Opinion | Columnists
Liberal Jews find a new voice
It seems like there's no end to it. When US President Barack Obama recently tried to stare down Israel over its policy of colonising Palestinian land, insisting on a freeze in the expansion of already existing colonies, we know who blinked first.
- Fawaz Turki, Special to Gulf News
- Published: 00:00 October 24, 2009
The US backed off from what appeared to be the sensible stance to embrace at the outset, namely that Israel cannot have it both ways — it cannot at once engage Palestinians in peace negotiations and remain in defiance of the rules, traditions and procedures of international law, including the Geneva Conventions, that bar an occupying power from colonising territory it has occupied during military conflict.
Moreover, the US voted against the Goldstone Report, commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council, which examined war crimes committed by Israel during its three-week brutal war in Gaza launched in December 2008, charging its combat soldiers with resorting to disproportionate force aimed at the entire population, not just Hamas fighters, and with the use of phosphorous munitions that wreaked havoc on civilians unable to go anywhere to escape harm.
The US government even went out of its way to cajole Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian National Authority, to delay — effectively, drop — his endorsement of the report, triggering a storm of criticism from Palestinians and Arabs everywhere, who levelled all manner of epithets at the Palestinian leader. That the hapless Abbas backed off later attests to the vehemence of the criticism, including unusually harsh criticism from within his own party.
After Obama was elected president, and certainly after he addressed Arabs and Muslims in an upbeat speech in Cairo in June, where he spoke of "Palestinian humiliation", political commentators across the Middle East were hopeful. To be sure, they were not naive enough to think that there was going to be a tectonic shift in American foreign policy in their part of the world, but they were convinced that the new president would move that policy into a more even-handed direction, and above all have the gumption to stand up to Israel's long-entrenched culture of impunity and laissez-faire entitlement that has prevailed for decades.
As these recent events attest, however, we were wrong.
That shift in policy will not come about so long as the pro-Israel lobby, in particular the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), is not curbed. It is now recognised, at long last, by a broad spectrum of the American Jewish community that Aipac has inhibited open debate on Capitol Hill and become an obstacle to peace in the Middle East, as it continues to propound the fraudulent notion that anyone who disagrees with Israel's practices, regardless of their egregious nature, is providing ammunition for anti-Semites and all manner of dastardly critics who seek "Israel's destruction".
Well, guess who is now opposing Aipac's efforts? Nearly half the members of the six-million-strong Jewish community in the US, who have become increasingly impatient with how this brazen lobbying group has all these years single-handedly frustrated attempts to find solutions to the conflict. Traditionally progressive, and sympathetic to Palestinian statehood, they are demanding that US-Israel relations be debated anew, and that American Jews should re-examine where American and Israeli interests diverge. Certainly, the horrors of the war that Israel unleashed against Gazans last year pained many liberal Jews.
Misgivings
The New York Times columnist Roger Cohn, for example, wrote of how he was "shamed" by Israel's actions there. Naomi Kline, a prominent Jewish writer and commentator, came out for boycott, divestment and even sanctions against Israel. At the Toronto International Film Festival in September, most of the signatories to a declaration opposing the festival's association with the Israeli consulate and a city-to-city programme featuring Tel Aviv, were North American Jews. Even devoted friends of Israel have begun to express misgivings.
When Israeli leaders, for example, defied Obama's call for a freeze on colony growth — and Obama ultimately capitulated — these leaders were secure in the knowledge that Aipac, backed by traditional leaders in the Jewish community, would lobby on their behalf, making sure that they would in the end have their way. After all, hasn't it always been like that?
Well it would appear that there's a new kid on the bock, outflanking this powerful group that, in a way, has defined American foreign policy in the Middle East — to everybody's detriment.
"They call themselves J Street, liberal Jewish lobbyists who represent that other half of the Jewish community", Danny Silverman, a journalist friend told me the other day. "Look ‘em up".
I did. In a long cover story in The Nation this week, called ‘American Jews Rethink Israel', the authors, Adam Horrowitz and Philip Weiss, who trace the origins of progressive Jews' alienation with the now hackneyed posture of Israel-right-or-wrong, write: "J Street is trying to position itself so that it is the only game in town for liberal Jews, affording Jewish advocates for the two-state solution the big political tent they've been lacking to this point". J Street will be holding its national conference where, in the words of thinker and activist Rabbi Eric Yoffie, who will speak there: "[We will] have a broad and generous definition of what constitutes pro-Israel".
It's about time that American Jews figure out for themselves whether Israel needs fighter jets from the US, with which to kill Palestinian and Lebanese civilians, more than it does peace with its neighbours.
Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.
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