I just returned from the First National J Street conference, which took place from Oct. 25-28, 2009 in Washington D.C. For those who do not know about J Street, it bills itself as “the political arm of the Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace movement,” and is viewed in the mainstream media as a progressive Jewish alternative lobby to the traditional AIPAC politicos. J Street is supported by a number of “participating organizations.” While I will not enumerate them all, they range from the pre-World War I (antediluvian) Workmen’s Circle, to which my grandparents belonged to the Congress of Secular Jewish Organizations, to ALEPH, a Jewish Renewal group that claims to be “in partnership with the Divine” and The Jewish Peace Lobby, whose membership includes 400 rabbis. There were over 1500 participants at this event — a lot of suits and ties, plenty of jewelry and yarmulkes, but only a few tee shirts and no black hats. (I didn’t over-dress for the occasion.) Though J Street’s slogan is “Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace,” during the event, the youth affiliate voted to drop the “Pro-Israel” part.) On the other side of the equation, there were a number of congress-people who took pains to hint at their bravery for appearing, given the financial arm twisting that the AIPAC crowd can muster. So, though it’s reputed to be a leftist outfit, I think that this means a spectrum from barely left of center to someplace to the right of advocacy of “Palestine from the river to the sea.”
As I indicated in a brief early post on Facebook, I do not have much contact with Jewish groups. I have never been to Israel. In fact, barring perhaps a few ballgames at Yankee Stadium, I’ve never been in the same place at the same time with 1500 Jews. As for religion, when someone asks me, as they invariably do, whether I believe in God, I usually reply by asking them what they mean by God. I am a veritable novice in the nuances of what I heard and know next to nothing about the subtle nomenclature and sectarian intrigues that I can sniff bubbling up from time to time. By way of example, before this convocation, I had no idea that there was a difference between a “Jewish homeland” and a “Jewish state.” (For the uninitiated, such as me, you can have a Jewish homeland in a multinational state but you can’t have multinationalism in a Jewish state.) And I didn’t know that there was a difference between a settlement and an outpost. (Both are probably illegal under international law, but the Israeli government sort of sanctions, at least doesn’t bust, settlements. Outposts are even beyond the Likud pale — although they do nothing about them either.) Yikes! I thought they were all just plain old illegal. I say this as part of a full disclosure so anyone who reads this can evaluate my impressions. Discount away.
As I recount my experiences, I want to also make clear a few other things. First, there were numerous options for each time slot. My choices were to meet my taste. Therefore I can’t comment on about four-fifths of what went on. Second, I will not attempt to recount verbatim what was said. Anyone who is interested can go to the J Street website and be directed to complete, unexpurgated video of the conference. (Everything was video-taped. We are rapidly getting to the point that reporters become redundant.) Third, I am actually a terrible listener. In addition to being jet-lagged from the get go, I tend to wander off thinking about some point a speaker made ten minutes earlier and so I miss stuff. Therefore, this account should not be construed as an attempt by me to tell anyone what happened there. It is a narrative of my travels and impressions at an event that was, for me, a learning experience rather than an advocacy or partisan experience.
Okay, away we go!
There’s a Plenary Session that kicks off the event Sunday Night. My plane is delayed on the tarmac at SFO for an hour an a half while mechanics repair a door, so I miss the first hour, and the demonstrators outside who would have accused me of being a member of the “new-Judenrat” — the Jewish collaborators with the NAZI regime who implemented the Final Solution in the ghettos of Europe. I know this because I see them out there the next morning with signs that look day-old. I find their point of view enlightening. This is a peace conference. Apparently, for them, the only thing wrong with fascism is that it was anti-Semitic, and whenever you’ve got nothing else going for you, slap your adversary in the face with the holocaust. For this ilk of Jew, the holocaust represents an inexhaustible pile of karmic poker chips that you can spend doing unto others what was done to the Jews.
Entering the Grand Hyatt late, I become immediately anxious. There’s no one in the lobby. Am I in the wrong place? There’s no way to tell that a landmark Jewish-American Peace Conference is taking place somewhere in the building — there’s not even a prominent “J Street” sign in the main lobby. I approach the concierge with some trepidation. (Will he think I’m some kind of nut?) and ask: “Is there something called the J Street Conference taking place here?” “Yes,” he tells me, “it’s down three flights.” Immediately, I begin wondering why they’ve stuck the Jews down in the 3rd level of hell.
