Columns

PEACE NOT APARTHEID

The desire to remain a victim is evidence of disease; yet to become a conqueror after having been a victim is a recipe for moral suicide.
Marc Ellis

The state of Israel...will be based on the principles of liberty, justice and peace as conceived by the prophets of Israel; will uphold the full social and political equality of its citizens.
The Declaration of Independence of the State of Israel 1948

If Israel is the answer to the Holocaust, was Israel not to be a different a model for the world? Was Israel not a dream of the rule of ethics, the home in the world of justice and mercy?
Earl Shorris in Jews without Mercy

If you want peace, work for justice.
Pope John XXlll

On September 12 of this year, The Irish Times published a letter signed by sixty-one academics urging academic institutions all over the world to boycott Israeli institutions of higher education. It seems that these teachers could no longer abide the shocking levels of violence visited upon the Palestinian people by the Israel Defence Force. The proximate cause was the horrific damage inflicted upon Lebanon in the summer war. It appears these Irish teachers had concluded that the Israel government had become impervious to moral appeals. "There is widespread international condemnation of Israel's policy of violent repression against the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, and its aggression against the people of Lebanon," the letter read.

     On November 14, 2006 former President and Nobel Prize winner Jimmy Carter eschewed the self-censorship which has bedevilled most Americans around the state of Israel. He called his latest book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Speaking on the American version of the CBC, National Public Radio (November, 28) Carter did not run from the "A" word, nor did he accuse Israel of racial policies inside the Jewish state. These are part of his remarks:

"The alternative to peace is apartheid, not inside Israel, to repeat myself, but in the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem, the Palestinian territory. And there, apartheid exists in its more despicable forms, that Palestinians are deprived of basic human rights. Their land has been occupied and then confiscated and then colonized by the Israeli settlers. And they have now more than 205 settlements in the West Bank itself. And what has happened is, over a period of years, the Israelis have connected settlements with highways, and those highways make the West Bank look like a honeycomb and maybe a spider web. You can envision it. And in many cases, most cases, the Palestinians are prevented from using the highways at all, and in many cases, even from crossing the highways."

     In his book, Carter has written: "Most Arab regimes have accepted the permanent existence of Israel as an indisputable fact and are no longer calling for an end to the State of Israel, having contrived a common statement at an Arab summit in 2002 that offers peace and normal relations with Israel within its acknowledged international borders and in compliance with other U.N. Security Council resolutions."

     Nobody can doubt Carter's bona fides in the area of Israel/Palestine. Along with his Nobel Prize for negotiating peace between Israel and Egypt in 1978, the deadly serious Christian has continued his intense interest in the area for 30 years monitoring election after election. His frank analysis is important and a major part of the rapidly crumbling political correctness around Israel.

     Tony Judt is a distinguished professor and the director of the Remarque Institute at New York University, and author of the now classic Postwar: The History of Europe Since 1945 (2005). In a recent article in Britain's The Guardian, Judt who is Jewish, described Israel as "the country that wouldn't grow up." He traces the history of the state from its founding, to the 1967 Six Day War. At that time it was well regarded by the world, which embraced the romantic notion of a small country made of kibbutzniks who were making the desert bloom. It was "a paragon of modern energy." The majority at that time had no idea of the Nakba, the catastrophic ethnic cleansing of the Arab inhabitants. Since 1948 a spate of Israeli historians has documented the forcible expulsion of the Arab majority.

Jewish empowerment

In the light of the post 1967 war, historians are unanimous on this point: The terrible destruction of European Jewry (the Shoah) which at this time had not figured greatly in Israel's narrative, suddenly became dominant. Jewish suffering led to a new Jewish empowerment. A number of influential theologians leapt into the breach, foremost among them Irving Greenberg. The latter's thought is too nuanced to do justice here, but one of his themes is the move from powerlessness to power. No more of the weak Jew. History has shown us where that leads. Power is the name of the game in today's savage world. Anything that diminishes power is to be eschewed. Jewish survival depends on it. Greenberg recognized that ethical compromise may be the result, but so be it.

