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THE CHALLENGE FOR DIASPORA JEWRY: JEWISH VOICES OF HOPE

We in the resistance have learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the excluded, the ill treated, the powerless, the oppressed and despised... so that personal suffering has become a more useful key for understanding the world than personal happiness.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, April 1945, before his execution by the Nazis

Were I an Arab, and Arab with nationalist political consciousness . . . I would rise up against an immigration liable in the future to hand the country and all of its [Palestinian] Arab inhabitants over to Jewish rule. What [Palestinian] Arab cannot do his math and understand what [Jewish] immigration at the rate of 60,000 a year means to a Jewish state in all of Palestine.
David Ben Gurion Israel's first Prime Minister

Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves ... politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves... The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country.
David Ben-Gurion 1938

You are called to make a difference. On behalf of all Palestinian children, I beg you; I beg you to be in touch with the Jews you know and to continue giving friendship and sympathy to them and to respect them as human beings. They need this more than anyone during these times of big decision-making. Ask them to be more reasonable in their perceptions of Palestinians and not to be automatic enemies of them. And, know, too, that if you are friends with Jews it does not mean you are automatically at enmity with Palestinians. What we need is one more common friend. Can you do that? Do you have the courage? Decide for yourself --and get your hands dirty for peace and justice.
From a recent speech by Palestinian Melkite bishop, Elias Chacour

 

In a brave (for Canada) article the Canadian Jewish writer Shira Herzog penned a thoughtful piece in The Globe and Mail (September 22, 2006). Coming as it did at the beginning of the High Holy Days which culminate on Yom Kippur, Ms. Herzog dared to suggest that Diaspora Jews needed to catch up with their Israeli counterparts in their understanding of the fractured reality tearing that part of the world apart.

     Quoting Professor Gary Sussman of Tel Aviv University's Hartog School of Government who said that "Diaspora Jews are caught up in yesterday's issues and their donations sometimes pay the bill for poor governance," Herzog agreed. For her, Diaspora response to the Lebanon war was too predictable. "The worn discourse of security and solidarity" must go beyond the knee-jerk response of "my country right or wrong." Canadian and American Jews need to examine Israel's "public ethics and government."

     This is probably as far as any Canadian Jew would dare venture. Ms. Herzog needs to be congratulated for her honesty. She ended her article by suggesting that this new line of thinking and reflection just might be taken up in the High Holiday.

     The rigorous self-examination, which Yom Kippur demands, most probably veered away from this painful subject and at a certain level one can understand the difficulty. Israel plays a central role for Jews for obvious reasons. Christians need to be aware of this when broaching this sensitive area. The Canadian Jewish establishment, like their American counterparts, is quick to pounce on any who dare criticize Israel. Fellow Jews are simply marginalized and ostracized from the community. Christians are often tarred with the "anti-Semitic" label, which is why much of the criticism is sotto voce.

     Though few Jews live in Israel, the state represents the embodiment of continuation, of Jewish survival. It stands as the enfleshment of the late Emil Fackenheim's addition to the 613 commandments of Torah. The 614th reads: Thou shalt not grant Hitler any posthumous victories. When bombs go off in Israel, when missiles fly, Diaspora Jews immediately feel a sense of solidarity.

     The sad reality is that so few Jews in the North American Diaspora have any first-hand knowledge of Middle East realities. Simplistic slogans ("The Arabs want to drive us into the sea," "Arabs only understand force" etcetera) with virtually no experience of the Palestinian reality is a poor substitution for clear-headed analysis. Massive propaganda from a series of neo-conservative Israeli governments, much of it deeply cynical, is shoehorned into an automatic "pro Israel" stance. The war in Lebanon was a classic example of mainline Jewish reaction. Rightly condemned by most of the world as appalling and excessive, the Diaspora response was overly defensive. In a previous article, I examined the tragic life of Rabbi Reuben Slonim who had been 30 times to Israel and could not break through the chauvinism of congregants who had never seen or tasted the historic and ongoing brutal occupation of the Palestinian people. Only Jewish suffering appeared to matter.