Three flights down, it looks like the morning after a convention. A few people are milling about in the foyer with no apparent purpose. At the registration desk, there are still plenty of unclaimed name tags in the box and a single bedraggled-looking woman apparently holding down the fort. I get my bag of goodies, which includes a considerable amount of propaganda in addition to conference information. I look around. “Is anything going on?” “The session is happening right now, behind those doors,” a J Street volunteer tells me, pointing to a set of nondescript doors.
I hesitantly open a door and find myself on the fringe of a vast throng. The hall is gigantic, a couple hundred feet each way, and filled with tables, completely occupied with people of all ages. A rabbi from Brooklyn, Andy Bachman, is speaking, and like most Jews, he goes on a bit too long. He ends up, like all rabbis seem to do, with a reading from the Torah about how even though “this land is your land, this land is our land,” we have to handle it with justice. Then a young woman, a student organizer for J Street, talks about problem of young Zionist Jews who will not debate and only want to impose their views on other campus Jews, and how this is alienating young Jews in general. There seems to be a dichotomy among Jewish youth. Either they support Israel unconditionally or they want nothing to do with the country. Everyone finds this troubling.
What emerges on the first night is that there is a consensus in favor of a two-state solution. But what does this mean?
There’s an old saying that if you put two Jews in the same room together, they will argue and have three opinions. So how many opinions do you get with 1500 Jews in the same room? Do you use the same ratio or is it a geometric progression? No matter, even the simple way, you’ve got 4500 possible two-state solutions in that single room, which no one wants to really acknowledge, at least on this Sunday night when everyone would prefer to fress on the pastries awaiting them in the lobby. (It’s a Jewish conference after all.)
If there is some common ground here, it’s humanism. Everyone seems to agree that humanism and social justice is to Judaism what lox and cream cheese is to bagels. There is also a common feeling among the participants at this conference that they are as strong supporters of Israel as anyone. They love Israel and they are angry that the so-called “pro-Israel lobby” is drowning out dissent with cries of treason. They don’t accept that American Jews must only speak with one voice and that any disagreement constitutes sabotaging Israel’s existence. I sympathize with them. But I can tell from the way they couch the argument, premised on their absolute support for Israel, that some of them don’t seem to understand that there is yet another group who is not being heard, and it’s not pro-Israeli at all.
After the speakers, we’re invited to have discussions at our tables. We can email or twitter questions to the J-Street panel if we want. We go around the table. Most of the people at mine appear to have personal connections with Israel. Everyone but one college student and I have been to Israel. One woman has a son who recently completed his IDF military service. Others have lived there for significant periods of time. Everyone is also affiliated with some Jewish organization.
I was first at my table to say that I was a secular humanist, that I had no direct connection with Israel and that I was not a member of any Jewish political organizations. This encouraged another, a man around my age, to admit to secularism. And then a young woman student did too.
The woman with the son who is an IDF vet asked me what brought me, unaffiliated as I was, all the way from San Francisco. I said I found it an embarrassment with being associated through my Jewishness with Israeli policies toward the Palestinians and I was curious to learn what the Israeli peace movement had in mind for addressing the problem. This got several nods. Indeed, it appears that current Israeli policies are testing the faith — so to speak — of many Jewish humanists who esteem human rights. Many of them are experiencing a deeply troubling moral conflict. They can’t reconcile Israeli behavior with humanistic principals. This anguish is at the heart of what I am now thinking of as a centrist-progressive Zionist alliance, one that feels it bears some moral responsibility for Israeli government conduct because of its support for the State of Israel. There is no time for me to articulate the distinction between that conflict and a slightly different one that I have — one that makes me responsible for Israeli conduct simply because I am Jewish — one that I find anti-Semitic, and which makes me sympathetic to the need for a Jewish state.
Monday morning, I attend a presentation on settlements at 9:00 conducted by Israelis in “Peace Now.” The house is SRO. There is a video camera right in front of me shooting the event. Beside the cameraman is a reporter taking notes in Arabic.
There are two Israeli presenters and one low-level U.S. government representative. Hagit Ofran runs an organization called “Settlement Watch” that monitors settlement expansion. She shows us a power point presentation that includes photographs of illegal settlements and this is where I learn the difference between settlements and outposts.
