Still Immoral, Still Stupid Let’s End 50 Years of Israel’s Occupation of the West Bank – One Person/One Vote

Family relationships can be very complicated. One can be extremely angry at a parent, a sibling, even one’s own child, deeply disapprove of some of their actions, and yet still love them quite deeply. That is the situation facing many Jews in the Israeli Left and increasing numbers of American Jews who are united around the following demands of the government of Israel:

• End the Occupation and end the daily violence against Palestinians that is an intrinsic part of almost every attempt by one nation to dominate another by force.

• Acknowledge Israel’s role in creating the Palestinian refugee problem (not 100 percent Israel’s fault, but definitely a large part Israel’s fault).

• Stop calling Israel a “democracy” when it rules over two million Palestinians and does not give them the right to vote in Israeli elections or otherwise participate in shaping the decisions that impact their lives.

• Stop the building of illegal Jewish settlements on Palestinian land and stop the displacement of any more Palestinians. Accept the validity of UN Security Council Resolution 2334 which “reaffirms that the establishment by Israel of settlements in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law and a major obstacle to the achievement of the two-state solution and a just, lasting and comprehensive peace.” As Tikkun’s contributing editor Mark LeVine pointed out, this resolution reminds Israel’s government and its American apologists that its half-century policy of creating “facts on the ground” as a way to normalize the Occupation and the settlement enterprise it has always been intended to support, has been for nothing, no matter how much Palestinian land Israel claims to have annexed.

• Stop the legal assaults on the rights of Jewish and Palestinian-Israeli poets, writers, artists, and human rights activists who are doing nothing but speaking out or protesting the Occupation. And along those same lines, apply the same standard of law to both Israelis and Palestinians both in the territories and throughout the rest of the country.

Many Jews feel a special connection to the land of Israel, and we care about Israelis, worry about their survival, and have compassion for them, even while detesting the violent actions of some of them, the arrogance of many of their leaders, the seeming obliviousness of many of them to what they are doing to the Palestinian people and their willingness to tolerate a government that promotes hatred toward Palestinians—a government that slowly but systematically steals Palestinian lands and ignores human rights while simultaneously aligning itself with the most reactionary, sexist, and intolerance-promoting elements of the Jewish religious establishment. That establishment imposes its practices on the secular Israeli majority as the price for its willingness to give a green light to repressive policies of the government—along the way turning many Israelis into intolerant secularists who blame all the country’s problems on religious Jews.

Many of us also feel a family tie to our cousins the Palestinian people, both Christian and Muslim Palestinians, spiritual descendents of our ancestors Abraham and Sarah, and have compassion for them, and are outraged at how they are being treated by Israel, even as we consistently critique the violent actions of Hamas and the anti-Semitism that persists in parts of the West Bank and Gaza.

We also are concerned that the policies of the Israeli government, by calling itself “the State of the Jewish people,” and the largely blind support it has received from many of the major institutions of the Jewish community, have besmirched the reputation of Jews as a people concerned with ethics and justice.

We see increasing evidence that Israel’s policies are turning younger Jews against not only Israel, but against Judaism. One can enter almost any synagogue in America—Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, or even the highly spiritual Jewish Renewal movement—and be welcomed even if one doesn’t believe in God, doesn’t want to follow the Jewish traditions, or even has no particular interest in studying the Jewish holy texts. But if one announces one’s opposition to the policies of the State of Israel and/or support for the human rights of the Palestinian people, one is treated as a heretic and often given the clear message they are not welcome and their views are outside the range of acceptable discourse. De facto, Israel has become the god of many Jews, and the Israeli army has become that god’s emissary on earth—the one thing that they fully trust. In their mostly blind worship of the State of Israel, large swaths of the Jewish people are massively abandoning the values that the Jewish tradition urged us to embody—loving kindness, justice, peace, mercy, compassion, slowness to anger, forgiving iniquity, and transgressions—in the one place in the world where Jews have the power to actually implement these values in an entire nation state. Thousands of years from now, if the human race survives the current destruction of our environment, Jews will look back with deep shame at how the Jewish people let our tradition be so polluted by support for Israel’s inhumanity toward the Palestinians for the past fifty years, and continuing now.

But even here, some compassion is needed for our people. For many Jews, God’s failure to “show up” and save the Jews from the Holocaust, and the refusal of most nations of the world to open their gates to Jews seeking refuge, led to disillusionment about the possibility of a world based on love and justice. Thus the hard-nosed neoconservatives and their recycling of the ancient and perverted view that “might makes right” in international politics.

The utopian and socialist branches of the Zionist movement quickly faded as more and more Jews came to believe that the only thing they can really count on is the power of the Israeli army and the potential sanctuary they might find in Israel should future upsurges of anti-Semitism (beginning to show its ugly face once again around the world in the past ten years, and more recently in the U.S. responding to the legitimation of hatred and demeaning of others during the 2016 election period by Donald Trump) threaten Jewish safety once again. Unable to shake the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) that infected not only the survivors but also the millions of Jews whose families or friends were wiped out in this genocidal attempt to murder all Jews on the planet, the previously marginal right wing Zionism of Herut (now Likud) became the predominant “common sense of the Jewish people,” even infecting those who still hold on to a belief in God yet put more trust in military strength than in the power of love and generosity.

So modern Orthodox and other observant Jews utter prayers in their synagogues for the State of Israel and for its army, claiming it to be “the beginning of the flourishing of our redemption,” while downplaying the pressing social justice messages of the Torah and the prophets and their relevance to the realities of contemporary politics both in the Middle East and in the U.S. Most notably ignored: the frequent repetition of Torah commandments to “love the stranger/the Other” (ha’ger) and to not do to them what was done to us when we were “strangers in the land of Egypt.”

