House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) hold a press conference at the Capitol on May 17, 2009. / Photo Courtesy of Talk Media News

David Harris heads the American Jewish Committee, and in between conducting its affairs, he likes to blog. A lot. Much of what he has to say is well written. Much of what he has to say is topical. Much of what he says is red meat to battle hardened pro-Israel troops.

His latest blog is written in response to concerns he and the Anti-Defamation League share over the issue of civility and bipartisanship among groups, likeThe Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI), that claim their primary focus is supporting Israel. ECI published an ad that seemed to position support for Israel as a Republican versus Democratic battle. In ECI’s view, conservatives (read Republicans) are the real Israel supporters.

No, check that.

In ECI’s view, positioning Republicans as the defenders of Israel is good for Republican politics and Israel is just a convenient vehicle to use to accomplish their purpose. That approach is one that gives Harris and Abe Foxman, the head of the ADL, a severe case of shpilkes. As it should.

The last thing the traditional Jewish organizational supporters of Israel want, and this also includes AIPAC, is to wage a battle where Israel becomes a partisan pinata. In their view, that ultimately weakens overall support for Israel.

Mahmoud Abbas

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has just made a significant stride toward reaching out for peace with Israel. As reported in thisHa’aretz newspaper column by Carlo Strenger (“Mahmoud Abbas’ crucial message to Israel”), and almost as if he’s directly responding to the columnist’s recent appeal for such an effort, Pres. Abbas has owned up to some important historical truths in an interview aired both on Israeli and Palestinian television. This is the core of Strenger’s new piece:

What life experiences brought people to join the Occupy Oakland general strike on November 2? And what do they hope Occupy Oakland will accomplish? A sampling of sights and sounds form the day reveals that participants came from a wide range of backgrounds and had different goals for the movement. Brenda Reed of Richmond joined Occupy Oakland because her home was put into foreclosure by Chase bank. She hopes Occupy Oakland will lead to financial reform and an equitable restructuring of our current system. Margaret B., a retired teacher from Richmond, wants Occupy Oakland to help raise consciousness and bring about the overthrow of capitalism. Kyle Kilgore of Berkeley is disabled and wants to see affordable healthcare. He explained that everything he is protesting “falls under the umbrella” of “economic justice.” More broadly, it seems that Kilgore named what ties together those who participated in the general strike: their different perspectives coalesce around a demand for economic justice.

Activists rally in Washington, D.C. in January of 2011 for an amendment overturning Citizens United. / Flickr, Public Citizen

When Adbusters Magazine called for an occupation of Wall Street, it recommended that occupiers have a specific political goal in mind. Their short list of suggestions included calling for a constitutional amendment to abolish corporate personhood, the Supreme Court doctrine that corporations are people with constitutional rights, among them the “right” to contribute unlimited sums to elect candidates of their choice.

The occupiers have been criticized from both the left and right for adopting an anarchical process that has led to no clear demands other than that all of the problems besetting 99 percent of Americans be addressed. The problem is that with members of Congress so beholden to corporate money to stay in office, none of the things that must be done to redress their grievances will occur when the interest of We the People conflict with those of the corporations that control the levers of power in the U.S. government.

A handful of images from Occupy Oakland’s general strike on Nov. 2 have already become iconic: aerial photos of people streaming up a bridge to shut down the Port of Oakland, the silhouettes of protesters standing atop a railroad scaffold at dusk, a masked protester shattering a window of a Wells Fargo bank, and the flaming garbage heap around which confrontations with the police occurred during the night. Though an abundance of other images are being posted and shared by protesters, these startling, dramatic scenes captured by photojournalists have become a favorite pick for news outlets looking for an attention-grabbing image.

Most of these sensational photos were not taken from the perspective of the mass of people who participated in the day’s protests. They were taken by news helicopters or by photographers who spent the day shadowing masked protesters in hopes of a perfect shot of breaking glass. They fail to convey a central embodied experience of the day: the intense sense of connection, warmth, and engagement experienced by the people who participated in the day’s mass nonviolent actions.

The photo essay below offers a vision of the general strike from the ground, from the perspective of participants who were listening to speeches in the plaza, chanting in the streets, and marching en masse to the port.