Akiva Eldar, a writer for Ha’aretz, points out that the settlers come in two basic kinds. One group merely wants cheap housing and would be easy to remove simply by paying them off and/or providing them with alternative housing. I think of them as scabs. The second group is much more troubling —extremists who believe that God has granted them this land and it is their holy purpose to occupy it. This group views the State of Israel as merely a tool to achieve that end. I think these folks are capable of ethnic cleansing in the manner of Rwanda, Darfur or Kosovo.
The big worry is whether the continued expansion, if not the current existence of settlements, will ultimately make impossible a two-state solution. Will either the growth of these settlements or the government’s refusal to remove existing ones bar the door to a peace based upon two states? The maps they show us are dire — the statistics grim.
There are currently five million Palestinians living under Israeli control. (This does not count the additional Palestinians in refugee camps beyond Israel’s control.) There are somewhere around six million Jews in the same area. 80% of these Jews live within what is known as the “green line” (the pre-1967 borders.) Approximately a half-million Jews live within what would be expected to be the borders of a Palestinian state. This is nearly triple the Jewish population living beyond the green line since 1993. Indeed the problem is not just confined to settlements. We are told that there are 99 “outposts” today in the West Bank, occupied by 4,000 settlers. These outposts are totally illegal and the land for them was seized by what amounts to armed robbery.
So who are these settlers who have no regard for either international or Israeli law? Well they are some sort of divinely-entitled Jew who believes that God gave him or her to right to kick out everybody else and steal their land. (But it’s not really stealing if God says it’s okay.) And therefore it follows that no one, not even the Israeli government can tell them what to do. They are a kippah and Uzi gang of thugs and today they number in the hundreds of thousands. (Nobody at this conference is going to say that these guys make you proud to be a Jew.)
From the problem presented by settlement in the West Bank, we move on to Jerusalem — the inference being that a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem is not out of the question, for these Israelis.
There are now 2000 settlers within the old city — which means that they have plunked themselves smack dab in the middle of Palestinian neighborhoods, set up guard posts and now run around with guns intimidating their basically unarmed neighbors. But they can do this because God says it’s okay.
A Christian lady in the audience gets up and asks the panel: “Is it true that these settlers are getting money from American Christian organizations?” The short answer is “yes.”
It is the consensus of the Israelis that if these trends continue, the two-state solution will lose by default and that more than mere lip service to a two-state solution is required. The settlements must go and Israel must be very clearly willing to make that happen.
For my next seminar and I decide to attend a presentation entitled: THE AMERICAN LEFT AND ISRAEL
The speakers all seem to agree. Time is running out on a two-state solution. If Israel keeps going the way it’s going, a Jewish minority will rule over a Palestinian majority. Then, Israel will have to give up calling itself a democracy. And herein lies the nugget in the J Street angst. If these folks have one thing in common, they want a democracy, with an opportunity for secular voices to be heard, and they have a self-image of Judaism being ethically humanists. For this group, Judaism and humanism are inseparable. (Now, I’m having my first epiphany. I’m not sure I accept this basic assumption. Yes, I agree that there is a substantial subset of Jews for whom democracy, ethics and humanism are an inseparable part of the cultural and religious heritage of Judaism, but it doesn’t appear to me to be a universal Jewish value. Certainly, that can’t be said of the settlers.)
No one here raises the prickly question whether the Jewish religious right, who dehumanize Palestinians, are able to put their Talmudic platitudes into practice when it comes to everyone they consider non-Jews — and that may include secular Jews. Nor does a humanistic approach to the Palestinians appear to be a top value among recent immigrants from the old Soviet Union. The current spokesperson for this group, Avigdor Lieberman, chair of the far-right Yisrael Beitenu (Israel Our Home) party wants to expel Arab-Israelis who refuse to swear allegiance to a Jewish state.
So it seems to me that there are three big blocks of Jews in Israel for whom the lox and bagels analogy to Jewish humanism do not apply. And it also appears that they are currently in control of the country. The left has been marginalized and is in disarray. Sad to say, the evidence is starting to pile up that these three trends may represent the future of Israeli public opinion. In which case, the end of a democratic and humanistic Israel is something that won’t be lamented by the next generation of that country. They’ll be happy as clams with a one-state Eretz-Yisrael from the river to the sea, (including a bunch of Lebanon) as an apartheid state, thank you very much. After all, it’s in the Bible.