     Knee-jerk defence of Israel among some Jews is similar to the lock step behaviour of ultramontane Catholics. The farther they get from Rome the more vigorous do they defend Vatican policies, often without seriously examining them. In many ways, some aspects of Judaism resemble Christianity in that both went from marginal status to state power and paid the price for it. But I am ahead of myself. In my next article I will deal with this.

     In this article I wish to hold up for weary travellers some amazingly distinct Jewish voices which one does not hear in North America --Jewish voices, both secular and religious, voices which give witness to the lie that Israel is a monolith, drunk with state power, unwilling to see the Palestinian as "the other" with just claims on a common land. I do not wish to downplay the absolute powder keg that Israel/Palestine and much of the Middle East is today, but I am not alone in thinking that unless this Israel/Palestine issue is solved, there indeed will be no hope. Listen to these voices of hope.

Yom Kippur challenge

In Israel's largest newspaper Yediot Aharaonot, Michael Barizon (who goes by the pen name B. Michael) got serious about Yom Kippur, and had the gall to suggest on October 1 of this year that Israeli Jews had much to atone for when it came to the Palestinians. In part this is what he said:

     "It's more convenient looking the other way, but when the Day of Atonement comes, all those self-inflicted deaf, blind people will not be able to say, 'We didn't know.'

     And there are some --whose numbers are growing daily-- who have adopted a unique way of dealing with their transgressions: They have trained their eyes not to see. They have taught their ears not to hear and have become accustomed to turning their heads in one direction only --towards an ostentatious, yet hollow worldview.

     It's far from easy --not seeing, hearing and not turning your head away. But these sinners have been blessed with a unique talent. Throughout their years of experience, it has become a natural instinct. And so, ostensibly blind and deaf they tell themselves over and over again in an assured voice --'we are righteous, and we have not sinned.'

     However, as recited in prayers, we and our forefathers have sinned. And we are continuing to sin. Yom Kippur does not atone these sins. These are sins whose severity cannot be altered by repentance, prayer or charity.

     Just beyond the tip of their noses, Jews are robbing their neighbor's land, cutting down fruit trees, stealing water, vandalizing orchards, torturing children, disrespecting the elderly and killing sheep and cattle --while they, on their part, feel absolutely righteous.

     And just beneath their windows a bureaucratic-military concern is tyrannically repressing millions of people whose sole sin is their race, religion and people."

     B. Michael is not atypical of many Jews of conscience.

Amira Hass and Shulamit Aloni

Let me introduce you now to Amira Hass. The daughter of Holocaust survivors, she is the only reporter of an Israeli daily who actually covers the Occupied Territories and Gaza. Like any good reporter she writes what she sees --and she asked her fellow citizens on August 30 of this year, precisely this question: Can you not see?

     "Let us leave aside those Israelis whose ideology supports the dispossession of the Palestinian people because 'God chose us.' Leave aside the judges who whitewash every military policy of killing and destruction. Leave aside the military commanders who knowingly jail an entire nation in pens surrounded by walls, fortified observation towers, machine guns, barbed wire and blinding projectors. Leave aside the ministers. All of these are not counted among the collaborators. These are the architects, the planners, the designers, the executioners.

     But there are others. Historians and mathematicians, senior editors, media stars, psychologists and family doctors, lawyers who do not support Gush Emunim and Kadima, teachers and educators, lovers of hiking trails and sing-alongs, high-tech wizards. Where are you? And what about you, researchers of Nazism, the Holocaust and Soviet gulags? Could you all be in favor of systematic discriminating laws? Laws stating that the Arabs of the Galilee will not even be compensated for the damages of the war by the same sums their Jewish neighbors are entitled to?"

     Then Hass asks the scalding question asked of Germans in the Holocaust years: "Could it be that you do not know what is happening 15 minutes from your faculties and offices?"

     "Where were you when this massive dehumanizing was taking place?"

     These are scenes which no Diaspora Jew is likely to ever see, so sheltered are they and indeed all of us who go to "the Holy Land" to look for the biblical stones, but miss the human stones crying out for solidarity.