Buddhist monks in orange robes chant in one corner of the Occupy Oakland encampment. Across the plaza, a reverend in a rainbow stole reads Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Six Principles of Nonviolence” at an interfaith events tent, and a rabbi gives a Jewish blessing. A block away, candles burn on an unorthodox altar to the death of capitalism, and passers-by leave flowers and notes on the concrete bench that has become a vigil area for activist Scott Olsen, whose skull was fractured by a tear gas canister on Oct. 25. Nearby, a woman wearing a hijab talks about how a tentful of anarchists kindly lent her their rug when it came time for her to pray. There is a striking cheek-by-jowl feel to the interfaith interactions here — a spontaneity and intimacy so different from the stiff pageantry that can sometimes accompany carefully orchestrated interfaith events.

Click on any image below to open this photo essay from Occupy Oakland’s general strike on Nov. 2.

What’s the connection between the “Occupy” movement and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? What positions are Jewish activists in particular taking on this issue? In this video report, activists from “Occupy Oakland” – a rabbi, a queer Muslim, a Palestinian refugee, a Gaza Freedom March participant, and others – share their stories and perspectives.

When I was reading into a book about Adolf Hitler, entitled The Psychopathic God, when I ran across a meaningful quote from a French Revolution-era author, diplomat and orator named Honore Mirabeau. In the book he wrote about his experience visiting the kingdom of Prussia (A Secret History of the Court of Berlin), Mirabeau wrote:

“Prussia is not a country that has an Army; it is an Army that has a country”.

That quote piqued my interest so I did some research into the realities in which Mirabeau found himself. My initial thought was to write column about Prussian militarism and the alarming similarities to our own but instead decided to write about the French Revolution, particularly with the early phases of the current revolution going on around the world in the Occupy Wall Street and Arab Spring Uprising movements. There are many lessons to be learned.

I will expand on Mirabeau’s tantalizing quote in another column at another time. In the meantime you can think about its relevance for our time.

Joseph Stalin

[This is my third and final installment (applause?) on two recent programs at the YIVO Jewish research center in New York. Click here for its beginning, and here for Part 2.]

Steven T. Usdin, a science writer and science policy editor, related the rather amusing story of Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant, about whom he’s written in Engineering Communism: How Two Americans Spied for Stalin and Founded the Soviet Silicon Valley (Yale University Press, 2005). Barr had become a Communist because of his family’s experience of being evicted during the Depression and his agreement with the CP’s newspaper, The Daily Worker, that the country was run by “bloody plutocrats.” Like Julius Rosenberg and others, he was inculcated in his Communist convictions as a student at the City College of New York; he and Sarant became part of the Rosenberg spy ring.

Joel Barr with Alfred Sarant

Both fled to the Iron Curtain after Rosenberg’s brother-in-law, David Greenglass, was arrested in 1950. They led adventurous and lucky lives, narrowly escaping arrest in the West and avoiding being purged in Prague and Moscow. Barr in particular was highly successful in romancing women. And at one point, the ‘Keystone Kops’ aspect of their story returned to American shores when they got their U.S. passports and Social Security numbers reinstated simply by asking.

During the 1960s, they created a micro-processing laboratory complex in the Soviet Union. Barr had “tens of thousands of scientists” reporting to him. Following Nikita Khrushchev’s fall from power in 1964, they were assigned to a lab in Leningrad, working on torpedo technology. Their innovations are still in use by navies of successor states of the former Soviet Union, and the navies of Iran and India.

Hitler vs. Stalin

It’s almost midnight, and I just got home from a deeply inspiring fifteen hours of marching and gathering and coming together with thousands of people during Occupy Oakland’s daylong general strike. Tikkun was out in force all day, participating in the actions, shooting video, taking pictures, and conducting interviews, so we will have much more material for you soon. So much happened today, from the early afternoon protests to shut down local branches of the big banks that have profited from foreclosures on people’s homes, to the evening’s mass nonviolent action to close the Port of Oakland (the fifth-busiest shipping port in the country). Before heading to bed I wanted to offer this little taste of the warm community feeling at the port when news came that — after an arbitration process involving the International Longshore Workers Union — port officials had agreed to cancel the evening shift due to the protesters’ blocking of the gates. Many danced when they heard the news. I didn’t manage to catch on video the little riff that the whole crowd was singing along to the brass band’s song, so you’ll have to fill it in with your imagination: “We closed the port” (doo bee doo bee do wah)… “We closed the port!”

