Postscript re 'the Jewish state' and 2 states

I've received some pushback from a couple of fellow supporters of two states, regarding my prevous post on the concept of a 'Jewish state.'  I fully understand the concern among fellow progressives  about what is meant by this term.  

This is how I wish to respond:
A progressive Zionist is very clear on what s/he means by a Jewish state; s/he knows that it's not about a state that is either theocratic or exclusively Jewish.  It is about a country that is always open to Jews seeking refuge from persecution, discrimination or oppression (at a minimum) and also may have a certain affinity for preserving & cultivating Jewish cultural expression &   heritage — whether in religious or secular form — (at a maximum), while not impinging upon the individual civil rights of its non-Jewish citizens.

I am NOT saying that peace hinges on the Palestinians accepting a Zionist understanding of Jewish identity. Still, it's too bad that there is this misunderstanding or reticence; it would take away a right-wing arguing point if the Palestinian national leadership could clearly state that they understand what is meant by the "Jewish people" (as a historic national entity, beyond a mere religious group) and that a Jewish state doesn't have to be theocratic or exclusively Jewish.

What I learned in Ramallah

Meeting with Dr. Ashrawi, center-right in cream-colored jacket.

 Visiting Ramallah (the provisional Palestinian capital) last week with Partners for Progressive Israel, we met with notable Palestinians, including Prime Minister Salaam Fayyad, the independent legislator and often-quoted activist Hanan Ashrawi, Palestinian-American businessman Sam Bahour, and the longtime PLO politician and official Yasser Abed Rabbo (a key player in the Geneva Initiative).

Our conversation with each was remarkable in its own right, beginning with Rabbo, who provided a glimpse of what might have been with the post-Annapolis negotiations between Ehud Olmert and his team with Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority leadership in 2007-08. George W. Bush tried to lend a last-minute hand during the closing days of his presidency, even setting up a meeting under White House auspices for Abbas and Olmert to hammer out the loose ends. The date mentioned by Rabbo as having been set by Bush was Jan. 2, 2009. Rabbo fills in with an exact date what Bernard Avishai wrote about in his NY Times Magazine article of Feb. 2011:

First word from Partners' Israel Symposium

I'm still in Israel for the second half of my two-week visit, at the moment sitting at the desktop computer of my cousin Gila, at Kibbutz Kabri in the Western Galilee, overlooking Naharia and the Meditteranean. There's much to think and write about from my intensive first week on Tiyul with the Partners for Progressive Israel "Israel Seminar" program hosted by the Meretz party.  We've met with a wide range of activists, analysts and officials--from Likud ministers Benny Begin & Moshe Ya'alon and the head of the Yesha [settlers] Council on the right to Meretz head Zahava Gal-on, other Meretz leaders and MK Dov Hanin (a Communist of the Hadash party) on the left, and the Palestinian Prime Minister Salaam Fayyad and numerous other Palestinians and Israelis in between.



Group photo, most wearing "My heart is on the left" Meretz T-shirts;Shani is front & center.

 The Seminar participants were an impressive bunch,  including: five academics (two historians, one philosopher, a journalist and an astronomer), an internationally celebrated singer & actor (our board chair, Theodore Bikel), a very impressive graduate student in international relations, plus an idealistic recent college grad who aspires to be a journalist.

Shani Chabansky, 22, blogged daily at her personal weblog, which I hereby link you to. She refers to us by our former name of Meretz USA and writes with youthful exuberance, with an intensely ideological lens, while presenting a useful running report on our activities. I'm going to take some time to digest what we've experienced and will write more either later this week or next.

2 states or one? Apartheid? New facts & thoughts

Paul Scham

University of Maryland professor of Israel Studies, Paul Scham, a longtime pro-Israel peace activist (as in J Street), has co-authored a new op-ed article in The Forward, "Moving on From Two-State Solution," with his Israeli colleague Edy Kaufman.  It lays out six options, including a two-state solution, which the authors see as "increasingly politically impossible." I don't quite agree.

