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During the Vietnam War, protesters were occasionally admonished with a sentiment that also appeared on bumper stickers: “America, Love It or Leave It.” In other words, to disagree with the government meant that you did not love your country and should get out. There’s a parallel here that could be applied to the present-day conflict between Israel and Palestine.
People who criticize the treatment of Palestinians by the Israeli government are often charged with being anti-Semitic. In other words, to criticize Israeli policy with regard to Palestine is tantamount to being against all Jews. The desired result is to silence criticism. Like the intolerance of the “America, Love It or Leave It” bumper stickers, critics of Israel are told that criticism of the occupation is somehow synonymous with hating Jewish people, which is just more illogical reasoning. There are Jews, however, who do not believe such criticism is necessarily anti-Semitic. A recent book, “Wrestling Zion,” edited by Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon, provides progressive Jewish-American responses to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Following are some key excerpts from that book:
“The fact is that nothing there is possible unless Jews and Arabs work together in peace for the benefit of their common Holy Land. It must be our endeavor first to convince ourselves and then to convince others that Jews and Arabs, Moslems, Christians, and Jews have each as much right there, no more and no less, than the other: equal rights and equal privileges and equal duties. “
– From a letter, from Rabbi Judah L. Magnes to Felix Warburg, September 13, 1929.
“Had Arafat agreed to these arrangements of the Oslo agreement the Palestinians would have permanently locked in place many of the worst aspects of the very occupation they were trying to bring to an end.”
– From an article by journalist Seth Ackerman.
“It is not American Jewish criticism that has created sympathy for the Palestinians. It is the suppression of millions of Palestinians over thirty-five years that has done it. It is a pity that the Israeli government has never expressed regret for the harm it has done the Palestinians during the occupation. An ounce of compassion would go a long way.”
– From an article by poet Adrienne Rich in which she quotes Emeritus Harvard Hillel Rabbi Ben-Zion Gold.
“While contempt and hatred for Jews and fanatical violence intensifies, Palestinians are treated as Jews were treated during the l930s: Their lives devalued and diminished, they are deprived of dignity, work, safety. Without a homeland, Palestinians are refugees, and in greater Israel limited to ghettos within barrier walls - locked in and locked out.”
– From an article by author and Professor Blanche Wiesen Cook.
“Suffice it to reiterate here that, through this text (Balfour Declaration) a government, that of Great Britain, delegated a land, Palestine, over which it exercised no sovereignty in either law or fact, for the benefit of a religious community, the Jews, then almost wholly living outside of that land.”
– From an article written by author Ammiel Alcalay.
“We do not think political attacks on France imply hatred of French people, or that attacks on the ‘axis of evil’ implies hatred of Iranians, Iraqis, and Koreans. Only with ‘Israel’ and ‘Jews’ is this crude equation being made, and it is not being made by Israel’s critics or even Israel’s haters; it is being made by its apologists, and by the blowhards and bullies of the right.”
– From an article by Professor Philip Green.
“If one cannot voice an objection to violence done by the Israeli State without attracting the charge of anti-Semitism, then the charge works to circumscribe the publicly acceptable domain of speech. It also works to immunize Israeli violence against critique by refusing to countenance the integrity of the claims made against that violence. One is threatened with the label, ‘anti-Semitic,’ in the same way that within the United States, to oppose the most recent U.S. wars earns one the label of ‘traitor,’ or ‘terrorist-sympathizer’ or indeed, ‘treasonous.’ These are threats with profound psychological consequence. They seek to control political behavior by imposing unbearable, stigmatized modes of identification which most people will want more than anything to avoid.”
– From an article by Professor Judith Butler.
In Section V of the book, entitled “The Law of Return: A Forum” in footnote 14 of an article entitled “We Renounce Israel Rights,” 45 Jews write disclaiming their right to citizenship in Israel because:
1) Palestinians who had been forced into fleeing from their native land were excluded from this right;
2) Israel’s policy towards Palestinians was barbaric; 3) they disagreed that Zionist emigration to Israel was a solution for Diaspora Jews, anti-Semitism, or racism; and 4) they wished to express solidarity for those working for an Israel open to people without restrictions based on racial, cultural, or ethnic origins.
Journalist and professor of journalism Alisa Solomon describe a student conference of Jewish college-student reporters on the theme of covering Palestine. She described how, after a trip to Gaza and the West Bank, she wrote of interviewing Palestinian farmers whose crops had been uprooted by the Israeli Defense Forces, villages whose water was repeatedly turned off by nearby Jewish settlers, and so on. The response of the students astonished her. “Far from all, but many of the students who spoke up went on the attack.” They disagreed with her giving voice to the Palestinian experience. She countered by telling the students that as journalists they had an obligation to hear and report a story even if they didn’t agree with it. They rebutted “by stressing that as Jewish journalists, their first obligation is to report on Israeli experience and by asserting (like Ehud Barak not long before) that Palestinians lie by nature and thus are unworthy sources for their stories. Solomon warns that today, “American Zionism is doing nothing less than diminishing the polymorphous, exuberant and myriad ways of being Jewish in America. Quite deliberately.”
The book closes with a conversation between several of the contributing authors. Editor Michael Lerner comments that “Jews and non-Jews are fundamentally equally valuable, that Palestinian life is just as important as Jewish life.”
The book affirmed for me my usual response to those who question my patriotism when I criticize the government of the United States: “I consider it not only permissible but obligatory to criticize U.S. policy the same as I once criticized my children when I believed they were engaging in reprehensible behavior. That certainly was no indication that I didn’t love my children. On the contrary, it proved I did.”
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