David Grossman is one of the greatest Israeli novelists and his sensitivity to the nuances of daily life in Israel is exquisite. For those who don’t understand how far Israeli racism toward Arabs has led that country away from traditional values, just read his latest article (translated by Sol Salbe of the Middle East News Service) and contrast it with the Torah perspective articlated in Deuteronomy Chapter 21 sentences 1-9:

Omar Abu Jariban, a resident of the Gaza Strip, staying illegally in Israel, stole a car and was seriously injured while driving it. He was released from the Sheba Medical Centre while his treatment was still ongoing and handed over to the custody of the Rehovot Police station. The police were unable to identify him. He himself was bewildered and confused. The Rehovot Police officers decided to get rid of him. According to Chaim Levinson’s account, they loaded him onto a police van at night accompanied by three policemen. He was still attached to a catheter, was wearing an adult nappy and a hospital gown. Two days later he was found dead by the roadside.

Today, our ad saying “No” to a first strike (preemptive attack) by either Israel or the U.S. on Iran appeared in the New York Times (in the National Edition it is on page A19).

The media has distorted what has been going on between Obama and Netanyahu, representing it as Obama standing up to Netanyahu and being a hero for peace. But actually what happened is that Obama legitimated a first strike and preemptive attack on Iran, arguing with Netanyahu about the timing of such an attack, seeking to allow coercive economic sanctions to work first, but stating explicitly that Israel should not be constrained in any way to follow what it decides to be in its best national interest in regard to a strike on Iran. That’s why AIPAC gave him a standing ovation when Obama addressed them a few days ago.

Panelists discussed tactics for opposing human rights groups on campus, particularly those that promote the use of Boycott, Divestment, or Sanctions (BDS) to pressure Israel to be accountable to international law. Last year, Firestone issued controversial guidelines barring Hillel groups from partnering with organizations that support any facet of the BDS movement or that lack an outright Zionist stance.

This September 2001 ad, sponsored by the right-wing Emergency Committee for Israel, appeared in many New York City newspapers. / Photo courtesy of Maggie Haberman

The Emergency Committee For Israel (ECI) seems to more closely mirror a right wing Super PAC than an organization sincerely interested in helping Israel respond to emergencies. Or maybe my definition of “emergency” just differs from theirs. You be the judge.

Back in October, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the American Jewish Committee (AJC), two of the leading Jewish-American organizations in the United States, fearing the possibility that bipartisan support for Israel could become a political wedge issue, asked that Jewish and pro-Israel groups refrain from criticizing President Obama’s overall record on Israel. Specific points of policy disagreements are fine, they said, but to engage in an attack on Obama’s Israel record could risk Israel becoming a Democratic and Republican political football. And Israel would more likely lose in that game.

'A Separation' publicity still

I believe that an Israeli attack on Iran would be disastrous for Israel and also bad for the US, but Israel needs to be reassured that its existence is not on the line. It’s up to Iran to step back from its belligerent posturing and policies against Israel, in order to alleviate the crisis atmosphere.

Hopefully, an intelligent application of diplomacy and sanctions can persuade Iran to cooperate fully with the International Atomic Energy Agency to assure that its nuclear facilities are only used for peaceful purposes; still, in this coming week’s visit of Prime Minister Netanyahu to Washington, the US and Israel must get on the same page. The US needs to prevent Israel from launching a preemptive attack, but this can only be done if Israel knows that the US has its back when it comes to deterring Iran.

I wrote this in a recent post:

Ten years ago, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president of Iran and still a leading figure now associated with reformist elements in the Islamic Republic, chillingly speculated that since “the Islamic World” is so much larger than Israel, it could destroy the Jewish state in a nuclear war and survive (“the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything“). This reinforced Israeli concerns that some Shi’ite religious fanatics in the Iranian leadership may believe in a theological doomsday scenario, which would invite a horribly destructive war with “infidels.” The threat that Israelis sense from Iran is logical—augmented further by Iranian allies inhabiting three of Israel’s borders (Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza and Assad in Syria) ….

