and based on widely-accepted historiography. What follows is speculative and fits well the general trend of Yuval’s work, which is to see much greater Christian influence on the formation of rabbinic Judaism than has hitherto been recognized. Yuval points out that in early Christian sources, following the failed Bar Kokhba rebellion, there is an attempt to interpret the removal of the Jews from Jerusalem as punishment for the sin of rejecting Christ, and the depletion of the Jewish population of Jerusalem in light of the Biblical prophecies of exile. The Jewish reaction, on his reading, was to emphasize that Jews were still very much in the Land of Israel – which contemporary Jews, for the first time, interpreted to include not merely the Northern Kingdom of Israel, but the entire land. Only later, during Talmudic times, was the Exile from the Land incorporated in Jewish collective memory.

What implications does the exposure of the myth of the Roman Exile have for Zionism, the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state, etc., etc. None, in my opinion. It is less important that the Jews were actually carried off into Exile than that they thought they were. The rabbis, and even earlier Jewish scholars, tended to conflate the Babylonian exile with the later loss of independence among the Romans. As a formative moment in Jewish religious consciousness, the destruction of the first temple and the exile was vastly more significant than the destruction of the second temple; some, like Bible scholar Adele Berlin, have argued that parts of the Bible, and maybe even the Torah, were edited in light of the trauma of the Babylonian exile. What this means is that in Jewish (and Christian) consciousness destruction, exile, and return, became significant categories in light of which history was read. If there is any argument for a right to return, it is not based, in the case of the Jews, on being driven out of the land against their will. It is more because of the Land of Israel playing such an important role in the consciousness of many (though not all) Jews. This is a more modest claim than is generally heard; it certainly does not in itself justify Jewish hegemony over Palestine. But it does put on the table the very real connection (imagined or not) between the Jewish people and Palestine. That, to me, is what is reasonable about Zionism.

In the words of J.K. Rowling, just because it is in your head doesn’t mean that it is not real.

Shabbat Nahamu -- Comfort, comfort my people

The motto of this blog is "Not just another Israel-bashing blog" -- but something more.

That "something more" is my Magnesian Zionism, and my love for Am Yisrael, the People of Israel, and, for ha-Am ha-Yisraeli, the Israeli people. For as much as I dislike, even detest, the ideologies and immoralities that swarm around me, I cannot bring myself to dislike my people. And when my gut takes over (like after reading Nahum Barnea's brilliant piece on the Gush Katif evacuees in today's Yediot Aharonot -- yet not available on the web, I think), and I want to demonize the settlers as fantastically spoiled, amazingly chutzpadik leeches, I pull myself short and say, Calm down, they are tinokot she-nishbu, captive children, of a fundamentalist ideology and parisitical mentality that has been the undoing of them. They, like drug addicts, don't need condemnation; they need treatment, patience, and love. And before I throw stones, I should look at the mirror -- have I done enough to fight the settlement movement from Gush Katif to Efrat?

No, a little bit more ahavat Yisrael and ahavat medinat Yisrael (love of the Jewish people, and the State of Israel) is in order and that's what I want to rant about, today.

Has Israel been built with the blood, sweat, and property of millions of innocent Palestinians? Yes it has. And it must make amends and offer restitution. But it has also been built with the blood, sweat, and energies of millions of Jews, inside and outside. And while there are many deep and structural problems with the state that was founded in 1948, there are many worse post-World Was II states than Israel, many more states that perpetuated the same crimes and worse than Israel, and yet are in much worse shape today.

Yes, things are the absolute pits here. But we can be thankful of the little things.

For example, I love Jerusalem -- whatever is left of it after its overbuilding and its ghetto-like, apartheid wall.

I love the quiet neighborhoods, the bustling areas, the amount and quality of kosher food I can eat...

Where but in Jerusalem can you go to a kosher restaurant that doesn't look irredeemably Jewish? Where you look around and the people don't all look like they followed you out of the early minyan (prayer service) at shul?

What other Jewish community in the world gives your daughters at least two shuls in which women read from the Torah AND there is a mehitzah (partition).

What other Jewish community in the world has Jews and Arabs working together to protest injustice and humanity?

What other Jewish community in the world has a DVD rental store like the Third Ear, where you can get alternative indie movies that show you the true face of the Occupation, as well as the complete sets of Simpsons and Seinfeld?

All this is in Israel, and in Jerusalem, the Holy City.

Gershom Gorenberg, the journalist, told me a story that I love to repeat. He was once speaking about Israel before Jews in America, and they were giving him a rough time for his criticisms of Israel. He finally broke down and said, "You know what -- you Jews are the best argument for making aliyah (immigrating) to Israel that I can think of. When I criticize Israel in Israel, nobody bats an eyelash...but when I do it outside of Israel, I am called a self-hating Jew and a traitor."

We Jewish people are in a spiritual malaise. Traumatized by the holocaust, supportive of a state that is still, after sixty years, foundationally racist, and yet has achieved so much....if I didn't believe in the indestructability of the Jewish people -- that the seed of Abraham will never wither away -- I would despair.

But we will prevail. With the help of people of good faith everywhere, and, desperately, with the assistance of our Palestinian brothers and sisters, we shall overcome the malaise. Justice will be served. We will learn from them and from our mistakes. It will take decades, but it will come. I am 53 years old. I compare my generation with that of the younger generation -- things are changing.

One day there will be no more secrets and lies. Books like Dershowitz's Case for Israel and Bard's Myths and Facts will have been banished to their proper place -- dusty bins in second-hand book stores in Boro Park No more refugee camps. No more rusting keys. There will be justice, justice, and peace.

