I spent much of the J Street policy conference last week struggling with the issue of racism in liberal Jewish life, including in my own thinking. J Street set off this debate in my mind because it dispensed with two easily-dismissed rationales for the Jewish state that you hear everywhere at AIPAC: Israel is necessary because the antisemites are going to turn on us in the U.S., or it’s necessary because the Bible gave us the land. J Street doesn’t go in for either argument. And yet it routinely invokes the necessity and goodness of Jewish democracy. I must have heard the words Jewish democracy a million times there. I’ve never seen a purple cow either. ...
Liberal Jews routinely invoke a racist idea -- the "demographic threat" -- to justify the Jewish democracy. These ideas are familiar to me. They are what I was raised with, and am still engaged by. They surround Jewish feelings of superiority. We are chosen, we are smarter, we are irrigating the desert and building computers that will deliver a drop of water to every root of every artichoke bush, we have more Nobel prizes than all the Arab world combined. I’ve struggled with this idea of Jewish superiority all my life. It was in the warp and woof of my upbringing in an academic milieu, and I run into it in almost every argument I have with Zionists. It reminds me of schwarzer talk in the 1970s -- talking about black people.
The elaboration of this attitude -- which J Streeters seem to believe but don’t pound the table about, as the neocons do -- is that Israel is a developed country while the Arab world is ignorant, that the Palestinians are peasants and Jews are urban people of the book, that the Arab world lacks basic freedoms. And so it would be a tragedy if the smart Jews of Israel had to share the government of their country, in one state, with the Palestinians. In a word, We don’t want to be governed by Arabs. ...
The conflict won’t go away until the ideology of the white master, which permeates the Zionist story, is discussed openly in the United States, and we begin to see this as a story of dispossession and disfranchisement. You can say anything you like about Palestinian peasantry, or women being covered in Gaza, or authoritarianism in Egypt, or Israeli technology. I share some of those political values. But none of these points is an argument for human bondage, let alone burning up children with white phosphorus or relying on powerful brethren in the U.S. to shut down the debate.
They are arguments that if Jews really want to be a light unto the nations, they must recognize that Israelis share a land with others, and they must work together to come up with a democratic ethos. ...
Until liberals wrestle with the real phenomenon of Jewish power, their analysis of foreign policy will be limited and their action ineffective. Bernard Avishai’s claims that American hardliners want the settlement program to continue, and "One cannot just assume that the Congress will care what Jews want" are absurd. Over and over, American presidents have said they oppose the colonization program; over and over these instincts have been nullified politically because of the Jewish presence in the power structure. The Senate is dominated by Democrats, and 1/5 of them are Jews, even though Jews are just 2 percent of the population. ... As I have frequently said, the biggest money game in town on the Republican side is Sheldon Adelson, a Zionist Jew, who got engaged in 2000 with the specific aim of nullifying the "peace process." Today is Obama frustrated by "hardliners"? No: he’s frustrated by the likes of Chuck Schumer, who refuses to go to J Street. ...
To think that the Jewish presence in the media is not also a factor in the disastrous American foreign policy re the Middle East is not to think at all. Avishai’s analysis evades this issue. The Israel lobby is powerful for a lot of reasons. Because it’s a special interest, and because it cares more than anyone else. But also because of the Jewish presence in the Establishment. It is a piece of heartwarming liberal nostalgia to put the blame for the settlements on big bad American hardliners. ...
But just consider America’s "foreign policy strategy," as Avishai puts it. In Iraq, that strategy has called for negotiations with terrorist groups who killed Americans so as to make a political solution, it has called for an end to the occupation of Iraq, and investigating atrocities by American troops. We suspend all those standards when it comes to Israel/Palestine. Why?
In a word, because of American Jewish engagement on these issues. Failing to acknowledge this reality does not serve readers, nor does it serve the necessary process of soul-searching inside the Jewish community over our responsibility for the denial of Palestinian freedom.
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