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Jay Michaelson

To paraphrase a recent Jewish organizational tagline, I’ve “hugged and wrestled with Israel” for 20 years now. At first, it was all embrace: Zionist songs and culture nourished me like mother’s milk, and on my first trip to Israel I kissed the tarmac at Ben Gurion, as did the other USY (United Synagogue Youth) kids.

Eventually, the wrestling came to the fore, particularly as I became more conscious of Palestinians, settlements and religious-secular divides. In 2002, I wrote about being “a leftist and a Zionist” and how difficult it was to maintain those dual political identities. And for several years, I’ve argued for a more nuanced approach to Israel advocacy and education than the hail of falafel balls and the bludgeon of Taglit-Birthright.

But lately I’ve noticed that I’m becoming a candidate for advocacy myself. I’ve loved Israel for decades, lived there for three years, and studied in detail the subtleties of its society and conflicts. And so it is with the sadness that accompanies the end of any affair that I notice my love is starting to wane.

Why? There are four primary reasons.

First, I admit, it has become simply exhausting to maintain the ambivalence, the hugging and the wrestling, the endless fence sitting. My love of Israel has turned into a series of equivocations: “I do not support the expansion of settlements, but the Palestinians bear primary responsibility for the collapse of the peace process in 1999.” “The Israelis acted overzealously in Gaza, but they must be entitled to defend themselves against rocket attacks.” “Yes, the separation wall is odious, but it is also effective and necessary.” Yes, but; no, but; defend, but. At some point, the complexity and ambiguity wears one out, particularly when the visuals on the anti-Israel side are so compelling, and so stark: walls, tanks, checkpoints.

I admit that my exhaustion is exacerbated because, in my social circles, supporting Israel is like supporting segregation, apartheid or worse. I know this is a sign of weakness of will on my part, and I hope that the Times-magazine-sanctioned rise of J Street changes things, but I don’t think advocates of Israel understand exactly how bad the situation is on college campuses, in Europe, and in liberal or leftist social-political circles. Supporting Israel in these contexts is like supporting repression, or the war in Iraq, or George W. Bush. It’s gotten so bad, I don’t mention Israel in certain conversations anymore, and no longer defend it when it’s lumped in with South Africa and China by my friends. This is wrong of me, I know, but I’ve been defending Israel for years, and it’s gotten harder and harder to do so.

How much of Israel’s pariah status is fantasy and how much is reality is, of course, a complicated question, and one that I would not presume to answer in this column. In the conversations I’ve had, it’s some of each — and again a subject for equivocation. Yes, Israel’s new government is a right/far-right alliance whose foreign policy looks suspiciously like Yitzhak Shamir’s era of “Say yes and do nothing.” But on the other hand, I understand why many Israelis are fed up and voted for it, and the oversimplifications among Israel’s critics are many. For example, just because this government is expanding settlements does not make doing so an essential part of Israel’s identity.

But I’m not sure the parsing matters. I’m not sure any state with tanks can win a propaganda war against an occupied people with guns and Molotov cocktails — even if the occupied people’s leaders deserve plenty of blame. It’s exhausting to keep fighting this fight, especially as Israel’s authentically odious actions (excesses by soldiers, expropriations of land) continue to pile up, and the yes-buts grow harder and harder to maintain.

The second reason for my waning love of Israel is that the Israel I love is increasingly disappearing. It started in Jerusalem, with the exodus of the secular left and the slow, agonizing demise of the culture they created. Now, many of my sabra friends are leaving the country entirely, desperately looking for tech jobs in California or academic postings in Indiana. However worn out I may be by the matzav my friends who have lived in it are far worse. For now, Tel Aviv’s liberal, secular, life-celebrating culture continues to thrive and is even developing a spiritual aspect — but like many Israelis, I feel like I’m reading the writing on the wall.

