We Don't Make Peace with our Friends, After All

With the death of Benzion Netanyahu, the father of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, one article about his legacy has been shared widely. Writing in Tablet Magazine, Yossi Klein Halevy wrote of the legacy of Revisionist Zionism, the hawkish version of Zionism peddled by Vladimir Jabotinsky through to Menachem Begin through to today’s Likud party. The take-away message of Revisionist Zionism according to Halevy? “Don’t be a fool.”

Israeli slang changes frequently. But one term that has remained for decades is the word “fryer.” One of the worst things you can be in Israel is a “fryer,” a fool, someone who is taken advantage of. No wonder that the right-wing Zionists I know shared the article on Facebook almost immediately.

But there’s another side to the story. Recently I sat down at Bridgehead coffee in the Glebe with Yariv Oppenheimer, director of Peace Now in Israel. During our interview as well as at the talk he gave that evening at Temple Israel, Oppenheimer painted a bleak picture of the state of Israeli democracy. Both within Israel and via the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, the peace camp is sorely needed.

In Israel, two recent laws threaten to undermine Israeli democracy.

The Nakba law declares that any publicly-funded organization attempting to commemorate the Palestinian Nakba (the Arabic word meaning “catastrophe” that Palestinians use to describe the violence and dispossession surrounding the Palestinian exile of 1948) is liable to have its funding cut. 

The boycott law entails any Israeli calling for a boycott of settlement products being subject to a civil suit without the plaintiff having to prove damages. In response to the boycott law, Peace Now launched a campaign that quickly went viral called “sue me; I boycott settlement products.”

Talking about budget discrimination against the Arab sector and widespread racism within Israeli society, Oppenheimer said, “I think Arab Israelis are more loyal to Israel than Israel is to its Arab citizens.”

The Revisionist Zionist philosophy that motivated Netanyahu’s father, and today Netanyahu and most of his governing coalition, warns Israelis away from playing the fool. Revisionist Zionists surely were not troubled over the military administration Israel extended to its Arab minority citizens until it was repealed in 1966, they do not lose sleep over Israel’s 45-year-long occupation of 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank that continues apace, nor are they distressed by the apparent erosion of the free-speech principles integral to Israeli democracy.

It’s all good and fine to retreat behind fortress Israel, shutting our ears to Palestinian suffering at the hands of Israel’s occupation policies, and chalking up anti-democratic legislation as necessary for security. But we must realize that there is a great moral and strategic cost to not questioning why Palestinian commemoration of their history is a threat, and why Israelis challenging their country’s settlement policies with their wallets needs to be stifled.

One of the most striking things Oppenheimer relayed in his public talk was when he regularly meets with Israeli teens. Most of the teens he talks with no longer have a concept of the Green Line, no longer seem to realize that the West Bank is an entirely separate entity from democratic Israel. Neither do these teens seem troubled by the occupation. “If we have the power to enforce an occupation, we should,” these teens tell him. He responds by telling them that one day they may very well find themselves studying abroad and sitting next to a Palestinian student at university. “What are you going to tell that Palestinian student?” he asks them. “How will you possibly be able to defend the occupation then?” 

That morning, I asked Oppenheimer a question I often hear from the right: how can Israel contemplate a withdrawal from the West Bank given the ongoing rocket fire following the 2005 pullout from Gaza? 

Oppenheimer’s answer was this. He rightly pointed out that both Israeli-Arab peace treaties -- one with Egypt in 1979 and another with Jordan in 1994 -- have held. Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza was a unilateral move; unaccompanied by a peace treaty. To this I would add that neither was it a full withdrawal: while Israel did remove its ground forces and all 7,000 settlers, Israel still maintains a naval blockade and control over airspace as well as control over borders.

In Hebrew, Yariv means adversary, opponent, or “he will fight.” It’s an odd name perhaps for someone who leads the main grassroots peace camp movement in Israel. But we shouldn’t forget that Peace Now was founded by Israeli army officers in the late 1970s, officers who understood the value of security as well as the urgency of making peace with their country’s adversaries. You don’t make peace with your friends, after all.

