December 26, 2016--Our Israeli Allies

I'm prepared again to be accused of being a self-hating Jew.

But because of the explosion of rhetoric about the U.N. Security Council vote to condemn Israel's "settlement" practices, especially the outrage expressed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu--much of it directed at the United States in the person of Barack Obama--impels me to speak out.

For all intents and purposes the annexation of the occupied territories by building homes there for Israeli Jews is against international law. But it proceeds apace with more than 500,000 Jews now living, or settled, on the West Bank, which was seized from Jordanian Palestinians in 1967 as the result of Israel winning the Six-Day War.

Under pressure from the United States, though periodically and grudgingly dragged into negotiations with Palestinian representatives in an effort to forge a lasting peace that can only come after there is agreement about the details of what a two-state "solution" would look like, Israeli leaders for decades have pretended to be interested but never, except briefly, suspended the bulldozing, the building, or the resettlement of Jews on the Islamic West Bank. They have done this in the guise of securing their borders but in reality to change the facts on the ground. To in this way assert that the West Bank is a part of Greater Israel.

And until this past week, whenever the issue of a two-state solution or to criticize the settlement practices has come before the U.N. Security Council, the United States, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, has used its veto power to block the resolutions.

That is, until Friday when Obama with less than a month remaining in his presidency finally unburdened himself, allowing his true feelings to show, by directing U.N. ambassador Samantha Power to abstain, effectively allowing the condemnation of Israel to proceed. The resolution promptly passed, 14-0.

This led immediately to a storm of criticism. First from swaggering president-elect Donald Trump who postured via a tweet that things "will be different January 20th" and then later from Netanyahu who said he can't wait for Trump to become president.

What an unholy alliance.

They were quickly joined by members of Congress from both parties. It seems that unflinching support for the Israeli government is the one issue about which members of both parties reflexively agree. All say that Israel is not just the only democracy in the Middle East but that they are also America's "most important ally." Not just in the region but globally.

I've heard this my entire life from family-member Zionists who made excuses for the abuses of one Israeli government after another, and, of course, all of the serious media across the ideological spectrum, since 1948, have done much the same thing--from the New York Times to Fox News.

What jumped out at me this time was the claim about Israel being our most important ally.

Israel is not that.

It is possible to see them as an undesirable ally.  And that the nature of our alliance does not contribute to peace or security for either them or us.

In fact, Israel may be our most dangerous ally.

Every time another Palestinian village is leveled or another apartment house constructed on the West Bank, Israel makes new enemies for themselves and for us. Images of settlement activity engenders hatred and serves to help recruit terrorists worldwide.

Israel's very existence contributes to similar sentiments and though Israel does have a legal and moral right to a homeland, even nationhood, but not when it insists on continuing to expand its borders by encroaching on the territories of neighboring countries. And, of course, resists any possibility of the Palestinians having a state of their own.

These practices have contributed to the Middle East becoming the most dangerous region in the world, one that has sucked us into various wars and acts of aggression with hundreds of thousands on all sides killed and maimed and which have cost us $3.0 to $5.0 trillion borrowed dollars.

What that is positive have we received from our alliance with Israel?

I have been thinking about this for quite a while and cannot think of much that is worth the cost. At most, they share intelligence with us gathered by Mossad, their excellent intelligence agency. And some high-tech U.S. businesses have formed useful partnerships with Israeli firms. Not enough in either case to justify the geopolitical price our uncritical relationship with them has imposed upon us.

Of course there is the long historical memory of the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazi that saw more than six million European Jews exterminated. This does without question put the Jewish people in a special category of concern and reparation. But that commitment should be, originally was, to the Jewish people, not the regressive governments of Israel. It is important to keep that separation in mind when thinking about the current threatening situation.

And there is more--

Part of the almost universal support for Israel by American governments and citizens also has a religious foundation.

Millennialists of all kinds from Christian apocalyptic fundamentalists to ultra-orthodox Jews who are waiting for the Messiah to apppear (in Hebrew, the Mashiach) see Israel, again Greater Israel, or as they prefer, Judea and Samaria, as playing an essential role in bringing about the End Times. It is only when all of Greater Israel is united that the conditions will be in place to begin the process of unleashing Armageddon and the Millennium.

With eyes wide open, this is the world America has been drawn into.

I am not sure it is in our best interests to rush to get entangled further. Let's see if Donald Trump can figure this out and make a deal to de-intensify matters. At the moment, considering his choice to be our ambassador to Israel, he is on a hot course to make things worse. And in the Middle East worse often means catastrophe.

March 16, 2015--Post-Racial America?

