When so many citizens and governments of so many countries regularly bathe in an anti-Israel bias, why would Israel ever reject a loving embrace?
Christians United For Israel (CUFI), founded in 2006, is now the largest pro-Israel (see Israel’s pro-Israel definition) group anywhere in the known universe and afterlife — over 500,000 strong and bountifully multiplying. All committed and loyally engaged in their Biblical struggle to defend the home team by enlisting, along with AIPAC, Israel’s much smaller Jewish quarterback, as Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s American blocking back and unofficial coalition party member.
Just as Netanyahu feels he speaks for generations of Jews, as he proclaimed before Congress in May, Pastor John Hagee, CUFI’s leader, has proclaimed to speak for all right-thinking evangelical Christians — evangelical Christians who know that Jews are God’s chosen title holders to all of pre-1947 Palestine: In July, while speaking at the sixth annual CUFI summit in Washington, D.C., he said, “The land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people….they own the land of Israel! The boundaries…are given exactly in the Bible.”
My self-discovery occurred on a drive to Austin two years ago. (It also occurred during my teenage years, but that’s a story for a different and possibly older audience.) After listening to a deeply unproductive discussion between several Palestinians and Israelis on a local radio station, one that was more the equivalent of a wrestling match than a debate, I had an epiphany.
Well two epiphanies: My tire was definitely flat and I was going to need to summon my “inner mechanic” along the side of the freeway. Plus, several minutes after the tire epiphany, while contemplating what to do about AAA’s two hour wait time, my mind wandered — in an intellectual not an Alzheimer’s sense — to a recent conversation with a local Jewish organizational official. Not because he promised that he could change my tire whenever I needed him to, although offering to fix flats might be an ingenious way for Jewish organizations to get a few extra bucks, but because his wait time was similar to AAA’s, if only I added two more zeroes and substituted years for hours: Fixing my tire might be possible in two hours andIsrael-Palestine peace might be possible in 200 years. I didn’t like either set of odds.
What I originally took to be WikiLeaks were actually internal Palestinian documents leaked to Al Jazeera by dissident Palestinians to embarrass Mahmoud Abbas and the PLO leadership who attempted (apparently in good faith) to negotiate a two-state solution with the Kadima-led Israeli government of Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni. What the Guardian and Al Jazeera are blasting as a betrayal of Palestinian rights was precisely the kind of deal that could work for both parties in bringing this conflict to an end.
A surprising outgrowth to this heartbreaking and heartwarming national story are its “Jewish” aspects. First of all, there is the fact that (according to the JTA new service) Congresswoman Giffords, the daughter of a Christian Scientist mother and a Jewish father who was “brought up in both faiths,” identifies strongly as Jewish and is a member of a Reform synagogue.
Secondly, there’s the sudden currency in the headlines of a historic term associated with the persecution of Jews, “blood libel.” Sarah Palin has accused the media of engaging in this hateful practice in asserting that the hyperbolic tone of political debate in this country, tinged with violent and threatening imagery coming from the right, contributed to the shooting of Ms. Giffords and the others at her event. Palin deserves to be sensitive on this point because it was Giffords who first rose to national prominence in March of 2010 by calling attention to the graphic gunsight imagery employed by Palin in targeting Giffords and about 20 other Democrats for defeat in last year’s campaign.
But Palin is well known for using the metaphors of guns and hunting in her speeches. We also know that Sharron Angle, Harry Reid’s Tea Party opponent for the Senate last year, darkly spoke of “Second Amendment remedies” for our problems.
UC Berkeley’s student senate is set to vote once more this Wednesday, April 28, on a bill to divest from two companies that materially and militarily support the Israeli government’s occupation of the Palestinian territories. Yesterday Michael Lerner posted on the diversity of opinion among peace activists on this issue. Today I want to share a piece submitted to Tikkun Daily by Matthew A. Taylor, a Peace and Conflict Studies student and member of Jewish Voice for Peace who is currently on leave from UC Berkeley. As a member of Students for Justice in Palestine, the group that is promoting the bill on campus, Taylor argues with urgency and deep emotion for the bill and explains what those in support of the divestment effort can do to help before the vote tomorrow evening.
When Will the University of California Stop Funding War Crimes Against Palestinian Civilians?
When will the University of California stop funding war crimes against Palestinian civilians and the occupation of Palestinian land? How much longer will grieving mothers have to wait for justice?
“The soldiers came early on the morning of Sunday January 4th. [My husband] Atiyeh went to the door with his hands raised holding his ID but they shot him in the doorway,” said Zinad. “I shouted ‘children, children’ in Hebrew but they started shooting,” said Zinad’s nephew Faraj.
After the massacre, Israeli soldiers left messages for the dead Samounis on the walls of a neighbor’s house. The graffiti read: “Arabs need 2 die,” “Arabs are pieces of shit,” and “1 is DOWN 999,999 TO GO.”
A Palestinian woman cries in Gaza City's al-Zeitoun neighborhood (AFP).
Israel’s attack on civilians was a “deliberate policy” designed to inflict “humiliation and dehumanization of the Palestinian population,” according to a United Nations report.
Debates continue to rage over the UC Berkeley Student Senate’s call for divestment from two companies that help Israel maintain the Occupation of the West Bank.