But then, J.J. Goldberg, Editorial Director of Forward tells us that there is a broad center of public opinion that does not want a one-state solution. Most people, Israeli and Palestinian want a two-state solution. What do those two states look like, I wonder. I wait for details. J.J. doesn’t go there.
Ezra Klein, a young writer from the Washington Post speaks next and confides that he doesn’t talk about Israel in his regular work because he gets accused of being anti-Semitic when he advocates peace and a two-state solution. He’s cowed by the American Jewish establishment that shrieks “Jews must speak with one voice and that means unequivocal support for whatever the government of Israel wants to do.”
This is a confusing picture. The majority in Israel wants a two-state solution, but is vague on the acceptable details. The American-Jewish establishment demands that American Jews shut up and let Benjamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman deal with it. But the powerful right wing of that government wants to expel Arab-Israelis living within the green line and they tacitly permit the settlers to expand. What kind of a peace deal will that be?
Michelle Goldberg, a young, articulate author decides that it is time to talk about the Goldstone report. Michelle, thinks the report did not come from a place of malice and comments that she finds it incredible that the Jerusalem Post wants to excommunicate him. I’m not sure what that means. How do you excommunicate a Jew? We don’t have any sacraments that only a priest can dish out. Are they going to sew a foreskin on him? What? I think what they mean is, they are going to say; “Oh Goldstone, he’s no Jew. He’s dead to me, like in Fiddler on the Roof.”
Ezra tells us that the conversation about Israel is not about policy but its right to exist. Most Jews believe that the threat to Israel’s existence is real and it has few allies. J.J. tosses in an observation that psychological conditions — the combination of holocaust and Intifada create a legitimate psychological terrorization. But does this excuse the conduct of the Israeli military in Gaza? Or more succinctly, does it offer an explanation that will mitigate in favor of Israel. While these psychological factors may sit comfortably with Jews, they certainly aren’t a big selling point with the rest of the world. Thus we have a spiral of isolation. And the behavior of the Israeli military is not going to look better in the future. J.J. tells us that 30% of junior officers in the major IDF infantry brigades are now coming from settler yeshivas and the general staff is freaked that they won’t obey orders to evacuate settlers.
So it looks to me like the IDF will soon be in the hands of a bunch of officers who have the temperament of war criminals and the means to inflict war crimes at will. There can’t be a two-state solution if the settlers are not removed from beyond the green line (and there is a real question whether the army would be willing to do it). The current Israeli government, while paying lip-service to a two-state solution with few details, is enabling the settlers who will make such a solution impossible. And the American-Jewish establishment is perfectly happy with all of this. The term fait d’accompli could not be more appropriate. Now I am wondering whether this conference is going to end up as a collective breast-beating, masturbation experience.
Then, during the question and answer period, a woman from Israel speaks up about the ongoing boycott and how it harms the most progressive and peace-oriented segments of Israeli society, artists, writers and academics whose voices won’t get heard. Later, we will learn that these are precisely the people who are now leaving Israel in droves.
As this session ends, I am taken by the fact that it was billed as “The American Left and Israel.” With due respect to the panel, who were very well informed, and J Street, I didn’t think I was hearing from the American left. We might have benefited more from the views of the likes Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn or Naomi Klein. Again, the mainstream nature of J Street came into focus.
After lunch, its time for another Plenary Session (at the round tables again).
The floor is yielded to Rabbi Eric Yoffe, the President of The Union of Reformed Judaism. Reform or no, this is one right-winger when it comes to Israel. In substance, he has a dissembling style. He begins by saying “This is no place to criticize the details of the Goldstone report.” And then he sets off on a lengthy exposition of criticism, never once mentioning that Israel refused to participate, advocate its position or send witnesses. As far as Rabbi Yoffe is concerned the Palestinian witnesses cannot be believed and from what I can tell, his criterion for judging credibility is their ethnicity. The argument reminds me of the Old South, where the testimony of a black man could not be used against a white man. There are scattered boos in the crowd and a moderator chastises the miscreants for incivility.
After this rant, we break up into small groups. I say, “Hey, Israel decided not to participate in the investigation. It sent no witnesses. It contradicted no charges. So why shouldn’t a judge like Goldstone write a report that looks like a default judgment? If you don’t show and don’t challenge, you are lending credence to the charges. It’s your call, not the judge’s and though you can kvetch all you like afterward, you asked for it.” The people at the table look at me like I’m some sort of heretic.