Part of the problem here is that the Israel I love is not the Disneyland most of my fellow Americans seem to adore. Sure, I cry at Macadam and even feel moved at the kotel. But my Israel is one of shuks, cafes, shtiebels and hiking trails; of family and friends; of my alma mater on Mount Scopus and my favorite field in Talbieh (Churshat Hayareach, an open space continually threatened with destruction). Personally, I find the way many Americans strut in and out of Jerusalem for the holidays partly ridiculous and partly nauseating. So while the storybook Jerusalem remains more or less intact, I care less about it than the delicate, messy harmonies of the real ones.

Worse than that, the mythic Israel is now actively affecting — I would say harming — the real one. The handful of rich American conservatives who have influenced Israeli politics lately have tended to prefer grandiose myths to the messy realities that should govern pragmatic decision making — and eventually, all those simplifications add up to dangerous distortions in policy. The “fantasy Israel,” the one many Americans seem largely to inhabit, doesn’t compensate for the erosion of the real one. On the contrary, it causes it.

Nor am I myself immune; the third way in which my love for Israel is waning is that I’ve started to second-guess the love itself. How distant is my love of Churshat Hayareach from the sentimentality of a tourist at the Wall? (The Western one, that is, not the Separation one.) Am I not, too, an American moved, and thus partially blinded, by religious and national myth? How different am I, really, from those who value the poetry of the kotel over the prose of human rights? Am I really so different from those whose pro-Israel company I keep? It’s not that American Jews’ myths about Israel are false — it’s just that they have a way of shaping narrative, and papering over problems like, oh, the two million non-Jewish residents of Greater Israel.

This is especially the case because those problems are often rendered invisible. When my more liberal friends used to call me out about Israeli politics, I would sometimes respond that the picture they had, shaped by Western media, was a distorted one. Really, I’d say, Israel is a wonderful place — a place where doors are left unlocked and musicians play in the street, and where an almost-extinguished culture rose from literal ashes.

But, you know, a Southerner in the 1950s or an Afrikaner in the 1980s might say similar things. Yes, living within Green Line Israel, it’s possible to forget the Occupation (a term that certain Jewish news agencies feel obliged to scare quote). But maybe that’s part of the problem: The current regime of Separation (apart-ness, perhaps?) is all too effective. And so I’ve begun to second-guess even my own love of the place, wondering how much of it is built upon a foundation of deliberately constructed ignorance, a result of years of selective education. I sip my limonana, and five miles away a mother is harassed at a checkpoint. Which is reality and which fantasy?

Finally, I think my love of Israel is fading because I feel personally implicated by its injustices, even though I have chosen to live in America and have relinquished my right to have any say over Israeli policy. (If only some of my countrymen would feel similarly.) On a recent trip to Berlin, I remarked to a friend that I felt more relaxed there than in Jerusalem. Part of it was that Berlin is a liberal city, and part of it was that I didn’t have to be frisked every time I walked into a cafe. But mostly, I think, I felt relaxed because while there was certainly plenty of political baggage around, none of it was mine. I’m not implicated in Germany’s wrong decisions (to be clear, I refer more to Turks in 2009 than to Jews in 1939), whereas I do feel implicated by Israel’s.

This sense of implication is perhaps yet more fantasy — yet another American thinking he’s part of a country he doesn’t inhabit. But it comes with the territory of love, which is perhaps why I’m slowly disengaging. I understand why many Israelis feel fed up with the Palestinian problem and are ready to slam the door. But as an outsider, I no longer want to feel entangled by their decisions and implicated in their consequences. B’seder: It’s your choice to make… but count me out.

In my heart, I still love the stones and trees of Jerusalem, even though I know that love is sentimental, problematic and shared with people I mistrust. I am still awed by the tkuma, the resurrection and rebirth of my ancient people. And, yes, I feel like underscoring, I still support the State of Israel, its right to exist and the rest. Most important, it is still, in part, my home.