Student senators debate the divestment bill. Photo by Skyler Reid from April 23.
The argument isn’t over yet, because — after failing to override student president Will Smelko’s veto of the Senate of the Associated Students of UC Berkeley’s divestment bill on April 15 — the student senate passed a motion to reconsider the vote. The student senators met again for a closed session on April 21 but failed to come to consensus about whether to override the veto, so the issue remains open. [4/29/10 Update: In a meeting that started on April 28 and concluded at 4 a.m. on April 29, the student senate came one vote short of overriding the veto. The resolution was reportedly tabled, making it available again for reconsideration at a future time.]
Rather than charge in with my own position, I want to respect the intelligence of Tikkun‘s readers by offering a variety of conflicting viewpoints and inviting you all to decide what you think. We are planning a full roundtable discussion among voices on all sides of the Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions debate that we will tape, edit, and publish in either the July or September issue of Tikkun (if you still don’t subscribe, please do so now)!
Here are some key parts of the bill being debated:
Human Rights Watch (HRW) has accused Israel of increasing its arbitrary repression of Palestinian non-violent activism lately. Abdullah Abu Rahma’s arrest — which I reported on in the second segment of my interview with Starhawk — is part of this crack-down in Bil’in, Nil’in, and Ramallah, where grassroots demonstrations have begun to mobilize Palestinians, Israelis, and international solidarity against the wall being built between the occupied territories and Israel. According to HRW,
Israel is building most of the barrier inside the West Bank rather than along the Green Line, in violation of international humanitarian law. In recent months, Israeli military authorities have arbitrarily arrested and denied due process rights to several dozen Palestinian anti-wall protesters.
Starhawk believes that the Israeli government fears this non-violent resistance more than the violent action they’ve contended with for years. Why? Because the government knows the movement’s power to shift public opinion and mobilize people against Israeli injustice. These grassroots efforts undermine several pillars of Israeli control in the occupied territories, according to Starhawk, and start to shatter the story that Palestinians are all evil terrorists.
I’m gonna be real with you — I was excited that J Street invited me to their founding conference. Excited to be part of the conversation of progressive, peace-seeking Jewish Americans that had found a new, stronger voice in Washington. Excited to push conference attendees towards language and policies of real justice and human rights for Palestinians, not just a ‘peace process’ that perpetuates Israeli supremacy. And excited to be pushed back; to challenge and debate about how best to change American foreign policy, how to build multi-ethnic coalitions, how the hell we can resolve this conflict before we’ve all lost what humanity we have left.
So when J Street capitulated to a right-wing smear campaign and dis-invited me and my fellow poets because we had poems questioning the moral purity of Israel, I was disappointed. But not surprised. The more I learned about J Street, the more I realized that their leaders was more conservative than their own energized members, whom had been wooed with promises of “hope” and “change.” Sound familiar?
So here are the excluded poets (about whom we wrote here) holding their own off-conference event:
Speaking at Busboys and Poets in front of huge comic portraits of Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King, and Gandhi, the disinvited poets Josh Healey and Kevin Coval, together with moderator Laila Al-Arian, showed why it was J Street’s loss that they did not appear at their originally scheduled panel. The duo clearly embodied the “emergent” Jewish identities that J Street desperately hopes to capture, with poems about their families in Israel, why Kevin quit going to shul, and yes, the Holocaust.
… Josh’s mother spoke up in the Q&A to urge people not to boycott J Street, which no one has called for. But I was reminded by her words to see J Street as a work in progress, learning and feeling its way. As Josh posed the question, will it be a two-way street? Later at the opening plenary, I was impressed by the force of J Street’s numbers and resources and real desire to open up the conversation on Israel in Jewish communities. If they are at all successful in that, it will be impossible to keep voices like Josh’s and Kevin’s out.
Then later the replacement for the poets at the J Street conference praised the above event and went on to say he favored
creating a “truly J Street dialectic: pro-conference and pro-poetry (a play of words on J Street’s tag line, pro-Israel, pro-peace), which led to applause.
Poet Josh Healey: J Street's Van Jones? Photo by Natasha Mozgovaya of Haaretz
We all have a lot of hope for J Street as an Israel lobby that can counteract AIPAC and promote justice for the Palestinians, just as we all have a lot of hope for Obama as a president who can talk with “our enemies” and create a more caring and ecologically sane society at home. We forgive their efforts to capture the center by ditching any of their friends who appear troublesome, we forgive, we forgive, and we mourn because when you start throwing your friends overboard, you only let the opposition know you have little belief in your ship, and so your potential friends may not wish to board. It’s an old story that pundits keep pointing out, but the liberal left-of-center seems so shellshocked by thirty years of rightwing ascendancy that they just can’t act as if they were as strong as they are.
“So Van Jones resigned, but did the right wing stop attacking Obama?”
You know the answer to that. It didn’t, but Obama’s friends lost a little heart, a little confidence. The voice is that of Josh Healey, J Street’s equivalent to Van Jones. Healey is the poet they just removed from their conference line-up for pointing out some similarities between Guantanamo and Auschwitz. In an interview in Haaretz, Josh Healey explains this problem with centrists beautifully:
