Widening concern for Israeli democracy

Two very different articles pointing to the same problems: one by Yossi Sarid, former  Minister of Education and former Meretz party leader, writing about how Israelis have gotten used to the deterioration of morality, especially public morality, to the encroachment of church and state in the form of more and more limits on women -- "get thee to the back of the bus," voices of women "polluting" the poor ears of religious men, etc. This links to his article online at the Haaretz website.

The other article is by Daniel Gordis-- hardly my favorite columnist, but he too writes about the deterioration of Israeli democracy-- also focusing on the medieval laws coming down and limiting women's rights.  I don't know if anyone is paying attention; I think that Israelis who don't like what is going on are no longer watching or hearing what happens in the public sphere.  They have turned off. Sorry to depress you in these dark times.  Last night I made an attempt, during Chanuka, to seek a sliver of light.

Yet wasn't it Prime Minister Netanyahu (whom Gordis likely supports) who not very long ago warned of this being 1938 all over again, regarding the nuclear threat from Iran? The Gordis article can be read in its entirety at the Jerusalem Post website, but here's its core:

What Are Israelis So Happy About?

Partners for Progressive Israel executive director Ron Skolnik, in his latest column for Jewish Currents magazine, tries to explain puzzling polling results which consistently show a majority of Israelis optimistic about their lives and satisfied with the direction of the country, despite their massive support for last summer's social protest movement.  The following are selected passages of Ron's article:

If things in Israel are so bad, how can they be so good? That’s the paradoxical question that formulated in my brain as I perused the surprising results of a string of public opinion polls commissioned and published by Israel’s newspapers on the eve of Rosh Hashanah. They found that the vast majority of Israelis are happy with their lot and generally pleased with the national situation. ...

In March of last year, I had written for my organization’s on-line publication that “Israel’s part-fence, part-wall barrier has not only added security . . . Psychologically, it has severed the average Israeli’s sense of responsibility for what goes on under the Occupation on the other side: Out of sight, out of mind, as it were — except when spasms of violence temporarily upset the general equilibrium.” The Rosh Hashanah poll results substantiated this analysis — that with terrorism down over the past years, thanks in large part to the improved security cooperation of the Palestinian Authority forces in the West Bank, Israelis are happy to push the difficult question of war and peace to the back burner. Pessimism about peace prospects therefore does not translate to pessimism overall because Israelis have essentially tuned out the “Palestinian problem” as a day-to-day concern. ...

Israel polls obsessively to gauge support for the various political parties. These polls, too, have recently made it clear that pessimism about peace is doing little to dampen Israeli optimism. To the contrary, Israel’s two main opposition parties were experiencing a reversal of fortune that was very much the result of the public’s inward focus. Labor’s star was rising with a new party chief, MK Shelly Yachimovich, who is closely identified with Israelis’ bread-and-butter concerns, while Kadima continued to sink under the leadership of Tzipi Livni, who has branded herself as a sober alternative to Netanyahu in the diplomatic arena but has failed to stake a claim as a populist

Hannukah & history: the pride & the pity

This is a reprise and slight update of past postings about Hannukah.  It comes every year, after all, and its bottom-line lesson for us has not changed:

History is of necessity an interpretive process, and these interpretations often spawn self-serving myths. National myths are not usually complete fabrications, but they tend to romanticize and sanitize real events.

The traditional Hanukkah story is a source of pride for the Jewish people. We are taught that a small army of freedom fighters, the Maccabees, led by the heroic priestly family of Mattathias and his seven sons, successfully resisted the cruel pagan tyranny of the ancient Greco-Syrian Seleucid dynasty. This is not untrue, but it's only part of the story.

We are usually not taught the far more complex reality that the Maccabean war of liberation was also a civil war between rural “fundamentalist” religious adherents of the old order and the more educated and cosmopolitan Hellenized Jews of the city, who voluntarily and eagerly embraced  

Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011): 'Jewish' gadfly

I last saw him at the New York Public Library in June 2010, days before he learned of his illness.  There, in the NYPL's magnificent main building, he spoke about his recent autobiography ("Hitch-22"), making a point of saying that he wanted to write it at a not-yet-advanced age, because you never know when you'll breathe your last.  He was about three weeks older than I.

I frequently read his articles and essays with great interest, and I was amused by his brilliant exposé of Mother Teresa.  I disagreed about as often as I agreed with his positions.  In particular, I did not agree with his stubborn defense of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq and of George W. Bush, even though I fully appreciated the human rights considerations which motivated his support for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.  (Full disclosure: I initially supported the run-up to the invasion, until the US lost the vote in the UN Security Council and insisted on unilateral military action; I rejoiced at Saddam's overthrow for humanitarian reasons, but also came to know that the terribly ill-advised decisions of US "proconsul" Paul Bremer-- to fire Saddam's military and to bar even lowly Bathist Party members from government jobs-- made Iraq's sectarian civil war inevitable.)