[Click here for part 1.] The closing panel featured fascinating portraits of individual spies. It began with historian and journalist Allen Hornblum (a former executive director of Americans for Democratic Action), the author of The Invisible Harry Gold: The Man Who Gave the Soviets the Atom Bomb (Yale University Press). A chemist, Gold was an industrial and military spy from 1935 until 1950; most importantly, he was the courier to Soviet agents of atomic secrets stolen from the Manhattan Project by physicist Klaus Fuchs.

Joseph Stalin

But Gold also is regarded by all who came to know him (including FBI agents and fellow inmates in Federal prison) as a complete altruist, a loveable and humane person. What drove him were the best of intentions: a concern about the rising power of Nazi Germany and a perception of the USSR as a progressive bulwark against this threat. Hornblum sees similar motives in Klaus Fuchs.

Next came David Evanier, the author of a novel on the Rosenbergs who is now writing a biography of Morton Sobell, convicted along with the Rosenbergs in 1951 and having served 18 years in Federal prisons. Evanier contends that the Communist left was blind to Soviet crimes, while the right tended to be blind to the suffering of African Americans and the dangers of fascism.

Sobell came from a Communist family and apparently held onto his loyalty to the USSR far longer than reasonable, but now is deeply disillusioned. The writer extrapolates from this that American Communists were not callous apologists for totalitarians, but rather that they held onto a naive faith.

Anwar Al-Awlaki in Yemen, October 2008. wikimedia commons / Muhammad ud-Deen

On September 30, 2011 a U.S. drone in Yemen assassinated Anwar Al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen accused of participation in terrorist activities against the United States. While there is a legitimate debate to be had about the justification and legality of targeted killings as a matter of policy, President Obama should not be permitted to assume this authority unchallenged.

Al-Awlaki’s killing is the first instance of a U.S. administration openly targeting an American citizen for assassination and comes amid a rapid increase in the use of targeted killings abroad. This issue was last raised in 2002 when Kamal Derwish, also a U.S. citizen, was killed in a similar operation. The Bush administration denied that he was an intended targeted, thereby avoiding the constitutional question, but Condoleezza Rice argued that targeting Derwish would have been “well within the balance of…[Bush's] constitutional authority.” In early 2009 Admiral Dennis Blair reaffirmed that the president has the right to assassinate an American citizen that is believed to be “working with terrorists.” The Bush administration avoided a constitutional confrontation while creating the legal framework for a 2010 Obama memorandum that justified the targeted killing of Al-Awlaki.

On October 18^th I participated in the general assembly meeting in OccupyOakland. On October 22^nd I posted a piece about that experience, which I named In Search of Dialogue. Even before writing that piece I have been engaging in my mind with the large question of decision-making in this movement. Since I posted this piece, I have received many comments and have read much that others have written, all of which have taken my thinking forward.

I remain deeply humble as I reflect on this movement. I believe even more than before that no one at this point can predict what this movement will bring about. With all the humility, I still want to ask the question: how can a movement maintain its focus and vision, include everyone that wants to be heard and create an efficient collaborative decision-making process?

I am not someone who usually agrees with Chuck Norris, who is a staunch Christian conservative activist, in addition to being a martial arts star. Consequently, I was shocked when I came across his recent column on the American Family Association website and found that I agree with it 100%!

UNESCO's headquarters in Paris, where the Palestinians were granted full membership on Monday, allowing them to register important sites on the World Heritage List. Photo by Matthias Ripp.

On Monday, the United States earned two dubious distinctions. First, it became one of only 14 nations (out of 173) to vote against Palestinian admission into UNESCO – the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Second, it became one of only two nations (Canada being the other) to vindictively punish UNESCO for admitting Palestine as a full member by immediately cutting off U.S. funding, which comprises 22 percent of the organization’s budget, or $70 million annually.

This funding cut was made due to U.S. legislation, over 15 years old, mandating a “complete cutoff of American financing to any United Nations agency that accepts the Palestinians as a full member.” However, those who have attempted to defend America’s move based upon a 15-year-old legal trigger – particularly when new legislation can always be written – fail to acknowledge the damage America is inflicting upon itself as it presses forward with an unbalanced foreign policy approach via-a-vis the Israelis and Palestinians.

As Daniel Levy notes in Foreign Policy:

America’s objections to the Palestinian move ring hollow across much of the world, and especially the strategically vital Middle East region. Its withholding of UN payments…is nothing short of a combination of the absurd and the vindictive. As former Senator Tim Wirth has pointed out this will be sapping to America’s soft power capacity. And if it continues, there may be more practical consequences, for instance, in regards to loss of American influence at the International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Intellectual Property Organization.