I’ve heard that the Islamic Republic couldn’t stop itself from touting “A Separation,” Iran’s winning submission for the Academy Award in the Best Foreign Language category, as a victory over “Zionism” for triumphing over Israel’s “The Footnote” and three other contenders. No thanks to the regime’s censors, the Iranian film industry has long earned well-deserved international acclaim for its artistry. Israel’s film industry is also outstanding but not lucky in this venue, with “The Footnote” being the tiny Jewish state’s fourth Oscar finalist in the last five years (with no cigar as of yet).

In contrast to his government, the Iranian director showed class and grace in his acceptance speech and in his general behavior in his visit to LA for this Hollywood extravaganza. This is how the JTA news service put it:

A 2009 anti-nuclear demonstration in Tel Aviv.

Would you please help us put an ad in the New York Times, Washington Post (or maybe also Ha’aretz and Yediot in Israel, and other media, depending on how much money we can raise) to put public pressure on President Obama to NOT agree to overtly or covertly approve an Israeli preemptive strike on sites where Iran is developing its nuclear capacities?

Click HERE to see the ad and hopefully make a donation.

As of now, Iran does not have those capacities, and though Israeli leaders are arguing that they must strike now before it becomes impossible to block the development of nuclear weapons, U.S. intelligence sources said on Friday, Feb. 24th, that Iran had not made any decision to go forward with developing nuclear weapons. You can view a sample version of the ad below(though when it is layed out beautifully on a full page in the NY Times and Washington Post, it will not look as wordy as it looks now, and there will be room for the names of some who have signed and donated to it). These ads are expensive, but they’ve been effective for the political Right and we need to help make more visible the peace-oriented majority of Americans who don’t support another war. We need to move quickly because high-level decisions on this are being made soon.

The wall between Bethlehem and Jerusalem pictured on February 7, 2012. Oren Ziv/Activestills

One line of graffiti on the wall in Bethlehem simply said, “I want my ball back.”

Wanting your ball back could be a metaphorical statement that, for Palestinians, simply expresses a desire for normalcy and to have a Palestinian state that is fully under Palestinian control. It is a desire, for example, to not depend on Israel to supply and control your water. That water is now delivered only at specified times and then stored by Palestinian families in their roof top water tanks, always hopeful that their limited supply lasts until the next distribution date.

Water scarcity is one of the reasons why toilet paper is customarily deposited in a trash receptacle and not flushed. It’s why ice is rarely supplied with drinks. It’s why anyone selling yard supplies would go bankrupt. And it’s also why several Palestinians told me when I visited Bethlehem last year that the next uprising in the West Bank may be over an Israeli plan to further limit the frequency of water distribution.

On the other hand, an Israeli may interpret the statement differently. “I want my ball back, ” could be seen as a hostile statement that threatens to take Israel into a Third Intifada if Palestinians still harbor a desire to, as one Israeli told me, “wipe Israel off of the map.” I clearly heard both conciliatory and extremist views during my visit.

Norman Finkelstein

Back in 2007, Norman Finkelstein was supposed to take part in an Oxford University Student Union debate about the future of Israel and Palestine. Incongruously to the British-Jewish organizations that vociferously objected to, and torpedoed his participation at the time, Finkelstein was scheduled to debate for a two-state solution.

Widely known as a stridently anti-Israel writer-activist, the former academic supports Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions (BDS) as tactics against Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories, but condemns the global BDS movement for being dishonest about its real agenda of displacing Israel as a Jewish-majority state. He also views a full right of return for Palestinians as unrealistic.

To the outrage of the anti-Israel far-left, he denounces the BDS movement as a “cult.” Finkelstein says he’s “not going to be in a cult again,” as he admits to having been a Maoist in his youth. In this connection, he argues that the BDS (or Palestinian solidarity) movement cannot realistically meet its goal of displacing Israel, because this is a non-starter with most Israelis and with the international community as a whole.

Israel’s system of military justice – the complex and suffocating legal framework which has governed Palestinians in the Occupied Territories for decades – has been largely invisible to the outside world, including to many Israelis. However, a confluence of events in the past month is illuminating on a grand scale this cruel and repressive legal system that has dominated the lives of Palestinians for far too long.

Last month, a piercing documentary by Israeli filmmaker Ra’anan Alexandrowicz – The Law in These Parts - won the 2012 World Cinema Grand Jury Documentary Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. The film forces former IDF officials and judges to wrestle with the inherent injustices they helped create in forming Israel’s military justice system – including the practices of indefinite detention, land confiscation for settlements and the use of torture in interrogations. The Law in These Parts, and the prestigious award it garnered, helped spark conversations in Israel and abroad about the legal system which enables Israel’s occupation.