The JTA's obit article on Hitchens is particularly interesting to me, as it focuses upon his long and complicated track record regarding Jews, Judaism and Israel:

Israel alarmist tackles post-Holocaust thought

Alvin Rosenfeld, the Indiana University professor of English and Jewish Studies engaged in dialogue at the NY Museum of Jewish Heritage, Dec. 14, with David Harris, director of the American Jewish Committee, on his new book, The End of the Holocaust (Indiana University Press, 2011).  Prof. Rosenfeld had achieved a measure of notoriety with an essay published by the AJC in 2006, “Progressive Jewish Thought and the New Antisemitism.” The controversy that followed is admirably summarized in this Wikipedia article.

You might wish to read “Shotgun Blast,” an analysis of the essay in The American Prospect magazine by Gershom Gorenberg.  He praised Rosenfeld's idea, but criticized his "sloppiness":

.... While attacking vituperative opponents of Israel who call themselves "progressive," he identifies their views with all who call themselves progressives – rather like letting James Dobson define what "Christian" means. He fires the shotgun of his criticism at such a wide flock of writers that his reader can wonder where he is aiming. Does The Washington Post's pro-Israel columnist Richard Cohen really belong to the same ideological species as those who accuse Israel of genocide? [Cohen apparently went overboard in one column, cited by Rosenfeld, when he characterized Israel’s creation as a “mistake”; in another column published not long after Rosenfeld’s essay came out, Cohen complains (in much the same way that Rosenfeld would) about the left’s outsized focus upon Israel, while often giving far worse human rights offenders (like China, Sudan, Zimbabwe and Iran) a bye.--R. Seliger]
The blurriness is a shame, because Rosenfeld has a legitimate argument. ... his intended target is those Jews who reject the very existence of a Jewish state, and who express their opposition in shrieks that rise to equating Israel with the Nazis.

Another excellent critique was written by Andrew Sillow-Carroll, editor-in-chief of the New Jersey Jewish News, in an editorial that I reproduced on this blog.  Since I share Rosenfeld’s concern for the more outlandish and unfair arguments against Israel that characterize so much of the left, and occasionally seep into mainstream liberal discourse, my response was rather mild. 

Yet, as in the AJC essay, Rosenfeld (judging from this public appearance) engages in overkill in

Republican contenders love Israel to death

With characteristic boldness (perhaps we should call it the "audacity of nope"), the GOP front-runner du jour, Newt Gingrich, asserts that the Palestinians are "an invented people."  This was a telling moment at the pander fest that was the Republican Jewish Coalition's candidates' forum.  Having carefully not invited Rep. Ron Paul, the RJC insured that it would be no less.  From the little that I saw of it, only Jon Huntsman-- while being warm toward his audience-- seems not to have gone overboard in this mode. 

Although Gingrich's comment, according to the JTA account, drew "rebukes" from some of his rivals, these were not anything like the points I'll raise here.  First off, all nations are "invented" at the formative stage in their history.  Whether due to geography, history, language, culture or religion, they obtain a level of self-consciousness as a distinct people and generally press their claim in some organized way.  As the well-known Palestinian-American scholar Prof. Rashid Khalidi indicated in Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (Columbia University Press, 1997), "National identity is constructed; it is not an essential, transcendent given...."

Arab-Palestinian identity was largely a reaction to the Zionist movement reestablishing Jewish nationhood in Palestine, the ancient birthplace of the Jewish people, as recorded in the Bible and remembered reverentially in the Jewish religion for two millennia.  Just as Palestinian nationalism was born of the Arab struggle against the Jews in the early to mid 20th century, the Jewish national rebirth occurred in Palestine, with Jewish identity made over from what was primarily (but not only) a religious heritage -- because of the tragic experience of Jews as a frequently trod-upon minority in Christian Europe and the Muslim Middle East.

New film on WW 2 controversy of 'Bergson Group'

Bergson in 1940s & '70s (VarianFry.org)

The NY Jewish Week has posted my latest article, on a film and filmmaker dealing with the Holocaust-era controversy of the "Bergson Group" and whether American Jews were too passive.  It begins with a discussion of the filmmaker's background and how pre-State Zionist divisions and the politics of that time and ours enter into the controversy, including a word from J Street founder Jeremy Ben-Ami on how this should not have been the case:

Pierre Sauvage ... owes his life to the good people of Le Chambon, France, who saved him as a child, along with many others, during the Holocaust.  His 1989 film, Weapons of the Spirit, documents their story.
His new documentary, Not Idly By—Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust, is a searing indictment of the leadership of the American Jewish community during World War II as articulated by Hillel Kook, better known as Peter Bergson.  Its 55 minutes interweave Bergson's statements from two sources, Laurence Jarvik’s Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die (1982) and outtakes from Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985). ... 

'Team Obama' excusing Arab anti-Semitism?