Then Jeremy Ben-Ami of J Street gets up and tells the whole 1500 that he agrees, the Goldstone report was flawed and the Israeli government, being an honest and upright democratic bunch, should appoint one of their fine in-house Jewish judges to conduct their own investigation. Everyone cheers. What’s AIPAC got against this bunch, I’m wondering? Nobody even asks why a Palestinian would feel comfortable testifying in such a proceeding. The poor shlub would be risking accusations of participation in the Intifada merely for being an eyewitness to a military action. My god. Why are these people cheering for an investigation by the very government that refused to put its case before a Jewish judge? Oh yes. “Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace.”
Now I’m off to a session entitled “Iran: Is Diplomacy Working?”
This is perhaps, the most disappointing panel yet. We get a lot of statistics. There are some arguments that sanctions have no history of working with Iran. The single Iranian on the panel argues that lifting sanctions would give us more leverage. A speaker argues that our dealings with Iran are tinged with racism.
I start to fade out. Everyone has begun this debate buying into the assumption that Iran is wrong to want nuclear weapon capability. No one is willing to walk a mile in Iran’s shoes. No one says anything about Iran being surrounded by hostile and nuclear armed forces. They have American troops on their eastern and western borders. There is an American nuclear task force in the Persian Gulf. Pakistan, to the south, is nuclear and Sunni while Iran is Shiite. And Pakistan-supported terrorists are actually engaged in a campaign of bombings in southern Iran. There is not a word of any of this. And then I have another epiphany. There are two words I have not heard spoken together at this conference yet: “American” and “Imperialism.” Just as I haven’t been to a conference with this many Jews ever before, I have never been to a political event before where you could go ten minutes without those words being uttered. I’m in day two of this one.
There’s another Plenary Session next up, a panel of members of the House of Representatives, who are going to tell us what they think. But I’m tapped out. And quite frankly, I don’t care what they think. They’ll do what gets them the most contributions and won’t offend the sacrosanct American-Jewish lobby, regardless of what they say at this conference. I need a drink and I’m willing to pay top dollar for one, which is what it costs at the Grand Hyatt.
At dinner that evening with a couple of very simpatico attendees, the talk turns to the Jew’s relationship to humanism and their supposed affinity for human rights. I ask if they can name any black hats who have made an exceptional contribution in the arts, letters, science, medicine or law similar to the accomplishments of secular or moderately religious Jews. I say that I know the black hats violate labor laws in their meat-packing plants. I know they run cars-for-cash scams. I know they are in the human organ smuggling business. “But where are the ultra-orthodox Albert Einsteins, Jonas Salks and Leonard Bernsteins?” I challenge. “Where are their books, their music, and their scientific discoveries? Where is the evidence of their humanism?” They are a huge sub-set of Judaism, and a growing one. How can we claim that Jews are inherently humanists and that Judaism is an integrally just culture without addressing that bunch? I agree that there is a subculture among Jews that has applied the traditional Jewish affinity for literacy, debate and logic to humanistic endeavors but there are at least two other significant tendencies. First there is a smug, ignorant bunch of opportunists who are the moral equivalent of strike-breakers. (If Lieberman gets his way, this crowd would have no qualms about receiving the stolen Arab property.) Second, are the “Divinely-inspired” terrorist settler types. Together with the ultra-orthodox ,these three groups may well be the real face of a future, amoral Israel. They look at me like I am a bit nuts to even be making such an argument. Judaism and humanism are inseparable dogma for most of us. And that certainly is an underlying assumption at the J Street conference — a raison d’etre for a Pro-Israel stance. My faith in that premise is being challenged here.
The next morning, jet-lag compels me to go light. I decide to take in a presentation of three short films from “The Other Israel Film Festival.” It’s a real treat. The first raises the question of racial stereotyping as to what a terrorist looks like. There’s an Arab-looking guy on the bus with a gym bag and a cell phone. He scares the hell out of the passengers. One woman runs, screaming, from the vehicle but it doesn’t explode in the last shot, driving away, as we might expect. The second film involves a close-up of the drug-dealing criminal element in Lod, an Arab ghetto close to Jerusalem, which looks like a Middle East version of the South Bronx. The third film involves a couple having a conversation about going into a battle. She’s Palestinian, he’s an IDF soldier. The shots are cut so only one person is visible in any scene, until the end when it is revealed that she is talking to her Arab husband and he is talking to his Israeli wife. There is plenty of food for thought in these films and obviously a lot of introspection went into making them. But the viewer can take away many different messages from them, which gives them a sort of To Kill a Mockingbird ambiguousness when it comes to the moral thesis. For example, who can blame the passenger when she runs off the bus?