However, it has been the hunger strike of a Palestinian baker, Khader Adnan, that has dramatically illuminated Israel’s inhumane practice of indefinite detention as mainstream media organizations in the U.S. and abroad heighten its scrutiny.

Activists in Bil'in protest Israel's occupation and rally in solidarity with Khader Adnan.

Adnan, who as of this writing is entering the 65th day of his hunger strike, and who is, according Physicians for Human Rights, in immediate danger of death, was arrested two months ago and accused of being associated with Islamic Jihad. However, no charges have been filed against Adnan, and Israel has refused to say what, if any, evidence it has against him.

Reading the NY Times online the other day, I was drawn toward a tailored “Recommended for You” item listed to the side of the screen (apparently a benefit of my subscription) about a Palestinian political activist being held in administrative detention, who is on a hunger strike which may lead to his death. This “Lede” blog story makes reference to a historic parallel in Northern Ireland, with the fatal hunger strike of Bobby Sands and other IRA prisoners in 1981, and the fact that a current leader of the IRA’s political arm, Sinn Fein, has called for the Palestinian’s release.

I’m troubled by the practice of administrative detention, but the fact that this individual, Khader Adnan, is evidently a political activist for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, an extreme terrorist organization with much civilian Jewish blood on its hands, gives me pause from the other direction. So I’m not arguing strongly for either side in this matter, but I do hope that his life is spared and that administrative detention rules are relaxed enough to allow attorneys for detainees to effectively represent their clients in court.

What moves me to write is that this first post links to a 2010 Lede blog post by the same NY Times blogger, Robert Mackey, “Thinking Outside the Two-State Box,” (Sept. 7, 2010), which mentions right-wing elements within Israel calling for a one-state solution involving a single political entity for Israel, East Jerusalem and the West Bank, but excluding the Gaza Strip. The Gaza Strip would be excluded in order to insure either a Jewish majority or a more equal ethnic balance between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, and presumably to isolate Hamas. This provision alone would probably make it a non-starter from the Palestinian point of view, but the unrealistic excision of Gaza is curiously not considered by the blogger.

One aches for a solution to a long-standing conflict that continues to bedevil Arabs and Jews on both sides of the divide, and in which neither side seems capable of making adequate concessions or accommodations to the other. Although recent Israeli governments have made territorial concessions and offers, they have still been too broadly ensconced in the West Bank and East Jerusalem to satisfy minimal Palestinian needs and aspirations; and settlements expand in spurts but inexorably, on territory claimed by the Palestinians.

A Jewish-Israeli settler videotapes an Israeli police officer in Hebron. Police officers escort the Breaking the Silence tours in the West Bank city of Hebron, protecting participants from settler attempts to disrupt the tours. / Oren Ziv, Activestills

For two weeks (interspersed with two nights in the Galilee) I have been in the Holy City with a group called Living Stones. Our main intention was to show solidarity with the Christian churches during Unity Week 2012. This involved sharing in prayer in Anglican, Lutheran, Latin, Armenian, Greek Orthodox, Ethiopian, Syrian and Coptic Orthodox, and Greek Melkite communities each night, meeting members of the communities and trying to understand their concerns. Much was fruitful and hospitality was wonderful. But there was a feeling of sadness that church leaders — with one exception — did not take the opportunity of the coming together to address specific peace issues.

Last week, I wrote about my attempt to bridge the growing Jewish community divide over Israel. I thought (in my naivete) that I could bring supporters of seemingly disparate pro-Israel factions together. Those with tactical disagreements over how to best strengthen Jewish support for Israel would surely beat their verbal swords into plowshares and till the verdant Israel discussion soil. We might not agree on every policy, but we could certainly unite behind a shared pro-Israel goal.

Or not.

Since its appearance on September 17, 2011 Occupy Wall Street has transformed the surface of political discourse in America. Few can argue that its all-too-telling slogans, dramatizing the contradiction between the interests of the 99%, and those of the 1%, have given an essentially rudderless president the overall approach likely to lead him to an important victory in 2012. The pertinence of class division, an idea essentially banished from American thought since the 1970s, has returned to a central place. The union movement has breathed new life, and a host of original issues, such as student loans, have moved to the center of our consciousness.