     Israel then began to hitch its wagon to the American imperium and Diaspora Jews were expected to follow suit. America would defend Israel and Jews must mute their criticism of America who would then stand tall for Israel. In the post 1967 era, "check-book Judaism" took off. Financial support for Israel began to replace religious obligation. No criticism of Israel would be tolerated. The Likud Party of Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir was shameless in demanding total allegiance to whatever policies Israel engaged in. More on this later.

     Begin, who was Israel's sixth Prime Minister (1977-1983), was a very tough Polish-born Jew, the leader of a terrorist group called the Irgun. In 1946 he had ordered the demolition of British headquarters in the King David Hotel. Ninety-one people were killed. Shamir followed Begin as Israel's seventh Prime Minister (1986-1992). He too had been a member of the Irgun, engaging in assassinations of prominent figures of the British Mandate in Palestine. Both embodied Jewish empowerment. The price, however --as history has shown-- has been steep. It is this tension which has been at the heart of Israel's dilemma to this day. The blindness and the inability to hear another's pain has shamed Jews of conscience around the world. Theologian Marc Ellis phrases it this way: "We have not recognized the formation of other peoples and their struggle for freedom to be as important as our own and a legitimate demand on us...we may be in danger of becoming a people void of ethics."

     In a famous letter to The New York Times (December 2,1948) Albert Einstein (and several other prominent Jews) warned Americans of the dangers of Menachem Begin and his new Freedom Party, "a party and social appeal closely akin in its organization, methods, and political philosophy to the Nazi and Fascist parties...formed out of the former Irgun, a terrorist, right-wing chauvinist organization in Palestine."

     The group warned Americans not to be fooled by this new party. It then described the slaughter (April 9,1948) in Deir Yassin (http://www.deiryassin.org/) a small Arab village of 750 inhabitants. This day of trauma is still remembered by Palestinians yearly. Einstein's letter reflects the tension even then in the Jewish community:

"Most of the Jewish community was horrified at the deed, and the Jewish Agency sent a telegram of apology to King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan. But the terrorists, far from being ashamed of their act, were proud of this massacre, publicized it widely, and invited all the foreign correspondents present in the country to view the heaped corpses and the general havoc at Deir Yassin. The Deir Yassin incident exemplifies the character and actions of the Freedom Party.

Within the Jewish community they have preached an admixture of ultra-nationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority. Like other Fascist parties they have been used to break strikes, and have themselves pressed for the destruction of free trade unions. In their stead they have proposed corporate unions on the Italian Fascist model.

During the last years of sporadic anti-British violence, the IZL and Stern groups inaugurated a reign of terror in the Palestine Jewish community. Teachers were beaten up for speaking against them, adults were shot for not letting their children join them. By gangster methods, beatings, window-smashing, and wide-spread robberies, the terrorists intimidated the population and exacted a heavy tribute."

     Both Begin and Shamir were brilliant at "intimidating the population" --this time Diaspora Jews. On their many trips to North America they became famous for laying guilt trips on fellow Jews. Their line of reasoning was simple: You here in America are living the good life. You have chosen not to come to Israel --okay. Pony up. Write a substantial cheque and shut up. Christians and non-Jews had no right to speak either, because of the Holocaust.

The shift to the right

As many Jews began to shift politically to the right, fellow Jew Earl Shorris (Jews without Mercy, 1982) outlined their neo-conservative opinions:

• The state of Israel can do no wrong
  
  
• The Palestinian people have no right to exist as a state
  
  
• The killing of an Israeli civilian by a Palestinian is an act of terrorism
  
  
• The killing of a Palestinian by an Israeli is a justifiable act of self-defence
  
  
• Occupation and colonization of foreign territory by Israel is not imperialism.
  
  

     The War in Lebanon (1982) stunned many Diaspora Jews. The killing of 19,000 Arabs became Israel's Vietnam. It brought 400,000 Israelis into the streets to protest, and it helped raise the consciousness of Palestinians. The world was becoming aware of Palestinian dispossession. The war prompted another Jew, Roberta Strauss Feuerlich, to write her powerful book The Fate of the Jews: A People torn Between Israeli Power and Jewish Ethics (1983). Heartsick over the shocking revelations of Israeli complicity in the Sabra and Shatila massacre (under Ariel Sharon) she wrote, "Perhaps Israel is too heavy a moral burden to bear." She went on to quote with approval Alexander Schindler the then leader of American Reform Jewry: "We do ourselves irreparable harm when we make Israel our surrogate synagogue."