Next up is a presentation called PALESTINIAN PERSPECTIVES and the panel is made up of three Palestinians. (The audience for this is so large the location had to be moved.) It opens with the moderator asking each of the panelists what the day after peace will look like. No one really bites on that one, except for believing that the checkpoints within the West Bank will be gone.
Here, in brief, are their opinions and attendant factual nuggets:
1) A one-state solution can neither be democratic nor Jewish.
2) Israel contributed to the creation of Hamas during the first Intifada because it allowed the Muslim Brotherhood, its precursor to operate as a counter to the PLO.
3) Hamas’s current policies are dysfunctional. It has a core base of ten to twelve percent of the Palestinian population.
4) However, a long-term stalemate will only increase its core constituency. The children of Gaza, for example, are more extreme than their parents.
5) There is no possibility of a two-state solution without permitting a Palestinian capitol in East Jerusalem.
6) Palestinians are willing to bargain away the right of return for the capitol.
7) The two-state solution must be based upon the 1967 borders.
The Goldstone report sets a foundation for the two sides to engage on moral grounds and confirm respect for human rights. Palestinians welcome Israel’s conducting their own investigation.
9) There is a big difference between advocating for a Jewish homeland (which the Palestinians can accept) and demanding (as Netanyahu is) that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state, (which they reject). Bassim Khoury, a minister in the Palestine Authority government explained that it is not the business of the Palestinians to tell the state of Israel, which they do recognize, what the religious orientation of their state must be, or indeed, who is a Jew. This all seems to me like a pile of crap on both sides. Why should Israel even care about this as long as the Palestinians recognize Israel’s right to exist as a sovereign state?
10) When Israel demands control of a united Jerusalem they are really demanding the right to preserve a permanent Arab ghetto within the city. The Palestinians have persuasive statistics to support this argument. There is twenty-five percent unemployment in East Jerusalem, which is ten percent higher than Bethlehem and Ramallah. Most Arabs don’t work in East Jerusalem, because there are lower benefits for children. East Jerusalem is the poorest city in Israel and its residents represent thirty-four percent of Jerusalem’s population. Fifty percent of the Arabs who reside there live in poverty, but its welfare budge is only twelve percent of Jerusalem’s welfare budget. The Jewish population gets the other eighty-five percent. Similarly East Jerusalem gets only fifteen percent of the education budget. Of the Jerusalem municipal budget, seven percent of the garbage collection allocation, thirteen percent of the sidewalk allocation, three percent of parks, and one point two percent of the cultural budget go to East Jerusalem. In the U.S. we would call this a Jim Crow budget split —separate and not equal. A single Jerusalem, governed by the same crowd governing it now, condemns a third of the population to a lifetime of discrimination without representation. It is advocacy for a permanent human rights violation.
That afternoon, there is another PLENARY SESSION entitled “Why Two States? Why Now?” It begins with the kind of obligatory U. S. government saber-rattling you’d expect. Congressman Robert Wexler of Florida, qvells about Obama sending 1300 US troops to Israel (at this very moment!) for military maneuvers in a show of support for Israel. He takes a moment to denounce the Goldstone report before assuring us that Obama is the biggest and best ever supporter of Israel we’ve ever had. Indeed he even recently withdrew from joint exercises with Turkey because Turkey wouldn’t do them with Israel. He concludes by telling us that he is taking a big political risk in his district by advocating for a two-state solution because he knows it is “a must.”
Next we hear from General Jim Jones, Obama’s national security advisor. Jones tells us that Obama is resolute on the “Iranian threat.” He argues that the Obama administration is also committed to an evenhanded approach to the peace process and a two-state solution.
After this pair leave the stage, it’s time to hear from three Israelis, a former vice-Prime Minister in the Kadima Party, a “business consultant” and the former head of Shin Bet, the Israeli security service.
Shin Bet tells us that their intelligence shows that support for Hamas drops among average Palestinians when they are optimistic about the peace process.
