As Palestinians and Israelis once again sat down to negotiate a long truce, if not a peace settlement, after Israel launched in early July its genocide against the besieged Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, a significant development emerged in an Israeli poll. It showed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s approval rating had plunged to 38 per cent in the last month from a high of 82. This undoubtedly will diminish his bargaining power.
This came when, for the first time in memory, American Jews published on July 23 a half-page advertisement in The New York Times that reproduced a letter signed by 50 survivors of the Nazi genocide and 287 descendants that was headlined: “Jewish survivors and descendants of survivors and victims of Nazi genocide unequivocally condemn the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza.” This advertisement heralded an unprecedented gesture from within the influential American Jewish community. It presumedly prompted Philip Weiss, founder and editor of Mondoweiss.net, a liberal Jewish website, to conclude in an article that the power of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), the pro-Israel lobby, is “ebbing” because “Gaza has dealt it another blow.” Weiss continued: “Young Jews are openly challenging the Jewish establishment, and mark my word, within a year we are going to see cover stories in national magazines about the Jewish political revolution, featuring inspiring young Jews like Jacob Ari Labendz and Cecile Surasky and Michael Berg and Naomi Dann of Jewish Voice for Peace.”
The Jewish survivors and descendants also condemned “the ongoing [Israeli] occupation and colonisation of historic Palestine and the United States for providing Israel with the funding to carry out the attack, and western states more generally for using their diplomatic muscle to protect Israel from condemnation”. Their letter further underlined, “Genocide begins with the silence of the world,” adding they are “alarmed by the extreme, racist dehumanisation of Palestinians in Israeli society, which has reached a fever-pitch.” The authors of the letter finally urged that they all must “bring about an end to all forms of racism, including the ongoing genocide of Palestinian people [and] full economic, cultural and academic boycott of Israel.”
The following day, The New York Times published an opinion piece by Antony Lerman, a former director of the London Institute for Jewish Policy Research, who maintained that “liberal Zionists are at a crossroads” since everything they stood for “is now in doubt”. The present Israeli mindset, he went on, “blocks any chance Israel might have to become a full-fledged liberal-democratic state, and offers the Palestinians no path to national self-determination, no justice for their expulsion in 1948, nor the occupation and the denial of their rights. I came to see the notion that liberal Zionism might reverse, or even just restrain, this nationalist juggernaut as fanciful.”
Lerman’s conclusion: “In the repressive one-state reality of today’s Israel, which Mr Netanyahu clearly wishes to make permanent, we need a joint Israeli-Palestinian movement to attain those rights and the full equality they imply. Only such a movement can lay the groundwork for the necessary compromises that will allow the two peoples’ national cultures to flourish. The liberal Zionist intelligentsia should embrace this challenge, acknowledge the demise of their brand, and use their formidable explanatory skills to build support for it.”
Another university professor in Atlanta writing in The New York Times highlighted “the contemporary manifestations of anti-Semitism, particularly in Europe.” Deborah E. Lipstadt, professor of moderate Jewish history and Holocaust studies at Emory University, wrote this month that “until now, my answer has been an unequivocal ‘no’.” She pointed out that when there is an outbreak of anti-Semitism today, she reports “officials condemn it”. But then she wondered whether she was “too sanguine” enumerating several anti-Jewish manifestations in Berlin, Paris and Rome. She thought, “it would be simple to link all this outrage to events in Gaza. Yet, she continued, “It is language, after all, that’s at the heart of the ubiquitous slippage from anger at Israeli military action to hatred of Jews.”
Her conclusion: “Jews are worrying. It is time for those who value a free, democratic, open, multicultural and enlightened society to do so, too. This is not another Holocaust, but it’s bad enough.”
What is peculiar about all my citations is that none have impressed the fact that the Jewish people have to compel Israeli leaders to abandon their negative policies and try to live in peace with their neighbours, Palestinians, Arabs or others elsewhere. For example, it would be a step in the right direction if Netanyahu would declare tomorrow morning that Israel would recognise a Palestinian state on the 1967 armistice lines, much as the Arabs have recommended in the Arab Peace Initiative proposed in 2002, that is, 12 years ago! If he will not do it, it is time for Israelis to have a new government if they want to live in peace in the region.
George S. Hishmeh is a Washington-based columnist. He can be contacted at ghishmeh@gulfnews.com