Joseph Stalin

Most people on the left have some grasp of the odious nature of Stalinism and the fact that Communists — however sincere they were in opposing racism, militarism and the excesses of capitalism — served false gods in Moscow. With archival evidence uncovered after the downfall of the Soviet bloc, little doubt remains on the Kremlin’s role in utilizing Communist Party members as spies in the United States. Most Party members had nothing to do with espionage, but a small secret cadre did. That being said, there is such a thing as “reactionary anti-Communism” — using an exaggerated fear of Communism to oppose progressive reform.

The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the famed research center on Yiddish culture and Eastern European Jewry — originally established in Vilna, Poland (now Vilnius, Lithuania) but long centered in New York — hosted two programs in the past month that eagerly drew me in. One was a half-day conference on “American Jews and Soviet Espionage” (Sept. 20), and the other a lecture by Yale University historian Timothy Snyder on his book, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, about the Eastern European territories which Hitler and Stalin rendered into great killing grounds in the 1930s and ’40s (Oct. 2).

The first program was a kind of reunion for YIVO’s executive director Jonathan Brent, who in his former post at Yale University Press as editorial director of “The Annals of Communism” series, had worked with some of the presenters. Dr. Brent opened the conference with a poignant talk on how Soviet Jews were sucked into spying on each other for a regime that had it in for them anyway. But first, unique for its time, Lenin’s reign had outlawed anti-Semitism and fostered a flowering of secular Yiddish culture. Many leading Bolsheviks– including one head of the secret police– were Jews, and other Politburo figures were married to Jews.

But after Lenin died, it was unhealthy to be a close comrade of his successor, Joseph Stalin. “In this world, nobody is innocent,” Brent explained. The most prominent Jewish literary figures of their time were executed on trumped-up charges. (Brent is the author of Stalin’s Last Crime — HarperCollins, 2003 — about Stalin’s apparent plan for a massive purge and deportation of Soviet Jews, just before his death in 1953.)

God is infinite, and each of us encounters different faces of God, and God needs us – each of us – to make our experience of God visible in the world. Without you, the truth of God that only you can know will be lost.

God speaks to us through the language of necessity – what we need to do to live. Think of your body – it tells you when you need to eat, to breathe, to lie down and rise up. Your soul also tells you what you need to do to live; it’s telling you now. Neither soul nor body will ever tell you that what you need to do to live is to kill yourself, but the souls of people like you and me DO tell us that we need to die, to go through the death of our false or partial selves, the selves we createdas confused and agonized childrenout of love for others and God. When those selves become intolerable to live in, as yours has long been, your soul tells you that self needs to die, so that you, the real you, the you God created you to become, can live. The one advantage of being suicidal is that if you can kill yourself, you have the strength and courage to go through the death of the inadequate version of yourself and stand at your full stature before your Creator.

God doesn’t make mistakes. Somehow the agony of having a soul at odds with your body and the life that’s grown around your body is necessary to form you into the person God needs you to be. But WE make mistakes. We mistake the agony that is an inevitable part of the birth process, the process of becoming ourselves, for the selves God wants us to be. The very pain that shows us what we must do – the pain that speaks the language of necessity, that says we must change, become our true selves, to live – seems to us to proclaim the opposite – that God wants us to remain in agony. When I have said that to myself, it has not only been a mistake – people in agony often make mistakes – but perversion, a chillul Hashem, a desecration of God’s name, a refusal to hear God’s voice, to see God’s love, to become the person God wants me to become, an insistence that God in fact doesn’t love me, that God is a sadist, a torturer, a God who instead of bringing the dead to life turns life into a form of death. I now realize that I have clung to this perversion of God out of anger – I have been so angry at God for my suffering that I refuse to see God’s love, that I make an idol out of my suffering and sacrifice my life to its twisted face. For me, transition is teshuvah – and without that teshuvah, without smashing the idol of my suffering and facing the God who wants me to live, all my prayers and actions are worthless.

This to me is what it means when Moses says “Therefore choose life.” Therefore smash the idols of agony, death, futility, fear, the stunted and twisted versions of the self, that turn life into death, that make death seem infinitely preferable to life. Therefore risk becoming what God made you to become; therefore risk feeling the love with which God has always surrounded and sustained you; therefore rip up the suicide plans, however comforting, and choose life, however terrifying; therefore know that when you choose life, no matter how hard the road, God IS road, and the destination, and every companion whispering words of hope along the way.