Peter Beinart contends that the “American Jewish community is hamstrung in its ability to respond by its own lack of experience with Palestinian life under Israeli control,” and calls for Jewish organizations to bring on real engagement:
When mainline Protestant delegations visit Israel, for instance, they are far more likely than their Jewish counterparts to visit Palestinians in the West Bank. Indeed, many Christian organizations maintain offices across the Green Line, something most American Jewish groups do not. That gives them an appreciation of Palestinian suffering that American Jews generally lack. …
I recently spoke to a group of Jewish high school students who are being trained to become advocates for Israel when they go to college. They were smart, earnest, passionate. When I asked if any had read a book by a Palestinian, barely any raised their hands. Even from the perspective of narrow Jewish and Zionist self-interest, that’s folly. How effectively can you defend Israel’s legitimacy if you don’t even understand the arguments against it?
Peter is surely right about the lack of any actual acquaintance with actual Palestinians. For years at The New Republic, the question of Israel was always discussed without any serious input from or dialogue with Palestinians at all. I was as guilty as anyone. They became in my own mind an abstraction associated with mass violence. The machinations of Arafat tended to end the conversation when it came to a possible two-state solution – as they probably should have. But the end of the Arafat era did not seem to me to prompt a new dialogue or a different approach. And again, I am as guilty as anyone. Obama’s candidacy talked me out of that indifference, if only because it became clear to me that any US coexistence and interaction with the Arab and Muslim world required some kind of two-state solution to the source of much of their anger – and after 9/11 and Iraq I believed that reconciliation was very much in this country’s interests. I still do.
Israel and its formidable lobby ended that particular opportunity for good – and by that time, it may have been too late anyway. The continuation of West Bank settlements renders any interaction with Israel’s government fruitless. They serve as a reminder that the Jewish state’s core objective at this point is expansion and oppression, not reconciliation or freedom. Which of course makes real interaction and dialogue even more fraught.
I remember a friend of mine – a good Jewish doctor with an excellent education who went to practice medicine on the West Bank for a few months. When he came back, he was a changed man. Seeing the brutal open-air virtual prisons that Israelis have imposed on the Palestinians, the daily humiliations imposed on innocents, the huge disparities in wealth and access to services, the deliberate crippling of the Palestinian economy, the often tolerated vigilante justice, the destruction of long-time homes: it all horrified him. Why had he never been told? Why had he been so blind for so long? He wanted to talk, to confess, to unburden himself of this revelation.
It was his – and my – responsibility, but it was also clearly a by-product of the American Jewish Establishment’s well-intentioed but blinkered creation of a cocoon of tired and exhausted cliches about Israel’s blamelessness, reinforcing them endlessly with Potemkin visits for congressmen and students and young Jewish Americans. The result may well be, as Yair Rosenberg has noted “more and more Jews are reaching out to Palestinians, only to find that they no longer have anyone to talk to”:
The anti-normalization movement–which advocates total boycott of all institutions and organizations that do not openly disavow Zionism, and works to exact a social, political, and economic price from those who breach it–grows every day.
A representative manifesto, signed by Palestinian student unions in the occupied territories and around the world, explicitly condemns the work of “organizations like Seeds of Peace, One Voice, NIR School, IPCRI, Panorama, and others specifically target Palestinian youth to engage them in dialog with Israelis.”
Beinart is aware of anti-normalization’s perils, but he devotes only two of his essay’s 46 paragraphs to it. Given his target audience–American Jews–this focus on one side’s sins is understandable. But it has the effect of indicting Jews in the pages of the NYRB for a lamentable situation that is not entirely their fault, while casting Palestinian isolationism as a mere footnote to American Jewry’s malaise. Moreover, such a narrow frame does not merely elide Palestinians; it also brackets out the many younger members of the Jewish community who have gone to great lengths to interact with their Palestinian counterparts–only to be rebuffed by the acolytes of anti-normalization.
Marc Tracy identifies Beinart’s stronger argument:
What makes Beinart’s piece valuable is the subtle turn he takes midway through. He notes that U.S. congressmen and senators and their staffs—most of them not Jewish—have visited Israel nearly twice as frequently as the second-most-visited country since 2000; and these trips are characterized by a parallel emphasis on Israeli totems like the Holocaust memorial (to say nothing of Lake Kinneret, site of Congressional skinny-dipping) at the expense of the West Bank. He notes, perceptively, “Establishment Jewish discourse about Israel is, in large measure, American public discourse about Israel,” adding, “Watch a discussion of Israel on American TV and what you’ll hear, much of the time, is a liberal American Jew (Thomas Friedman, David Remnick) talking to a centrist American Jew (Dennis Ross, Alan Dershowitz) talking to a hawkish American Jew (William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer), each articulating different Zionist positions.”
What I never heard discussed ever was the core argument: whether Zionism should remain the one nineteenth century “ism” still defended in the 21st Century, even as, after 60 years, the Jewish state failed to gain real legitimacy from its neighbors. What Americans never hear discussed is why the Arab world remains so furious about the establishment of the Jewish state, why an indigenous people might actually be opposed to another people and another country coming into their world, terrorizing them, and then running their new state by force of arms, even as they then expand further and further on what Palestinians regard as their land. When has Charlie Rose ever hosted such a discussion, for example?
Americans never learn and are rarely taught why Israel remains so controversial a country across the globe – and are, indeed, instructed that all objections to the Zionist project must necessarily be a function of anti-Semitism. You can see the inklings of a reassessment going on – but it is so far at the margins it may as well never exist. I’ve learned the hard way how the Greater Israel Lobby enforces this – by raising the Hitler card any time anyone wants to open the discussion. The consequences of this have been well explained by Peter. And they are not propitious for the future of a democratic or civilized Israel.
But perhaps we should all start over with an Encounter trip to the actual country run by Israelis, including the vast numbers of inhabitants denied a vote, or civil rights, or a decent future.
The Dish 