Israel, human rights and the silence of [most] American Jews

REALISTIC DOVE

Candid, constructive commentary on Israel, the Arab-Israeli conflict, America’s Middle East policies and their domestic political context.

Israel, human rights and the silence of [most] American Jews

Those who empathize with the plight of Palestinians under occupation are often puzzled by American Jews’ silence in the face of Palestinian suffering, especially when the suffering results from Israeli actions that much of the world deems to be human rights abuses. A whole industry exists to monitor and refute human rights NGOs whenever they set their signs on Israel. Worse, even mentioning Palestinian misfortunes is suspect in some quarters, as Barack Obama has learned.

But it is not just the pro-Israel right wingers and centrists who either defend or mutely accept the way Israelis treat their neighbours. It is also my camp, the liberals who crave compromise. Some of us marched against the Vietnam war and even against the Iraq war. Some of us give money to help victims in Darfur and shelters for battered women here at home. If we are within the Jewish communal tent, not enough of us can bring ourselves to say very much out loud about the battering of an entire people.

I include myself in this category, guilty as charged, looking back on my own reactions to sundry allegations of Israel’s human rights violations. I think it is important for American Jews who support Israel to stop suppressing their moral instincts, to stop ignoring what is best within themselves, and to start finding a language, a vocabulary to acknowledge the horrors of occupation. But before providing a prescription, we need the diagnosis.

“It blows my mind that my Jewish brothers and sisters, who are with me on Darfur, who were with me on South Africa, can’t bend themselves to deal with injustice to the Palestinians,” said a Protestant minister whom I interviewed for my book. “I just never understood it.”

One simple answer is that American Jews who agree with the minister on most issues view the realities of the region through an entirely different prism, which reflects Israelis’ sense of permanent vulnerability and their fierce determination not to be vulnerable.

American Jews who see themselves as ethical and caring can usually find reasonable explanations and justifications for Israeli activities that the world abhors. The core argument is the same one used in Israel: what appears to be cruel and unjust behaviour is usually an unfortunate, unavoidable consequence of The Situation that Israelis and Arabs are mired in. Plus, we have a rooting interest in information and arguments that prop up our craving to believe in the Israelis, while others have a rooting interest in finding ways to blame them. The raw truth is usually the victim.

Object to the missiles that repeatedly killed non-combatants in Gaza or Lebanon, and you will be assured that Israel has done everything possible to avoid collateral damage, Israel has been much more careful about shedding innocent blood than its adversaries, Israel is perfectly within its rights under the Geneva Convention to go after enemy combatants that hide among civilians. Besides, you will be told, we can’t be armchair moralists judging Israelis by western, humanistic standards; they live in a tough neighbourhood where there is no respect for the weak…Look at how the Lebanese army shelled Palestinian refugee camps unmercifully a few months ago in their fight with militant jihadists..I’ve made those arguments.

Object to anything that al-Jazeera decides to transform into yet another symbol of Zionist bestiality, and eventually you are likely to hear evidence that the truth has been distorted by Palestinian propagandists and their media allies. When Israel assaulted the West Bank village of Jenin during the second Intifadeh,

• at first the international media alleged that hundreds of innocent Palestinians had been massacred and
  
• that bulldozers had crushed houses and
• destroyed property for no discernible reason.

Later, media and some human rights groups changed their story; they said there had been no massacre, and most of the Palestinian casualties were armed combatants. The truth was probably somewhere in between, but you could almost hear the sounds of Israel’s friends around the world, including me, breathing sighs of relief.

Another reason for our silence is that the world unfairly singles out Israel for its abuses, real or imagined, and ignores even worse behaviour by, say, the armies of central Africa or Sri Lanka or the security services of every Arab country. To liberals with a connection to Israel, the intense, remarkably single-minded focus on the Jewish state by the United Nations Human Rights Council and a large swath of the blogosphere is so suspicious, and so offensive, that we feel reluctant to add to the clamour of its avowed enemies. We certainly don’t want to give rhetorical fodder to those who blithely call for tearing down the “apartheid wall” –not changing the route of the security barrier, but obliterating the whole thing– and refuse to acknowledge that Israelis need protection from those who want to blow themselves up in shopping malls and discos.

But sometimes, what we read about or see on our T.V. screens makes it impossible to counter allegations of indefensible Israeli behaviour. When that happens, something besides logic and evidence kicks in, we are left with little except a panicky unwillingness to believe Israelis are behaving as badly as people claim. So, we look the other way if we come across titbits like the following, from a B’Tselem press release this past December:

A survey conducted by the Israeli military and published by leading Israeli daily, Yedioth Ahronoth, found that a quarter of soldiers serving at checkpoints in the West Bank perpetrated or witnessed abuse of Palestinians. In response, B’Tselem, said that the numbers are shocking, but not surprising. The organization commends the military for initiating the survey, but states that physical and verbal abuse of Palestinians by soldiers, particularly at checkpoints, has long become routine. In spite of official condemnations, the military does not do enough to ensure accountability and to deter soldiers from engaging in such behaviour.

According to B’Tselem, most soldiers who harm Palestinians are never held accountable. Law enforcement authorities place numerous obstacles on Palestinians who try to complain against security forces personnel and only a small minority of complaints result in charges against those responsible for abuse.

"There must be a reasonable explanation,” we try to tell ourselves. “There must be something terribly wrong with the way this story is being told, even if it is the Israeli army itself that is telling it.”

We try to tell ourselves, “there must be a reasonable explanation for the extra-judicial, execution-style killings of four Palestinians sitting in a car in Bethlehem,” as reported today by Richard Silverstein in Tikun Olam. “Ok, it’s suspicious, but war is hell.”