     How is it that Hass "sees" while other Israelis do not? For her it was the witness of her extraordinary parents who had a history of "resisting injustice, speaking out and fighting back." In her book Drinking the Sea at Gaza, she recalls an indelible story of her mother's. Having just arrived at the death camp of Bergen Belsen, she saw a group of German women slow down as the strange procession of emaciated people walked by. All of these women watched with "indifferent curiosity." For the daughter, Amira, "these women became a loathsome symbol of watching from the sidelines and at an early age I decided that my place was not with the bystanders."

     Another Israeli woman Shulamit Aloni, the 78-year-old human rights lawyer, a former education minister and descendant of a Polish rabbinical family, wrote an article about this time, even more to the point. In vigorous language which can only come from visceral human disgust at the observed treatment of fellow human beings, she stated that Israel's leaders must change their mindset:

     "Over the years we deported, robbed land and stole water, destroyed crops, uprooted trees, turned every village and town into a detention camp, and set up hundreds of communities on land that doesn't belong to us....

     We paved roads for Jews only, a case of blatant apartheid, while defending it using witty Jewish self-righteousness in the absence of fair and public reporting of the budgets involved, deeds committed, expropriation of land, and disregard for vandalism...

     But as we usually present it --we're the victim, while they're the murderers with blood on their hands. We never report the number of Palestinians we murdered from the sky and killed by fire --women, children, the elderly, whole families, thousands of them.

     No wonder they hate us ...the time has come for the government of Israel to start talking peace, and end the excuses for disqualifying and boycotting Palestinian representatives."

     Diaspora Jewry, of course, does not see what these women see. Nor does it appear do they want to.

Jeff Halper and Arik Aschermann

When I asked Jeff Halper the American-born founder of the Committee Against House Demolition (ICAHD) why North American Jews (who in the past have had a strong justice perspective) seem so blind when it comes to Israel --he said it was simple. Most are ignorant of the situation. Their idea of Israel is still from the movie Exodus, the Jew as eternal victim.

     I asked Halper who has spent 30 years in Israel and is a retired anthropology professor about the Israeli pull-out of Gaza in August 2005. Did he agree with another well-known critic Professor Baruch Kimmerling who called it "emotional exploitation" and "the evacuation trauma?" The whole event --"the most expensive production yet"-- was to portray Sharon and the state of Israel as "heroes of peace." Kimmerling, who wrote a book on Sharon's lifelong dislike of Arabs, maintained that it was to show the world that so much was invested in this --that there is no chance of evacuating the huge population in the West Bank.

Jews as victims

Halper replied to my question: "Yes all this is true. This is part of the narrative of Jews as victims. One of the things I am working on is reframing the conflict because the way Israel frames it, which has been accepted by the public and media, is a framing based on security and terrorism, where there is no Occupation. After 9/11, this resonates with people. Now, the story is that Israel is doing a wonderful thing. Look how it evacuated the settlement. These poor people lost their homes. I think every Israeli in Gaza was interviewed three times. This was not pathos, but bathos."

     "We present an alternative reframing. First you start with the Occupation. Two, Israel is the stronger party. Three, the Occupation is pro-active, a claim for the entire country. Everything is a ploy to claim Judea and Samaria. We're claiming the entire country and we're going to lock the Palestinians into a Bantustan (the name given to the 'homelands' of Africans in the apartheid era). We must do this in a clever way because the world does not like apartheid these days. At all costs, you want to preserve your image as the victim. This is very convenient, as no one will hold you accountable.

     And we have no right to despair when such men as Rabbi Arik Ascherman, the head of Rabbis for Human Rights, regularly befriends Palestinian families who have had their homes bulldozed and human rights trampled on. At one of his trials, Ascherman said simply: 'I am very deeply affected when the Torah which I am sworn as a rabbi to uphold is being trampled on. In a piece which I wrote immediately after the demolition of the Da'ari home I noted that my kippah was lost in the rubble. I wondered whether this symbolized what was being done to Jewish values and/or whether it would be found some day so that it would be known that somebody had stood against this evil in the name of Torah.'"