But especially on this side of the ocean, more and more of those who feel similarly have politics, agendas and overall experiences of Israel very different from mine. What they love is not what I love, and how they love is terrifying. And so while my love endures, my unease grows, and with it, the gnawing sense that this relationship is in trouble.

Publicado originalmente no The Jewish Daily Forward em 25 de Setembro de 2009.

http://www.forward.com/articles/114180/

Israel é apenas uma nação entre nações?

Em um nível, ele é de fato um lugar comum. As pessoas reclamam do trânsito, acompanham a cotação de suas ações, levam o cachorro para passear, usam BlackBerry, vão à praia e pagam suas hipotecas. Caminhe pelos prósperos subúrbios ao norte de Tel Aviv e você poderá se sentir na Califórnia.

Em outro, é claro, não é. Mais de 60 anos após a criação do Estado moderno, Israel ainda não tem fronteiras estabelecidas, não tem Constituição, não tem paz. Nascido de um horror excepcional, o Holocausto, a normalidade tem se mostrado esquiva.

A ansiedade dos judeus da diáspora não deu lugar à tranquilidade, mas a outra ansiedade. A fuga dos muros deu origem a novos muros. A psicose da aniquilação não desapareceu, mas adquiriu nova forma.

Apesar dos sucessos de Israel -é a sociedade mais aberta e dinâmica na região – isso é um fracasso atormentador. Algo pode ser feito a respeito? A história não é encorajadora.

Mas talvez um bom lugar por onde começar seja notando que Israel não vê a si mesmo como normal. Em vez disso, ele vive em um estado perpétuo de excepcionalismo.

Eu entendo isso: Israel é um país pequeno cujos vizinhos são inimigos ou observadores frios. Mas eu me preocupo quando Israel transforma em fetiche seu status excepcional. Ele precisa lidar com o mundo como ele é, por mais embaraçoso que seja, não o mundo do passado.

O Holocausto representou a quintessência do mal. Mas ele aconteceu há 65 anos. Seus perpetradores estão mortos ou morrendo. Um prisma do Holocausto pode distorcer. A história ilumina – e cega.

Estas reflexões vêm de uma análise do discurso do primeiro-ministro Benjamin Netanyahu na Assembleia Geral da ONU, no mês passado. Os primeiros 30 parágrafos foram dedicados a uma mistura inflamada de Alemanha nazista (a palavra “nazista” apareceu cinco vezes), Irã moderno, Al Qaeda (uma ideologia sunita à qual o Irã xiita se opõe) e terrorismo global, com o Israel solitário e excepcional enfrentando todos eles.

Aqui está o resumo de Netanyahu da luta de nossa era: “Ele coloca civilização contra barbarismo, o século 21 contra o século 9, aqueles que santificam a vida contra aqueles que glorificam a morte”.

Isso é fácil, tem ressonância – e é de nenhuma ajuda. Claro, é uma posição que responde às ameaças e negação do Holocausto inaceitáveis do presidente do Irã, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. (Vários líderes iranianos também falaram em aceitar qualquer acordo a respeito de Israel que seja aceito pelos palestinos.)

Há outra forma de ver a luta em andamento no Oriente Médio -menos dramática e mais precisa.

É vê-la como uma luta por um equilíbrio de poder diferente – e possivelmente maior estabilidade- entre um Israel com armas nucleares (cerca de 80 a 200 armas nunca reconhecidas), um Irã orgulhoso mas incomodado e um mundo árabe cada vez mais sofisticado e consciente (apesar de reprimido).

Não é uma batalha entre barbarismo e civilização, mas entre várias civilizações, cujas posturas em relação à religião e ao modernismo variam, uma na qual todos buscam algum tipo de acomodação entre elas.

Uma baixa desta visão, é claro, é o excepcionalismo israelense. O Estado judeu se torna mais uma nação lutando por influência e tesouro. Eu acho que o presidente Obama, ele mesmo fazendo calar o excepcionalismo americano (é caro), está tentando empurrar Israel para uma autoimagem mais prosaica, realista.