**A version of this appeared in this week's Ottawa Jewish Bulletin**

Talking about Israel with our Grandmothers

At my Passover seder, an elderly relative who suffers from senility was having a particularly foggy day.  Though I’ve known him all my life, my grandmother -- sharp as a tack into her nineties, realized the man had forgotten me. “Mira is a professor who tries to get the world to love Israel,” my Babba said. Though she delivered it with a wink, it was an obvious jab at what she sees as my dovishness when it comes to the question of Israel.

Seems that grandmothers come up a lot nowadays when Jews discuss Israel. University of Toronto’s Jenny Peto caused a small firestorm in 2010 with her controversial MA thesis on Holocaust Education which she dedicated to her late grandmother. If she were alive today, Peto wrote, “she would be right there with me protesting against Israeli apartheid.” (Soon after, her incensed brother sought to correct that view of their grandmother in a letter to the National Post.)

Grandmothers also figure in the opening sentence of Peter Beinart’s new book, The Crisis of Zionism. “I wrote this book because of my grandmother, who made me a Zionist.” Beinart sees Zionism undergoing an intense moral and political crisis, and seeks to do everything he can to keep his beloved Jewish and democratic Israel afloat. By this he means push for a two-state solution and an end to the highly undemocratic occupation that has plagued Israel’s moral profile for forty-four years.

It’s clear to me from ongoing conversations with my grandmother -- and with many other Jews -- that the Jewish community needs to think seriously about what it means to care about Israel.

What does it mean to feel attached to a country of which one may not be a citizen, but whose anthem one sings at community events, whose birthday one celebrates in Diaspora communities, which receives a portion of funds raised through annual Jewish Federation campaigns, to which we send our kids on Birthright, and where we may visit, live or mark our kids’ Bar or Bat Mitzvah? 

If we truly and deeply care about Israel, do we remain silent in the face of shocking actions of brutality like the recent video clip of the IDF soldier slamming his M-16 rifle into the face of a Danish protestor? Do we attempt to silence criticism of Israeli policy with accusation of anti-Semitism? Do we decide to sign up for Israel advocacy training, so we can act as Likud government spokespeople?

Or do we chart a different path, one where we wrestle with Israel, and think deeply about the implications of its current policies for Israelis and for Palestinians? Most importantly, do we recognize that the officer who beat the Danish protestor is a symptom of the bigger problem of occupation?

I have heard people say that we shouldn’t “air our dirty laundry,” that the subject of Israel is a family affair. Surely our synagogues and other Jewish organizations represent the metaphorical family living room. But when it comes to those venues, voices seeking to pierce the silence are few and far between. 

Beinart writes that if Israel ceased to be a liberal democratic Jewish state, “it would be one of the greatest tragedies of my life.” To that end, he calls for a boycott of settlement products from what he calls “non-democratic Israel.”

Beinart has a public voice: author of wide-circulation books, editor of the new Daily Beast blog Open Zion, and writer of a much-discussed 2010 article in the New York Review of Books where he demanded that the American Jewish establishment be more responsive to the moral sensibilities of younger Jews who are being forced to “check their liberalism at the door” when it comes to engaging Israel.

Not all of us enjoy a regular public platform. But each of us can decide when to speak out, how to vote, to whom to donate money, and how to talk with our kids. Those who care about Israel’s future might reconsider where their charitable efforts go. Groups like Ameinu, the New Israel Fund, Peace Now, Rabbis for Human Rights, and, in the U.S., J Street, are desperately digging in the avalanche for the keys to a democratic and Jewish Israel, keys that some days are being camouflaged by the dirt of occupation. The alternatives -- a “one-state solution” or perpetual occupation -- are simply not tenable if one wants Israel to remain both democratic and Jewish.

There’s a reason why young progressive and liberal writers on Israel -- from the radical left to the Zionist left -- invoke their grandmothers. In different ways, these young Jews are trying to honour their ancestors’ legacy. Beinart concludes, “Either our generation will help Israel reconcile its democratic and Zionist ideals, or we will make our children choose between them.”

**A version of this column is appearing in this week's Ottawa Jewish Bulletin**