Indeed, many Jews of this sort who claim to believe in God nevertheless hold the view that we can’t trust others, that the “other” always wants to hurt us, and that the only thing to count on is force and violence. This way of thinking, as I demonstrate in my book Jewish Renewal: A Path to Healing and Transformation, is precisely the view that Judaism came into the world to challenge. Those who trust only in power are following the path of Pharaoh, of Sodom, of the Roman Caesars, of Hitler and Stalin, of Nixon and of Kissinger, of the neocons, and now of Trump. It’s the antithesis of Judaism, but it is to some extent the logic of global capitalism, imperialism, and domination. Yet I’ve heard it echoed in many synagogues by rabbis and others who are liberal on every other topic, but revert to this kind of thinking when it comes to discussing making peace with the Palestinian people and allowing them the same freedom we celebrate for ourselves at Passover each year.

Yet it is hard for any of us who understand the traumas faced by the Jewish people, and recognize how brutally we have been treated by much of the world for much of the past two thousand years, to approach this issue without some compassion. That compassion must extend to the people of Israel whose very existence as a country has always been challenged by all the states surrounding it, states that were meanwhile brutalizing their own minorities and sometimes their majorities as well! Think Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, and today even Turkey!

This complex of feelings mirrors that of many progressives in the U.S. toward our own country. We know that the U.S. has been one of the most violent and destructive countries in the world in the past sixty years. We understand its horrendous imperialist policies have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Iraq, and the countries of South and Central America. Building on the criminal legacy of previous European colonialists, the U.S. has perpetuated and exacerbated the impoverishment of millions through its imposed trade agreements and unequivocal support for a global economic system that leaves 2.5 billion people living on less than $2 a day and 1.5 billion living on less than $1 a day. The UN estimates between 6,000–10,000 children under the age of five die every single day around the world because of curable diseases linked to malnutrition that the U.S. could end were that our priority (see our Global and Domestic Marshall Plan at www.tikkun.org/gmp for details).

We know that we live in a country in which over 2,000,000 people are imprisoned, African Americans are often unsure whether they will be arbitrarily arrested or even physically assaulted (in many cases murdered) by racist police, Native Americans’ rights are are similarly violated on a daily basis (our treaty arrangements with them ignored and their land violated in dozens of ways, most recently at Standing Rock in North Dakota), and millions of undocumented workers live in constant fear of arrest and deportation to countries they escaped in order to avoid being killed, raped, imprisoned, or simply returned to the ranks of those slowly dying of malnutrition (repressive policies dramatically escalated by the Obama Administration and we fear worse from the Trump presidency).

We know that we live in a country where haters and overt racists can win elected offices and where sexists and homophobes continue to degrade women and LGBTQ people. We at Tikkun have embraced much of the platform of the Movement for Black Lives because it so effectively nails the racism in this country and provides powerful counter-measures (even while taking exception to their description of Israel as engaged in genocide).

And yet, many of us, while using our political energies to nonviolently struggle to change this system, nevertheless love the U.S. and the American people, appreciate the complexities of their lives which have led some to respond to their class oppression by joining hateful movements, and others to endorse militarism out of fear that they and their families may someday become targets of radical extremists and terrorists. These people have much pain in their lives, and the response of Tikkun is not to disparage them, but to help them see that there are other paths to dealing with and relieving that pain besides demeaning others.

There are very few of us on the American Left who call for the United States to be dismantled for its crimes, though they far exceed those of Israel, as do the crimes of Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Syria and so many other countries. No wonder, then, that we can understand Israelis whose fears are leading them in destructive directions, particularly when they hear about people calling for the actual dismantling of Israel. Just as we can love our fellow citizens in this country, we can love people in Israel and in Palestine even as we disagree with the paths they have chosen to deal with past pains and current fears, and even as we are outraged at the continuing oppression and racism against Palestinians.

So, yes, we have complex feelings about Israel. In my book Embracing Israel/Palestine: A Path to Middle East Peace I try to tell the story of the past 140 years of this struggle in a nuanced way, demonstrating that both sides of this struggle have legitimate claims, and both have been inordinately insensitive to the needs of the other side. In each case, the partisans of one side have focused on the extreme haters on the other side and used their actions to justify acts of violence or oppression that have incensed the citizens of the other side and made each people more likely to embrace their most extreme elements. Order it at www.tikkun.org/eip.

But seeing this as a situation caused by the ethical failures and psychological blindness of many people on each side of the struggle does not lead us at Tikkun to conclude that there is nothing to do to heal the situation. The reality of 2017 (and this has been the reality for a good part of the past fifty years) is that Israel has vastly more economic, political, and military power than the Palestinian people and hence has the greater responsibility to solve the problem.

The first step would be to end the Occupation, and in a generous spirit and honoring the Torah’s command “Justice, justice shalt thou pursue/chase after,” create a Palestinian state.

Yet the political reality at the present moment makes that highly unlikely no matter which major political party in Israel would win the next election. Though we’ve been strong advocates for a two-state solution for the past thirty years, and still believe that to be the best achievable path for the next thirty years until our more visionary plan—the no state solution, which includes the transformation of the global political reality from a nation-state configuration to an environmental district configuration—becomes obtainable. Given the reality on the ground, I now believe that the best way to reach a two state solution is to advocate for a short-term solution: inclusion of all of the Palestinian people inside the West Bank and Gaza in the democratic processes of those who rule over them. Simply put: “one person, one vote.”