Daí a abstenção americana em uma votação nuclear na ONU no mês passado, em Viena, pedindo que todos os Estados no Oriente Médio reconheçam o Tratado de Não-Proliferação Nuclear (TNP) e criem um Oriente Médio livre de armas nucleares – uma ideia que conta com apoio dos funcionários do governo Obama e que segue a agenda de desarmamento nuclear do presidente.

É uma mudança perceptível em relação ao endosso tácito americano de décadas ao arsenal nuclear israelense não declarado. Isto é lógico. Lidar de modo eficaz com o programa nuclear do Irã, um membro do TNP, ignorando ao mesmo tempo o status nuclear de um Israel fora do TNP, significa convidar acusações de dois pesos e duas medidas. O presidente Obama não gosta disso.

Eu acho que há um caso defensável para Israel colocar um fim ao seu excepcionalismo nuclear, colocando seu arsenal às claras e ingressando no TNP como parte de qualquer arranjo de segurança regional endossado pelos americanos e que impeça o Irã de obter armas.

Também vale a pena notar o tom sensível do secretário de Defesa americano, Robert Gates, em relação ao Irã – em contraste flagrante a Netanyahu. “A única forma de acabarmos sem um Irã com capacidade nuclear é o governo iraniano entender que sua segurança foi reduzida ao ter essas armas, em vez de fortalecida”, disse Gates.

Em outras palavras, como argumento há muito tempo, o Irã toma decisões racionais. Em vez de invocar o Holocausto -uma distração indefensável- Israel deve ver o Irã friamente, entender suas preocupações e ver como pode ganhar com a diplomacia liderada pelos Estados Unidos.

Acabe com a pose, com a retórica exaltada, e lide com a realidade. Isso pode ser doloroso -como a conclusão do recente relatório da ONU, feito pelo ministro Richard Goldstone, de que tanto as forças israelenses quanto os militantes palestinos cometeram possíveis crimes contra a humanidade durante as operações militares de Israel em Gaza.

Mas também é educativo. Goldstone é um homem comedido – eu o conheço há muito tempo. A resposta israelense às suas conclusões me parecem como um exemplo do efeito cegante do excepcionalismo desenfreado. Países comuns erram.

O Oriente Médio mudou. Israel também precisa. “Nunca de novo” é um modo importante, mas totalmente inadequado, de lidar com o mundo moderno.

*Roger Cohen é editor-geral do “The International Herald Tribune”

Tradução: George El Khouri Andolfato

http://noticias.uol.com.br/midiaglobal/herald/2009/10/16/ult2680u918.jhtm

Richard Goldstone – juiz e promotor de tribunais de guerra. Chefiou a missão da ONU em relação à Operação Chumbo Fundido, investigando alegações de crimes de guerra

Five weeks after the release of the Report of the Fact Finding Mission on Gaza, there has been no attempt by any of its critics to come to grips with its substance. It has been fulsomely approved by those whose interests it is thought to serve and rejected by those of the opposite view. Those who attack it do so too often by making personal attacks on its authors’ motives and those who approve it rely on its authors’ reputations.

Richard Goldstone.
Photo: AP

Israeli government spokesmen and those who support them have attacked it in the harshest terms and, in particular my participation, in a most personal and hurtful way. The time has now come for more sober reflection on what the report means and appropriate Israeli reactions to it.

I begin with my own motivation, as a Jew who has supported Israel and its people all my life, for having agreed to head the Gaza mission. Over the past 20 years, I have investigated serious violations of international law in my own country, South Africa, in the former Yugoslavia, in Rwanda and the alleged fraud and theft by governments and political leaders in a number of countries in connection with the United Nations Iraq Oil for Food program. In all of these, allegations reached the highest political echelons. In every instance, I spoke out strongly in favor of full investigations and, where appropriate, criminal prosecutions. I have spoken out over the years on behalf of the International Bar Association against human rights violations in many countries, including Sri Lanka, China, Russia, Iran, Zimbabwe and Pakistan.