     Despite Lebanon, the world community did not pay too much attention to the ongoing Occupation and the rise of the illegal settlements. The West Bank and Gaza were but names to most observers. It was the Intifada of 1988, the "shaking off" of Palestinian despair which again focussed the international gaze on Israel. Many North American Jews became visibly upset by the shocking level of violence imposed on stone throwing Arab young people. As more and more church delegations arrived in the Occupied Territories and Gaza, as media increasingly reported on the massive disproportionate violence visited on the Palestinian populace, on the humiliating checkpoints, the bulldozing of homes, the targeted assassinations and extra judicial murders, the land seizures and destruction of Palestinian olive groves and latterly the building of Separation Barrier which steals even more land, people of conscience have broke silence and said. "Enough."

Post 9/11

9/11 was a temporary boon to Israel. The Israeli spin machine had a brief success linking the word "terrorist" to Palestinian resistance to the Occupation. The war in Lebanon, however, and the staggering overkill of Israel's superior firepower disgusted the rest of the world. Then came the stunning revelation that according to United Nation (UN) officials the Israeli military fired 90 percent of the bombs during the last 72 hours of the war when they knew a ceasefire was imminent. These one million cluster bombs have been killing three civilians per day. As member of the Knesset Ran Cohen, a reservist colonel who commanded an artillery battalion during Israel's first Lebanon war, said: "This is a very serious matter. If cluster bombs were used in populated areas, this constitutes an indescribable crime." Canadians got a rancid taste of Israel's overkill in late July in Lebanon when one of our own Major Paeta Hess-von Kruedener (part of the UN observer team) was killed by an Israeli air strike. Their outpost was clearly marked, and they had communicated ten times with the Israeli Defence Force.

     The latest disgusting murderous assault was in early November in Beit Hanoun where 12 members of a family were blown to smithereens in Gaza. The usual disingenuous hand wringing occurred for North American consumption. "Accident," "tragedy," "event", "mistake," and "incident" were words used to describe this. Former Knesset member Uri Avnery cut to the chase in an article. "No it is a M-a-s-s-a-c-r-e," the ex-Irgun writer wrote. "The entire choir of professional apologists, explainers-away, sorrow-expressers and pretext-inventors, a choir that is in perpetual readiness for such cases, sprang into feverish action."

     Now with the Carter book piled on top of simply too much Israeli violence, the world has become abundantly aware of Israel's moral deficit. This was put in simple terms on November 22 in a report in the Toronto Star that said: "Israel Worst Brand In World Says U.S. Survey." The National Brands Index (NBI) survey showed that Israel is suffering from the worst public image in the world. "Israel's brand is by a considerable margin the most negative we have ever measured in the NBI, and comes at the bottom of the ranking on almost every question," states report author Simon Anholt. The survey also indicated there was nowhere respondents would less like to visit than Israel. Worse yet, Israel's people were also voted the most unwelcoming in the world.

     Within Israel we may be coming to a moment of truth. As Jimmy Carter says in his book, the vast majority of Israelis yearn for a solution as do Palestinians. At a deep level Israelis must be tired of being viewed as a pariah state. Recently two Nobel Laureates grieved publicly at the malaise that has gripped their country. Yisrael Aumann and Aaron Ciechanover bemoaned the "fatal disease: the depletion of spirit... that has spread through Israeli society"."

     The outstanding Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif responded to this malaise in The Guardian (November 17, 2006). Her answer I believe gets to the heart of the matter and a potential place for healing:

"The secret rotting at the core of the state of Israel is its refusal to admit that the Zionist project in Palestine -- to create a state based on the dispossession of the non-Jewish inhabitants of the land-- was never noble: the land it coveted was the home of another people, and the fathers of the Israeli nation killed, terrorized and displaced them to turn the project into actuality."