I still see two independent states (with some cooperative, bi-national elements) as the best and most realistic alternative, but options #3 and 4 seem vaguely possible and I don't have a problem with this kind of discussion. Yet the concept of a "confederation" makes more sense than a "federation." A confederation is a loose union binding together co-equal sovereign entities. A federal union consolidates more power in a central government than either Israelis or Palestinians would be likely to accept.  Even so, these options are fraught with questions, as the writers themselves note:

Book on Israeli Militarism Critiqued by T. Mitchell

Thomas Mitchell, Ph.D., is an independent scholar and creator of The Self-Hating Gentile blog.

"Fortress Israel" by Patrick Tyler; 497 pp.; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; $35.

Since former Irish diplomat, politician and journalist Conor Cruise O’Brien penned The Siege in 1986, there has been a flood of histories of Zionism and Israel. Some of these have been written by professional historians, others by diplomats and politicians, and some by journalists. Generally I find those written by historians or political scientists to be better because their authors have been trained in using professional judgment to evaluate sources as well as how to make an argument for a particular thesis. Journalists are more trained in getting the interesting quotes, and now freed from restraints imposed by their news editors, are liable to allow their partisanship to show in ways that would not be permitted in a quality newspaper.

Patrick Tyler, a former Washington Post Middle East reporter and New York Times foreign correspondent and writer comes to this task having already written a book on the Mideast policy of American presidents. This history covers Israeli regional policy from 1954 to 2009. In the nearly five hundred pages of text the most attention is devoted to the period between 1954 and 1956 and the Oslo period with each having over a hundred pages devoted to them. Tyler’s two “heroes” in this book are Moshe Sharett and Yitzhak Rabin. Each faces off against a major villain or two: David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Dayan, and Pinhas Lavon for Sharett and Benjamin Netanyahu and Shimon Peres for Rabin.

Patrick Tyler argues in a rather round-about fashion that Israeli diplomatic policy is determined by the military-security establishment in Israel. Tyler defines this broadly to include not only the Israel Defense Force and intelligence organizations like the Mossad, Aman, and Shabak/Shin Bet, but also military politicians such as former chiefs of staff and prominent generals who have gone into politics. He quotes one Israeli to the effect that the IDF is a trade union and everyone who belonged to it toes its line.

Gershom Gorenberg on Romney

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney has indicated since the event described here that he joins the ranks of mainstream leaders of both major parties in supporting a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians.  But in this recent article, "Mitt Versus the Middle East," Israeli journalist Gershom Gorenberg indicates his concern about Governor Romney's understanding of the issue as follows:

....  "The pathway to peace is almost unthinkable to accomplish," Romney says in the now-famous video of his May 17 campaign event, uncovered by Mother Jones. Put aside the candidate's struggle with English diction, and forget the ignorance of geography that allows him to assert that the West Bank has a common border with "Syria at one point." Romney dismisses any possibility of reaching a two-state agreement, and therefore rejects an American role in facilitating such an agreement.

ABBAS' UN PROPOSALS ARE WORTHY OF CONSIDERATION

On Friday, October 5, Partners for Progressive Israel President Dina B. Charnin and Executive Director Ron Skolnik issued the following statement on behalf of the organization:

With the Israeli-Palestinian peace process stuck in a dangerous state of atrophy, the diplomatic approach offered by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas at the UN Security Council is worthy of consideration as a possible way forward.

Partners for Progressive Israel agrees with President Abbas that, ultimately, a durable and just two-state peace can only be achieved through Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

But there also is merit to Abbas’ argument that without clear terms of reference set by the international community as a framework for such negotiations, Israeli-Palestinian talks held in the shadow of unrelenting Israeli settlement expansion have little chance of producing a positive result and preventing the two-state solution’s demise.

Norman Finkelstein the 'moderate' at university forum

Norman Finkelstein

Over the weekend, I reported for The Jewish Daily Forward on a forum at New York's New School in which the iconoclastic anti-Israel writer Norman Finkelstein was the relative moderate. I'm certainly not against the former professor and prolific author speaking at such venues, but I discovered in my reporting that the New School gave Finkelstein's publisher the lead in organizing this event, including in the creation of a panel that was totally one-sided in its composition and scheduled from 4 to 6 PM last Saturday, still during the Sabbath.  In other words, a public forum at a major university was designed as a promotion by an outside company for one of its (non-university) authors. 