I would have been acting against those principles and my own convictions and conscience if I had refused a request from the United Nations to investigate serious allegations of war crimes against both Israel and Hamas in the context of Operation Cast Lead.

S A Jew, I felt a greater and not a lesser obligation to do so. It is well documented that as a condition of my participation I insisted upon and received an evenhanded mandate to investigate all sides and that is what we sought to do.

I sincerely believed that because of my own record and the terms of the mission’s mandate we would receive the cooperation of the Israeli government. Its refusal to cooperate was a grave error. My plea for cooperation was repeated before and during the investigation and it sits, plain as day, in the appendices of the Gaza report for those who actually bother to read it. Our mission obviously could only consider and report on what it saw, heard and read. If the government of Israel failed to bring facts and analyses to our attention, we cannot fairly be blamed for the consequences. Those who feel that our report failed to give adequate attention to specific incidents or issues should be asking the Israeli government why it failed to argue its cause.

Israel missed a golden opportunity to actually have a fair hearing from a UN-sponsored inquiry. Of course, I was aware of and have frequently spoken out against the unfair and exceptional treatment of Israel by the UN and especially by the Human Rights Council.

I did so again last week. Israel could have seized the opportunity provided by the even-handed mandate of our mission and used it as a precedent for a new direction by the United Nations in the Middle East. Instead, we were shut out.

As I stated in response to a recent letter from the mayor of Sderot, I believed strongly that our mission should have been allowed to visit Sderot and other parts of southern Israel that have been at the receiving end of unlawful attacks by many thousands of rockets and mortars fired at civilian targets by Hamas and other armed groups in Gaza. We were prevented from doing so by, what I believe, was a misguided decision by the Israeli government.

In Gaza, I was surprised and shocked by the destruction and misery there. I had not expected it. I did not anticipate that the IDF would have targeted civilians and civilian objects. I did not anticipate seeing the vast destruction of the economic infrastructure of Gaza including its agricultural lands, industrial factories, water supply and sanitation works. These are not military targets. I have not heard or read any government justification for this destruction.

OF COURSE the children of Sderot and the children of Gaza have the same rights to protection under international law and that is why, notwithstanding the decision of the government of Israel, we took whatever steps were open to us to obtain information from victims and experts in southern Israel about the effects on their lives of sustained rocket and mortar attacks over a period of years. It was on the strength of those investigations that we held those attacks to constitute serious war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity.

The refusal of cooperation by the government of Israel did not prevent us from reacting positively to a request from Gilad Schalit’s father to speak personally to our mission at its public session in Geneva. No one who heard his evidence could fail to have been moved by the unspeakable pain of a parent whose young son was being held for over three years in unlawful circumstances without any contact with the outside world and not even allowed visits from the International Committee of the Red Cross. The mission called for his release.

Israel and its courts have always recognized that they are bound by norms of international law that it has formally ratified or that have become binding as customary international law upon all nations. The fact that the United Nations and too many members of the international community have unfairly singled out Israel for condemnation and failed to investigate horrible human rights violations in other countries cannot make Israel immune from the very standards it has accepted as binding upon it.

Israel has a strong history of investigating allegations made against its own officials reaching to the highest levels of government: the inquiries into the Yom Kippur War, Sabra and Shatila, Bus 300 and the Second Lebanon War.

Israel has an internationally renowned and respected judiciary that should be envy of many other countries in the region. It has the means and ability to investigate itself. Has it the will?

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?apage=2&cid=1255694838474&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

Jack Wertheimer is a professor of American Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary.