“There must have been a very good, sound military reason for bombing that power plant in Gaza and inflicting darkness for half a day, for months, on a civilian population,” we try to tell ourselves, even though reasonable people called it a clear violation of international law. “And even if it is a war crime,” we tell ourselves, “why say anything? Israel has enough problems, enough enemies…”

After awhile, though, the evidence accumulates and becomes too troubling to be discarded or wished away. The anguished testimony of the Israeli soldiers in “Breaking the Silence” makes a mockery of willfull denial. “Breaking the Silence” is an explicitly non-political organization that just lets those who have served in the territories speak for themselves about the level of brutality and wanton cruelty. They are not refuseniks. Most of them return to the IDF every year for reserve duty. They want their own society to wake up to what Israeli soldiers are being asked to do, and, sadly, what some of them eagerly volunteer to do. Read what they have to say on the group’s web site.

When the pro-Israel left in this country confronts what Palestinians are subjected to, the standard response is that there is no such thing as a benign occupation. Unless and until there is a political solution, we assert, morally grounded Israeli soldiers and border police will be forced into circumstances where it is difficult and sometimes impossible to be humane, it is difficult and sometimes impossible to be good. I use that argument, all the time, and it is true…up to a point.

But lately, I am tired of relying upon it as the exclusive answer. The problem is not merely that the brutality and humiliation inflicted on Palestinians is an inevitable consequence of occupation; the problem is that is just plain WRONG. Why can’t we say that? What happened to our moral compass?

Yes, those who focus only on Israeli behaviour without putting it into context, without appreciating that steps must be taken to protect Israel’s borders, have also lost their moral compass. Yes, the Palestinians have in many ways brought this situation upon themselves [e.g, there used to be a vocal peace camp in Israel; it was shattered by the second Palestinian Intifadeh. Now, the prospect of Hamas rockets being hurled at Tel Aviv from the West Bank has made it even harder to put that doveish, Humpty Dumpty back together again]. But once that context is affirmed, the reasons for decrying the brutality and humiliation become compelling and the rationalizations for saying nothing become very hollow.

Rabbis for Human Rights is an Israeli organization that does not hesitate to call some Israeli policies morally reprehensible and contrary to Torah values. A few American rabbis, like Arthur Waskow, are associated with it. But thus far, its message has been unheard or barely noticed, let alone echoed, in the organized American Jewish community.

The unwillingness of American Jews to say, simply, “This is wrong!” has many consequences, in addition to the way it contributes to the corrosion of souls and hearts. What should also be of concern to the mainstream Jewish community is that the silence contributes to the alienation of Jewish college students and young adults from anything remotely connected to Israel. That does not matter to the anti-Zionists who believe the whole enterprise of Israel is illegitimate, but it should matter to anyone who wants to help fix what is broken in Israel.

Yes, speaking out forcefully against Israeli policies and behaviours will add fuel to the fiery rhetoric of those who don’t want the Jewish state to exist. That is undeniable; it is a problem and I have never come up with a solution to it. But a greater risk is that an entire generation of Diaspora Jews will want nothing more to do with Israel. There are a host of Israeli organizations trying their best to monitor and change unjust Israeli policies; instead of connecting our young people with those groups and showing there is a way to be pro-Israel and true to their ideals and values, much of the community either derides or shuns those groups. That is why the message from Israelis like Rabbi David Froman, one of the more articulate activists in Rabbis for Human Rights, is decidedly Zionist. After deriding those in the UK and elsewhere who want to boycott Israeli academics, he tells us:

And yet, we know in our hearts of hearts that while such boycotts are not justified on the universal plain of comparisons, there are more than a few elements of truth in what these hypocrites claim. For one segment of the population over whom we have responsibility, we have abrogated any semblance of democracy. It is especially painful that some in South Africa have joined the fray of those who boycott us, because of that country’s moral authority - given how blacks suffered years of unspeakable oppression under white minority rule.

But how would one describe certain things we are doing in the West Bank that have virtually no security value - checkpoints between Palestinian villages and within Palestinians cities; separate roads for Palestinians; thousands of Palestinians arrested under administrative detention; confiscation of Palestinian property for illegal Jewish settlements; a twisted route for Israel’s security barrier that separates Palestinians from their lands and divides villages in half; administrative home demolitions; covert protection for Jewish settlers who harass Palestinians tending their agricultural fields; preventing Israelis who marry Palestinians from living in Israel; banning Palestinians from swimming in natural springs along the Dead Sea? And yet, despite the above, Israel’s present situation is still not politically analogous to South Africa’s history of discrimination; and so, we confidently argue that “apartheid” is not an appropriate term to apply to what we are doing in the West Bank. But what term would one choose to define a privileged protectionism for a few thousand Jews in the West Bank over a separate and unequal existence for over two million Palestinians?

…We have shamed ourselves as a Jewish state that sought to educate the world that we would not be a nation like other nations and that the Zionist enterprise would fashion a society based on a prophetic vision of social justice. Instead, we have created a moral morass - and, if it takes the hypocritical self-righteousness of some foreign pseudo-intellectuals and pig-headed unionists to open our eyes and alter this unacceptable reality, then something positive will ultimately be served.

Something positive will be served if Americans who want both Israel and Palestine to thrive, side by side, stop keeping their eyes closed and their mouths shut.

Topics: Palestinians, Israel, Zionism, American Jews, Far left, Israeli occupation, Gaza Strip
By Dan Fleshler | March 28, 2008