Police dismantle the Occupy encampment in downtown D.C. on February 4, 2012. With so many encampments broken up, what should be the movement's next steps? Credit: Creative Commons/thisisbossi.

So welcome has Occupy Wall Street been that some now argue that its task is complete, the message has been heard, and that it is time to return to the norms of everyday electoral politics. In fact, this would be a drastic error. What now needs to happen is that Occupy Wall Street has to mutate into a permanent, radical presence in American life. It needs a long-term perspective, not centered on the next election, nor on the economic crisis alone, but on turning the country in a new and progressive direction.

It is not often recognized that the country had similar movements from the time of the revolution until the 1970s. While such an independent left, radical, or progressive presence has sometimes been marginal to everyday politics, and has often been stigmatized in states of emergency, it has made its crucial contribution during long-term crises when the country needs to move in a genuinely new direction. There have been three such crises: the slavery crisis, the crisis over industrialization and the present crisis, which began in the 1960s. And in each case the country produced a vibrant left — the abolitionists, the socialists and communists, and the New Left, without which the country could never have successfully addressed its problems. These three lefts constitute a tradition, and Occupy Wall Street is the reawakening of that tradition. With that view in mind, I would propose two immediate steps for Occupy Wall Street and its supporters. In both, I build on the idea that we need to continue to occupy not just physical spaces like parks and public areas, but political and cultural spaces as well.

Syrian activists say these five children were killed by the shelling of pro-Assad forces in Homs, Syria on Jan. 26. / Local Coordination Committees in Syria

I and many other progressive Jews demand an end to Syrian genocide and a boycott of Russian and Chinese products– so as long as those countries refuse to join in active measures to replace the Assad government. I call upon the world community to intervene and stop the genocide being waged by the Assad government against the people of Syria.

The world must not sit idly by on the blood of the democracy- and human rights-seeking people of Syria against their brutal dictatorship. The Syrian regime has already killed more than 5,000 of its own citizens, and tens of thousands have been wounded or arrested and tortured. This is a crime against humanity, and it deserves a powerful intervention from the West.

On Monday night, Zehava Gal-On was overwhelmingly elected the new chair of the Meretz party. She is now the third female leader of an Israeli political party represented in the Knesset, joining Tzipi Livni of Kadima and Shelly Yachimovich of Labor. (In addition, Einat Wilif is the Knesset caucus leader of Ehud Barak’s new Independence party.)

Under my leadership, Meretz will bring Israel‘s Left home… it will no longer be a boutique, north Tel Avivian faction. Meretz will translate last summer’s social protest into political power. It will be a true social-democratic party that supports dividing the land [of Israel with the Palestinians].

The people of the United States face threats to their safety, health, and economic well being that are not being addressed by Congress. Congress has a favorability rating in the single digits, yet we continue to re-elect the vast majority of its members every two years. The reason is that most Americans seem afraid to face the greatest threat: that the Democratic experiment may fail because of rabid partisanship, for which we are ultimately responsible. The dangers our government is failing to address pose a threat to the rest of the world given the economic and military dominance of the United States over other nations.

If we want a government of, by, and for the People, we must achieve consensus on where we want our leaders to take us. That requires forging a consensus on what kind of America we want to leave our children. This is the crux of the dilemma in which we find ourselves. If we cannot agree on what we want our elected officials to do, then they will continue to do as they please. That is generally to keep themselves in office by catering to the interests of the special interests that pay for their obscenely expensive election campaigns.

The next several articles will focus on what has become an increasingly important issue within the Jewish community: What does pro-Israel really mean?

For Atlanta Jewish Times publisher Andrew Adler, pro-Israel means calling for Israel’s Mossad to consider assassinating U.S. President Barack Obama. Thankfully, Adler’s addled response to Obama’s supposedly anti-Israel policies and actions was widely denounced within the Jewish community and resulted in a U.S. Secret Service investigation of Adler’s views. Hopefully that investigation will be more conclusive than the effort to define what it really means to be pro-Israel.

Is AIPAC’s pro-Israel definition different from ADL’s, AJC’s, J Street’s or Christians United For Israel’s? What about the Emergency Committee for Israel’s pro-Israel? Or Obama’s? Or Newt Gingrich and Sheldon Adelson’s, Gingrich’s Israel puppet-master?