From now on, Jewish groups will likely think twice before using any variation on the word “assimilation.” That’s one lesson learned from the recent brouhaha over a 34-second commercial on Israeli television promoting the Jewish Agency’s Masa program, which brings young Jews to Israel for sustained periods of work, study and volunteering. The advertisement, which paired photos of young Jews on missing-person posters with the statement that “over 50% of Jews abroad are assimilating,” drew a firestorm of criticism on blogs and in news reports. Facing mounting international controversy, the Jewish Agency quickly killed the ad.

The issues raised by the ad, though, will not go away so easily. While the ad may have been clumsy in its execution, its central point is essentially correct: Large numbers of Jews around the world are disconnected from any Jewish communal activities.

Is there any reason to doubt that the Jewish people is suffering an erosion of its engaged membership? In the case of American Jews, we now lack an up-to-date national survey with precise numbers (or a national leadership sufficiently interested in basing its policies on hard data to produce one), but there is ample evidence of large declines in the numbers of Jews who participate in organized Jewish life in recent decades. Most established organizations have seen their membership numbers and donor base implode. And the many new initiatives that are rightly generating much excitement tend to attract only relatively small proportions of the Jewish population. When we add up all the activities of synagogues, federations, service programs, national organizations, cultural providers, educational institutions and the myriad start-ups, it is clear that vast populations of American Jews are steering clear of organized Jewish life.

Describing the world in which he works daily, a rabbi of my acquaintance talks about how, of necessity, he must focus only on the present. Why? Because the Jews he encounters have no connection to a Jewish past, and judging from the absence of any Jewish education among their grandchildren, they have no Jewish future.

So why, then, if there is a large kernel of truth to its claims, did the Masa ad elicit such a sharp reaction? In large part, it is because it was inferred that the 50% assimilation figure the ad cited refers to intermarriage rates, which in the United States reached that level in the late 1990s. Critics contend that the ad — though it does not actually mention the word “intermarriage” — gives offense to the children of Jews who intermarry, by implying that they are somehow “lost.” Many children of intermarriage, these critics note, are raised as Jews and go on to identify strongly with the Jewish people. This is, of course, true — but only up to a point. Unfortunately, this optimistic reading describes only a minority of intermarried families. The majority of intermarried families raise their children in a faith other than Judaism or in two faiths or no faith at all; not surprisingly, when they reach adulthood, most of those offspring do not identify as Jews.

Few would dispute that the Jewish community has a far better chance of retaining the allegiance of individuals raised in homes in which both parents are Jewish than in those where one parent identifies with a different religion. Indeed, wherever Jews are a minority community, intermarriage is a major factor in the contraction of the Jewish population. How, then, does it serve Jewish group interests to silence all discussion about the relationship between intermarriage and assimilation?

This hesitance to grapple seriously with the issue of intermarriage is part of a broader phenomenon: Speaking of threats to Jewish survival has become passé. Many argue that such discussions no longer serve to rally Jews; if anything, they turn people off. Moreover, advocates of this point of view tend to argue that if Jews are disengaged, it is because of failings in our institutions. If only we had more compelling programs and wiser leaders, if only we would cater more to the desires and preferences of younger generations, we would retain larger numbers of Jews, they say.

These are serious arguments, but the reality is that while creative leaders and innovative programs aimed at young Jews have brought in some people from the periphery, large numbers of American Jews — in some age groups, the majority — still do not participate in any form of Jewish public life. Those who reject the language of crisis when describing this state of affairs in favor of an appeal to individual preferences must explain how they propose to re-create a culture of Jewish responsibility on that basis. If we want to strengthen our community amidst the prevailing individualistic culture, we had better start with straight-talk about our current condition.

The reactions to the Masa ad have exposed a series of complex issues worthy of extended conversation within our community. Rather than view the ad solely as a dragon successfully slain, we would do well to see it as an opportunity to ask ourselves some tough questions about the best ways to build Jewish social capital and draw in disengaged Jews — as a chance to converse about what we expect ourselves and our fellow Jews to contribute to Jewish life. In this season of introspection, what could be more timely for us as a community?

http://www.forward.com/articles/114911/

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