Three more male voices

I have never forgotten what Israeli peace activist Yehezkel Landau told me years ago at our dinner table. He was visibly angry with diaspora Jewry. "Their unblinkered support of Israel is terrible. It does me no good. Israel needs their honesty not their servility. I have lived in Israel, they don't and their automatic support for Israeli state crimes is hurting me and the Jewish people here and in Israel. We need to be called to a higher standard, instead we get blank cheques and we basically tell the diaspora not to criticize."

     In 1999,three Jewish Israelis Amir Cheshin, a retired army colonel, Bill Hutman, a journalist and Avi Melamed an Adviser on Arab Affairs (to then Jerusalem mayor Ehud Olmert) penned a book called Separate and Unequal: The Inside Story of Israeli Rule in East Jerusalem. Their conclusion: "Do not believe the rosy propaganda --the rosy picture that Israel tries to show the world of Jerusalem since the 1967 reunification. Israel has treated the Palestinians terribly. As a matter of policy, it has forced many from their homes and stripped them of their land all the while lying to them and deceiving them and the world about its honorable intentions." It is dubious that even a handful of Diaspora Jews have even heard of the book. It sits unread in the Toronto library.

     My wife and I were privileged to attend a recent screening of Avi Mograbi's film Avenge But One of my Two Eyes, a Cannes selection of 2005. Despite wide coverage on the CBC (where we heard the director speak) none of the Diaspora was present at Ryerson University the night of the Toronto screening in early October.

     The affable Tel Aviv professor and filmmaker takes two Israeli "myths," the Samson story where the blinded Jewish hero pulls the temple down on all, killing hundreds of Philistines and that of Masada, where in 73 CE over 900 Jews died by their own hand rather than submit to Rome. The message: Death is preferable to domination. The film is excruciating to watch. The constant humiliation of Palestinians is only matched by the stunning arrogance of the Israeli Defence Force (IDF). At one point Mograbi (in the film) loses his patience at the soldiers humiliating schoolboys.

     In the question period after the film, Mograbi admitted that he is able to show his film in his native Tel Aviv, but few come. Nevertheless it is a powerful contemporary understanding of the end result of humiliation: Suicide bombing. This time it is the Palestinians who are both Samson and those who despair in Masada by inflicting violence on themselves.

     The above represent a minority snapshot of contemporary Israel. But they number in the thousands, and they include both those young men who refuse to serve the IDF in the Occupied Territories, and those Women in Black who have vigilled on behalf of Palestinian rights for years. Their voices are small, but they are present, tiny shoots of hope.

     I have often wondered what those signs outside of synagogues mean when they say it is time to "stand up for Israel." I make the following analogy. If I had an alcoholic brother, I would want to stand up for him. I would not bless his destructive activity. I would try and intervene and set him on a healthy course. Would this make me "anti fraternal?" By giving in to his every self-defeating whim, am I loving him? I think not.

     Diaspora Jewry rightly feels strongly about the survival of Israel. I believe we all should. Jewish empowerment in the state of Israel is a fact, but the question we must ask is this: Does the Holocaust not have universal meaning and should not that meaning be: No massive suffering upon anyone else?

     It is obvious that many Israeli Jews do not self-censor themselves around the overwhelming state power of Israel. Nor need non-Jews. However, we must question our motives in doing so. If we are satisfied that such a voice is both necessary and needed, we not only should speak, we must speak. Bonhoeffer was right, the great events of history must be seen from the underside. That will mean that we must attempt to walk in the shoes of the mute, the drowned out, the voiceless --no matter who or where they are.

     For years now I have cherished the answer Archbishop Michel Sabbah, the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, the highest Roman Catholic prelate in Israel, gave to a Reform rabbi here in Toronto years ago. When the rabbi told him that his remarks were too one-sided, Sabbah replied, "I'll tell you what rabbi, when your people are treated like mine, I'll change sides." Sabbah enfleshed an important dictum of faith: "Vox victimarum, vox Dei" (the voice of the victims is the voice of God.)

     Meanwhile kudos to Shira Herzog for raising an important issue in the Jewish Diaspora here in Canada.

Ted Schmidt is the former editor of Catholic New Times. His blog is http://theologyinthevineyard.wordpress.com/ He can be reached at jtschmidt@rogers.com