Business guy says that Israel can’t survive in the current climate. Its best and brightest are emigrating at alarming rates. Its gross national product is not expanding rapidly enough to sustain things like perpetual war. Not only must there be a two-state solution right away, it must be constructed so that seeds of an economic union with both states and Jordan can grow. Israel is too small to go it alone and besides, the infrastructure —water, roads, communications—must be integrated to make any business sense.
The political guy warns that a one-state solution will have to be a dictatorship and an apartheid regime. He agrees with the Palestinians who believe that time is on their side and that by refusing to negotiate a compromise Netanyahu is ordaining a single apartheid state. For Zionism to survive, he says, Israel’s borders must be defined to insure that Jews will remain a majority for the foreseeable future.
I am struck by these analyses. While speakers have mentioned the brain drain from Israel, no one had even hinted at immigration. What was once a given component of the Israeli demographic equation, Aliyah, is yet another topic that has escaped scrutiny at this conference?
FINAL MUSINGS:
Leaving this session, I am totally confused — so much so that I begin to rethink my intention to lobby congress people the next day. I am not sure what the point would be.
What kind of Israel looms on the horizon? It seems to me there are two generic possibilities.
Scenario one is a single state, governed by right wing fanatics and enabled by ultra-orthodox who don’t give a damn what goes on as long as they can continue to daven at the Wailing Wall and don’t have to fight for it. This Israel will have an army run by settlers for whom Arabs and Palestinians are sub-humans. There will be strategic land confiscations and the creation of a series of Bantustans. There will be constant, low-level warfare throughout the country enhancing ethnic fear and hatred, which will break out into violent pogrom-type occurrences periodically and justify both war crimes and human rights violations. This will be a state that only the most myopic and hidebound Jew could support. I couldn’t go for it. It wouldn’t be my homeland. It would be like going to heaven and finding it populated with the likes of Pat Roberson, Oral Roberts and Jimmy Swaggart. It would be hell to live in a country governed by settlers, ultra-orthodox and scabs. And Israel would only last as long as the United States believed it was in its interests to support it, after which civil war a la Lebanon would be foreseeable.
Scenario two is one where Israel tolerates a Palestinian capital a few kilometers away — in a city with an integrated infrastructure — adjacent to a West Bank state without Jewish settlements, or if they remain, where the Jewish residents must accept living under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian government. This Israel would withdraw to defensible borders where the majority is either Jewish or gives its allegiance to the state. It would have to be a small state because there are only six million Jews living there. It would be a state that could not actually be the last haven for the other seven million Jews world-wide. We would not all fit. Eventually, Jews in the Diaspora would grow more and more alienated from this state because its composition would still continue to be those three groups I previously discussed: settlers, ultra-orthodox and amoral opportunists, while Diaspora Jews are prone to assimilation.
This smaller Israel will eventually become a state with little to attract secular Jews. It will survive, but as a poor cousin and its only chance for success is integration into a larger common market. This solution is chilling for many Jews, because it requires a kind of humble realism that is anathema to “chosen people.” Yet it is the only door open that avoids the kind of conflict where, one day, Israel will lose a crucial battle and find it has no friends at all to pull its iron out of the fire.
There are some collateral advantages in this second scenario that were not spoken at this conference. If the Palestinians have something to lose, they will be less likely to risk it in a war. And, an integrated society is the best protection against a nuclear strike launched by a Muslim tyrant.
I went into this conference vaguely supporting a two-state solution but not sure why. I left believing that it is the only option that can avoid war, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and the scourging of the Jewish secular humanist identity. But I doubt whether there is the will to make such a two-state solution happen. The current Israeli government is not broad-minded or foresighted enough. We know making peace requires the overwhelming support of the population while making war requires only a handful of terrorists. Unless the general population on both sides opposes terrorism in deed, by turning them in, there can be no peace. Since we are dealing with populations here and not armies, the kind of negotiation politicians like, based upon military chits, is not possible. The size or effectiveness of ones armed forces is essentially irrelevant in this kind of a conflict. What matters is that the great masses of both populations must see clearly that they are getting tangible and significant benefits from peace. Only this will make the alternative of war unacceptable — and it requires leadership that doesn’t presently exist.
One conclusion is inescapable. If a two-state solution requires immediate action, its chances for success are a long shot. There is neither the will nor the statesmanship nor the requisite sense of urgency in both the current Israeli government and the American-Jewish establishment.