As Republican Presidential debaters vie for Jewish votes by professing infinite love for Israel (all except the uninvited Ron Paul, of course), there's that brouhaha on Obama administration figures who don't simply blame everything on the Arabs.  J.J. Goldberg writes amusingly of this in his column in The Forward:

[Ambassador to Belgium Howard] Gutman is under fire for a speech he gave to a November 30 conference on European anti-Semitism, which his critics say amounted to rationalizing and excusing anti-Semitism. In his remarks Gutman claimed that attacks on European Jews by local Muslims stem from a hatred “largely born of and reflecting the tension between Israel, the Palestinian Territories and neighboring Arab states in the Middle East.” ...
Gutman said that educators and community leaders can help ease the fraught situation by “working to limit converting political and military tension in the Middle East into social problems in Europe.” But to make a real dent in European anti-Semitism, Israeli, Palestinian and neighboring Arab leaders have to sit down and talk peace.
Gutman’s most serious offense was to draw what most observers are calling a phony distinction between “classic” anti-Semitism and a supposedly new version spreading in Europe today. ... the first refers to 1,000 years of repeated efforts by ... Christian Europe to liquidate the Jewish people .... The second refers to a series of attacks and threats against European Jews over the past decade, including vandalism, verbal abuse and some violence, mostly by Muslim immigrant teenagers.

By the way, although it did not go viral, I was similarly criticized when I made much the same argument as Gutman in a May 2003 Forward op-ed, "Reconsidering Antisemitism": 

Meretz Secretary General in South America

Dror Morag, the secretary general of Israel's Meretz Party (someone whom many of us knew as secretary general of the World Union of Meretz), reports on his November tour of South America:

During November, I participated in a series of conventions in Latin America. The
events took place in an important period in the Zionist calendar, with the Memorial
Day to Yitzhak Rabin and the 94th anniversary to the Balfour Declaration. I was sent
to the journey as a member of the Jewish Agency Board of Governors, to a special
convention in Buenos Aires, aimed at learning of the Jewish life in the region and
strengthening the local communities. On November 14th, we commemorated the
Balfur Declaration and held a ceremony in honor of the victims of the suicide bomb
attacks in the Israeli embassy (1992) and the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association
building (1994). The two aforementioned memorials remind us of the long and
sorrowful journey we are going through since the foundation of the State of Israel.
The two dates are linked together to our reality as a society and cultural group
aspiring for lasting peace and development, understanding that only regional peace
will lead the State of Israel and the Jewish People to lasting security and stability.

During my journey, I visited Jewish communities in Uruguay, Argentina and Chile.
Visiting these countries, I also met left-wing politicians and local media and presented
the Party's and the Israeli Left's position to the general public.

In Uruguay, I met a small but well organized Jewish community. It is a mostly
secular community maintaining strong links with Israel. The local Meretz group

News from World Union of Meretz

Partners for Progressive Israel remains as it was when we were Meretz USA, affiliated with the World Union of Meretz, a constituent of the World Zionist Organization.  The following is the latest report from Amichay Findling, coordinator of the World Union of Meretz: 

Dear friends and partners,

Democracy in Israel

Israel is going through hectic times, ruled by a bad and racist government threatening the foundations of democracy - freedom of speech and Independence of the juridical system. Every week we face new disturbing law propositions limiting journalists and civil society organizations and trying to politicize the supreme court. Every week new incidents of political violence erupts, always by extreme right wing activists against Palestinians and Israeli left-wing leaders.  

Meretz stands in the front of defending Israeli democracy. Meretz is always there - in the parliament and in the streets. We are in the front for such extent, that starting from this week, security services issued a bodyguard to Meretz MK Zehava Galon  after receiving threats.  (You may get the latest updates-- in Hebrew-- on the Meretz Party's Facebook page; you are also invited to follow the World Union of Meretz on Facebook, in English.)

And yet, everyday we are in the Knesset and every week in the streets, protesting and proposing better laws, building coalitions and working towards a better Israel.

Letter to Jewish Week: 'Buy Israel Week' Misleading

The first ever "Buy Israel Week" in the US kicked off earlier this week, on November 28, and will run until this Sunday, December 4.  The campaign, supported by a large number of Jewish media outlets and organizations, including the right-wing Stand With Us, aims to increase consumer support for Israel at a time when fears of a general boycott of the country are growing.   There's only one problem: 'Buy Israel' includes the settlements.

Here's my published response to an editorial in the NY Jewish Week, one of the partners in the Buy Israel Week effort:

‘Buy Israel’ Misleading

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

The Jewish Week’s call to “buy Israel” in the framework of “Buy Israel Week” (Editorial, Nov.11) is well intentioned, but misleading. Specifically, the “Buy Israel Week” campaign makes absolutely no distinction between Israel and Israeli settlements in the West Bank. As a result, “Buy Israel Week” would have us buy from Tekoa, the settlement home of Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, as quickly as we would buy from Tel Aviv.

Israel is legitimate and sovereign. So American Jews should certainly be encouraged to buy Israeli goods and services made within Israel proper — the land within the pre-war borders of June 1967. But Israel’s West Bank settlements, established in an area under occupation, enjoy no legitimacy, and they undermine both Israel’s security and its future as a democracy with a stable Jewish majority. So supporting the settlements through our purchasing power does damage to Israel.