Ma'a salaama

Shabbat Shalom

Jerry

Lucius Malfoy: Don't Lease Wizard Land to Muggles!

In a press-release issued today, Lucius Malfoy of the Wizard National Fund (WNF) wrote:

"We are gratified that the Government of Wizards, which since 1961 has been entrusted with management of Wizard lands through the Wizard Land Authority (WLA), recognized that the land purchased by the Wizards for the Wizard purebloods should remain in the hands of its rightful owners.

"This decision of the Wizard parliament reaffirms the vision and the dream of Lord Voldemort and the millions of wizards over the past 106 years who contributed and participated in the rebirth of a Wizard nation after 2,000 years. The land of the Wizards is part of the very existence of the Wizard people from as far back as Salazar Slytherin. We are a people linked to our land. Now and forever."

Mr. Malfoy implied that Muggles whose land was taken from them in the Great War, or paid for with a few galleons, have no rights to that land "since it is not part of their very existence."

Mr. Malfoy's statement came today despite a stinging editorial against the parliament's decision from the respected Daily Prophet.

For the original statement of the WNF-KKL, click here

With apologies to Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, and Ron Weasley (not to mention J.K. Rowling)

There are no kosher settlements

You know, back in my (political) Zionist youth, I put down two thousand bucks to join a non-profit organization called, "Reishit Geulah". By doing that I was helping support the creation of a new town on the West Bank, right outside of Jerusalem, called "Efrat".

The year must have been 1978 or something. I remember going to hear Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, then rabbi of the Lincoln Square Synagogue in New York City, make the sales pitch for a model Torah community. At one point, after showing plans for the villas, apartments, shul, etc., a skeptical woman raised her hand and said,

"But Rabbi -- isn't Efrat over the Green Line?"

To which Rabbi Riskin replied

"Efrat is in the consensus -- nobody wants to give it back. It's part of the Etzion bloc. And anyway, we will have good relations with our Arab neighbors."

About a month later, I withdrew from Reishit Geulah and got my two thousand dollars back. They were very prompt about the refund.

The town of Efrat -- arguably the most immoral settlement that Israel has ever constructed on the West Bank (but it's a close race) -- will be the subject of a separate post.

Here I just want to see how Efrat maintains its neighborly relations. Please watch the following video (you have to navigate to the site)

http://mishtara.org/blog/?p=214#more-214

You see in the video a group of Palestinians and Jews protesting the fact that route of the Separation Fence now entails a new path for Efrat's sewage. And the cheapest path is through a grove of apricot trees -- well, what were once apricot trees, until they were cut down. This will destroy the livelihood of the Palestinians who have worked there for generations. No amount of compensation will make up for destroying their livelihood and their way of life. Note the reasonableness of the Palestinian, and the patent unfairness of the setup.

Important! Keep watching the video. You will then see the destruction of the apricot trees to make way for the sewage of Efrat, to the soundtrack of Ana be-khoah.

Now take a few minutes to look at yourself at the mirror and ask yourself, in what way was I responsible for the destruction of the livelihood of an entire village?

Now you will say that this happens all the time in any society. Doesn't the government have the right of eminent domain, which allows it to expropriate land for the common good? The answer is yes, it does, provided certain conditions are fulfilled: a) the government has the consent of the governed and is not an occupying force; b) the public good is not the only the good of the occupier or its own population; c) proper compensation is given.

All three of these conditions were fulfilled in the evacuation of the Gush Katif. Not one of them is fulfilled in the current case.

This is just one of hundreds, if not thousands, of injustices that you will never read about in the press. Since you won't read about it, you will think that it does not exist.

Remember, when an Israeli's rights are violated, he can appeal to the Israeli police, the Israeli courts, and to one of the most powerful armies in the world, the Israel Defence Force.

But when a Palestinian's rights are violated, to whom can he appeal? To the same Israeli police, the same Israeli courts, and the same Israel Defence Force -- none of which bodies represents him or his interests.

A New Wind Blowing? Breaking the Silence and UPZ at a Hillel near you

Much has been written recently in the Jewish blogosphere and the American Jewish press about "Shovrim Shtikah" ("Breaking the Silence"), the group of IDF veterans (many of whom are combat officers), whose purpose is to raise people’s awareness about IDF behavior in the West Bank. (Check out their website and read the testimonies, some of which are available in English. There are many more that have not been put up on the web. Donations are welcome for this avodat kodesh/holy project) Several soldiers toured the US in the fall and spoke a variety of venues, mostly Jewish. The trip was organized by the group in Israel, with the help of activists across the US. The Union for Progessive Zionism also got involved with cosponsoring the group at a Hillels. Sorry, Lebel Fein, the UPZ did not bring them to the US – but they were helpful; Tammy Shapiro, head of the UPZ, gets a big yasher koah/congratulation for her work. But the biggest one goes to Judith Kolokoff. The only relatively balanced piece on the group was by Michelle Chabin in the New York Jewish Week. If you missed the link to that article, that may be because there is none; the Jewish Week apparently posted it on their website -- it turns up in Google --and then took it down. Too hat to handle, Gary? It appeared in the January 19, 2007 issue. The worst piece about the American tour, also not available on the web, was in the Israeli tabloid "Yediot Aharonot" under the headline, "Palestinian Groups Fund Draft Resisters." For the record, combat officers are not draft resisters -- and Palestinian groups do not fund BTS. The worst editorial, that of Jonathan Tobin, will be the subject of my next post, kicking off the series, "Captive Children", or as they say in Hebrew, "Tinokot she-Nishbu". This is the way we orthodox Jews label poor, benighted Jews who were brought up with the wrong ideology, that is, when we don't want to consider them to be heretics and deserving death! Stay tuned.