As I reported in my piece, I was referred by a New School press officer to address my questions to the publicity manager for Finkelstein's publisher. The spokesperson for OR Books told me that they scheduled the event to accommodate Noam Chomsky, who wanted to participate to help "his longtime friend," Finkelstein; so a program entitled “The Jewish-American Relationship with Israel at the Crossroads" effectively excluded religious Jews and the panel showcased only strikingly anti-Israel views.  

I would not have wanted a tedious slugfest between anti-Israel activists and Israel-right-or-wrong apologists. But this was a program that allowed no room even for liberal critics of Israel who are not explicitly anti-Israel, such as CUNY's Peter Beinart or The Forward's JJ Goldberg and, in being scheduled during the Sabbath, ensured that they wouldn't attend anyway.

Anna Baltzer

I noted in my article that Finkelstein proved himself to be relatively moderate compared to Anna Baltzer, showing how far out this other speaker is (notwithstanding her charm).  For example, she condemns J Street as "racist" for advocating a Palestinian state alongside Israel out of Jewish self-interest, rather than primarily regarding the interests of Palestinians.  She channels the logic of the most extreme elements on the left (going back to the days of the Weather underground) that insists on slavishly identifying with "the oppressed" (generally from the Third World or "people of color") and the duty of "white" or in this case Jewish "progressives" to accept, without question, the leadership of these oppressed groups. So, in the world according to Baltzer, whether there should be one state or two is basically for the Palestinians -- the people "in struggle" -- to decide. 

Ethnic cleansing issues in perspective

I hope this video helps us put things into perspective.  It also should reinforce our collective purpose to put an end to this bloody cycle.
This Land Is Mine from Nina Paley on Vimeo.

Controversy Over 'Pro-Israel' Subway Ad

Eltahawy spray-painting this ad.

 NY subway ad

In this video you see that Mona Eltahawy was angry, and if you read the message on the subway wall, it is really insulting to Islam.  Mona is a moderate Muslim who has lived in Jerusalem for a year, taken quite a few great positions on human rights for all, and has been quite good on Israel. She may need support in the next month.-- Lilly

Zahava Gal-On Promotes New Peace Plan

Akiva Eldar's Ha'aretz column of Sept. 25 is entitled "Israeli left-wing party drafts new Mideast peace plan to replace Oslo Accords." Selections are included as follows:

.... Under the plan, Israel would declare without preconditions that the conflict must be solved by ending the occupation based on the 1967 borders, with 1:1 land swaps. Meanwhile, Jerusalem would be divided based on the proposals by former U.S. President Bill Clinton - Jewish neighborhoods to Israel, Palestinian neighborhoods to Palestine, and special status for the Holy Basin.
The plan also proposes that the government declare an immediate freeze on settlement activity, as long as is needed to ensure peace negotiations. The talks would last no more than a year, and the gradual implementation of core issues would take no more than four years.

The sweetness beyond problematics of Haredi life

It's Sukkot, the seven or eight-day autumn holiday (depending upon where you are and whether you consider Simchat Torah part of Sukkot or not) in which religious people eat their meals in a loosely constructed booth (a sukkah) gaily decorated with plant material.  "Ushpizin" (Holy Guests) is a prize-winnning Israeli drama, made a half-dozen years ago, depicting the lives of a Hasidic couple in modern-day Jerusalem.

We liberal Jews have strong feelings about the limited cultural vistas and the political influences that we see on Israeli policies from this quarter–-more in terms of the intrusion of religion into the affairs of state and civil life than on attitudes toward peace-making, where the Haredim are often confused with the national-religious camp. But this film reminds us of the positive spiritual dimension to the Haredi life style.  

Dramatic changes of fortune are seen as divine intervention, as an answer to their devotion and a part of their ongoing dialogue with God. When bad fortune strikes, they are rendered bereft not only by the event itself, but also by the notion that they have done something displeasing in the eyes of God or, even more painfully, that their suffering has meaning they cannot fathom in the sacred scheme of things.