     Soueif writes that the Palestinians live on, clinging to their dream and hopes for justice. They have survived even in a sewer like Gaza (my words). Soueif continued saying:

"Meanwhile, Israel insists it is civilized, decent, and peaceable. How can a society caught in such delusion thrive? And how can people living within the Zionist project as privileged Jewish citizens bewail their embattled lot or be puzzled by it? Israel will not be well until it acknowledges its past and makes amends for it. The process has a name: truth and reconciliation."

So where does that leave us?

We are beginning to see despite the formidable power of the U.S. pro-Israeli lobby (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/mear01.html) the gradual but decisive transformation of the global view of Israel vis à vis the Palestinians. An unrelenting media, computers and Internet, the rise of the Arabic news network, Al Jazeera, decades of hard slogging by fact finders to Palestine/Israel, the extraordinary persistence of moral Jewish voices in Israel and abroad, all have conspired to render the emperor naked. For Jewish theologian Marc Ellis, the symbol for Israel is a gun ship hovering over a defenceless people; for Jewish historian Tony Judt the symbol is the Star of David emblazoned on a tank. The world now gets it. Palestinians have replaced Jews as the persecuted minority. Power as it inevitably does, corrupts ethics. The tired and utterly unhelpful cry "Everyone hates us" no longer works when David has become Goliath. The Holocaust as an ideological prop to deflect criticism of modern day Israel has outlived its usefulness. Guilt no longer works here or in Israel. As Judt so cryptically says," The fact that the great-grandmother of an Israeli soldier died in Treblinka is no excuse for his own abusive treatment of a Palestinian woman waiting to cross a checkpoint. 'Remember Auschwitz' is not an acceptable response. The era of Israel as eternal victim is over."

     Jimmy Carter and Desmond Tutu are Christian models of witness and discipleship. They have internalized the wisdom of the prophet Isaiah.

Then justice will dwell in the wilderness and righteousness abide in the fruitful field And the effect of righteousness will be peace and the result of righteousness, quietness and trust forever.

Isaiah 32: 16

No peace, no justice would be a simple translation of the above. The overwhelming onus for peace in Israel/Palestine must be placed on the broad shoulders of the more powerful partner, Israel. However the double solidarity owed here must always begin with Christians' solidarity with the global Jewish community in whose hearts Israel has an especially cherished place. It must begin here because of Christianity's horrible role in the victimization of the Jewish people. This will mean a non-negotiable commitment to the safety of Israel and its right to live with secure borders. It will further mean a rejection of violent means of overthrowing the Jewish state, in particular, the death of innocent bystanders.

     A second solidarity is based on the prophetic consciousness of the Gospel identification with the humiliated, in this case, the long-suffering Palestinian people. It will not shrink in the name of a false ecumenism, from speaking truth to Israeli state power. It will no longer collude with Jewish empowerment, and allow the memory of the Holocaust to render Christians mute in honest criticism of the state of Israel. Further, it will, in the name of true brotherhood and sororal relations, use all non-violent means of persuasion, including boycotts to bring Israel to its senses. Much like South Africa, Israel will be treated as a pariah state until it wakes from its trance to acknowledge the full humanity and legitimate rights and national aspirations of the Palestinian people. The destruction and humiliation of these fellow Semites must end.

     Jimmy Carter's book is an honest look at the prevailing realities in this poor tortured real estate, so central to two beautiful peoples. I leave the last word to him and encourage all to read Palestine: Peace not Apartheid.

"The bottom line is this: Peace will come to Israel and the Middle East only when the Israeli government is willing to comply with international law, with the Roadmap for Peace, with official American policy, with the wishes of a majority of its own citizens and honor its own previous commitments by accepting its legal borders. All Arab neighbors must pledge to honor Israel's right to live in peace under these conditions. The United States is squandering international prestige and goodwill and intensifying global anti-American terrorism by unofficially condoning or abetting the Israeli confiscation and colonization of Palestinian territories.

It will be a tragedy --for the Israelis, the Palestinians, and the world-- if peace is rejected and a system of oppression, apartheid, and sustained violence is permitted to prevail."

Ted Schmidt is the former editor of Catholic New Times and the author of Shabbes Goy: A Catholic Boyhood. jtschmidt@rogers.com