What about the Israeli government’s pro-Israel definitions? Which one gets chosen depends to a large extent on whether you are part of the ruling Likud party coalition or a member of the opposition, led by the Kadima party.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s definition leaves little room for nuance: Israelis know what’s best for Israelis and the free pass to rigorously disagree stops at the border. He won’t recognize or engage with pro-Israel groups if he feels they offer too much dissent from his government’s policies.

Yet, Tzipi Livni, Kadima’s leader, welcomes dissent as valuable and representative of the diverse nature of the pro-Israel Jewish Diaspora. She has even argued that by allowing for disagreement, Israel actually encourages more of the Diaspora to remain interested in providing support. (Gideon Levy, an Israeli columnist, goes a step further: He says if you are really pro-Israel, if you really love Israel, then you “must criticize Israel as it deserves.”)

I made a point of seeing Rabbi Lerner twice in his recent sojourn to New York. Last Sunday evening, he was part of a panel discussion of religious leaders and academics at Riverside Church, called “Occupy the Mind: Progressive Moral Agenda for the 21st Century.” It was organized by James Vrettos, a professor of sociology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York, who began the discussion with an impassioned recitation of progressive concerns.

Dr. Cornel West

Dr. Cornel West contributed his usual brilliant oratory: witty, entertaining and challenging. In a mutual exchange, he pointed out that fellow panelist Dr. Serene Jones, president of the nearby Union Theological Seminary, will be his “boss” when he moves from Princeton to Union Theological in July, where he began his academic career in the late 1970s. He mentioned that he’s returning to New York to enjoy the cultural richness and social vitality of the Big Apple and especially to be near Harlem, to again experience its energy and its music.

Michael Lerner connected well with the audience, getting us to stand and stretch, after sitting over an hour listening to speeches, and to sing with him a couple of Biblically-inspired songs for peace. His talk was about promoting a politics of love, hope and generosity versus right-wing themes of fear and “power over.” To this end, he touched upon the Global Marshall Plan initiative, and the Environmental & Social Responsibility Amendment. He pointed out that the latter would overturn “Citizens United” by ending the corporate funding of elections and would subject large corporations of over $100 million in gross income to having to prove their environmental and social responsibility every five years to be recertified with a public charter. I don’t know how “practical” these ideas are in every detail and in their implementation, but hopefully they will promote constructive public discourse on what we are about as a society and as citizens of the world. Moreover, Michael urges us not to be “practical.” This runs somewhat counter to my nature, but I have enough experience in this world to know that we can undermine ourselves as individuals and collectively when we too readily define things as impossible or impractical.

I also caught him the next evening at Romemu, a Jewish Renewal congregation in my neighborhood in Manhattan,

Image by Chisda Magid, 1/27/2012

“How would a Republican administration help bring peace to Palestine and Israel when most candidates barely recognize the existence of Palestine or its people? As a Palestinian American Republican, I’m here to tell you we do exist.”

Abraham Hassan, a self identified Palestinian-American Republican, asked a question in Thursday night’s Republican debate, raising an interesting issue of Republican credibility in the Palestinian community domestically and abroad. Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich in typical fashion characterized the Palestinian population as “Hamas and others who think like Hamas,” as Romney said. Both candidates were emphatic that American and Israeli interests, especially when it comes to the Palestinians, are exactly the same. Gingrich attempted to defend past suggestions that Palestinians are an “invented people” by arguing that “[the term Palestinian was] an invention of the late 1970s…prior to that [Palestinians] were Arabs.”

In his book, Palestinian Identity, Columbia University professor of history Rashid Khalidi extensively chronicles the emergence of a Palestinian national consciousness as early as the late 19^th century, like modern Zionism, belies Gingrich’s proposition (ironically, Gingrich fashions himself a professional historian yet seems unaware of Khalidi’s historical work). All national movements are imagined communities, to use Benedict Anderson phrase, but that does not mean they are meaningless, as the word “invented” seems to suggest. By denying the origins of Palestinian peoplehood, and hence much of its history, Gingrich is rejecting precisely what it means to be a Palestinian. Hassan’s statement that Republicans “barely recognize” the Palestinian identity appears to be a gross understatement.