To many, the election of Barack Obama signaled that America, at long last, was becoming a post-racial society.

Lost in the euphoria was the fact that Obama lost the white vote to John McCain by 12 percentage points, 55-43, and to Mitt Romney four years later by even more, by 20 points, 59-39. And many of us feel that the personal and vitriolic disdain for Obama shown by Republican lawmakers has as much to do with his skin color as his policies, which, in truth were and are quite middle of the road. Very much including his signature program, Obamacare, a name applied to the Affordable Care Act by mocking opponents who hoped it would fail and that Obama would thereby be eternally stigmatized.

Yes, the same people resented Bill Clinton and tried to bring him down (largely because he was successful and triangulated his way to stealing much of the GOP agenda), but with Obama it has been harsher, more hate-filled.

Even among many young people--Obama's initial natural constituency--racial animus has spilled out into the headiness. Very much including overt racism by over-privledged college students enrolled in elite colleges and universities.

At the University of Oklahoma, for example, a video that went viral shows members of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity chanting racial slurs--

There will never be a nigger at SAE. There will never be a nigger at SAE. You can hang him from a tree.

Though the First Amendment will protect them, the university president, David Boren, closed down the frat house within 24 hours and at least two students were quickly expelled. SAE has deep roots in Southern racism. One of its principles calls for the restoration of Ante Bellum traditions, traditions that before the Cicil War included legalized slavery. It appears that that tradition among some is sadly still alive.

Then at even-more-elite U.C.L.A., members of the student council were caught on video recently discussing what would usually be a routine matter--the confirmation of a second-year student to the university's judicial board. A student who happened to be Jewish.

She was asked by a Student Council member--

Given that you are a Jewish student and very active in the Jewish community, how do you see yourself being able to maintain an unbiased view?

After doing her best to answer, she was asked to leave the room and for 40 minutes the council debated whether her Jewishness and affiliations with organizations such as Hillel would bias her dealing with "sensitive governance questions."

She was voted down and it wasn't until a faculty advisor intervened and more discussion ensued that a second vote was taken and she was confirmed.

Negative feelings toward Israel on liberal campuses is fueling these kinds of reactions toward Jews. A sad conflation of Jewishness and Israeli government policy.

I have had this experience and thus needed to draw a distinction between myself as a nonobservant Jew while at the same time being a harsh critic of current Israeli governmental policy.

Jews are not by definition Israelis and being Jewish does not require one to support Israeli government policy.

But such is the state of things in post-racial America.

More work needs to be done and a great deal more change is necessary for us as a people to get there.

June 10, 2014--Un-Settling: The Politics of Middle East Real Estate

If you ever for a moment thought that the Israeli government's allowing the building of "settlements" on land claimed by Palestinians is primarily to accommodate population growth, if you imagined that the recent decision by the government to permit 1,500 more housing units to be constructed deep in the West Bank and East Jerusalem was about needing additional apartments for an expanding population, think again.

It's not about living accommodations, it's about the politics of hate and real estate.

The Jewish population has been growing very slowly. Though the ultra-orthodox are having increasing numbers of children, that rest of the Jews in Israel are not growing in number.

There are at least two dimensions to this increase in the number of settlements--the orthodox, the Haredi, are messianic-minded, which means that they are preparing for the appearance of the Jewish Messiah. To them this requires that Jews come to occupy all of Greater Israel--one of the conditions for the Moshiach's appearance--and that includes all of the West Bank, all of Jerusalem, all of Judea and Samaria, the Sinai, and a good slice of current-day Iraq.

The second reason for expanding housing, politically linked to the presence of increasing numbers of aggressive Haredi, is that settlement policy is one vexing arm of the struggle between the current Israeli government and the aspirations of the Palestinian people who want a homeland, a country of their own. And, to present a balanced picture, this to extreme Palestinian  power-players means occupying much of what is currently Israel.

As evidence of the settlements political agenda is the recent move to authorize 1,500 more units in response to the emerging reconciliation between Fatah (moderate Palestinians) and the more radical Hamas, which does not recognize Israel's right to exist.

According to a recent article in the New York Times, the Israeli government was uncharacteristically honest about the new settlement policy. In the past, they would have claim it was to alleviate a housing shortage. But not this time--

By presenting the new building in the West Bank and East Jerusalem as a punishment over the newly constituted government of the Palestinians, who regard that territory as theirs for part of a future state, Israel set itself further apart from international consensus and drew criticism from foreign allies, including Britain, France, and the United States. [Italics added.]

Where we go from here is anyone's guess. Minimally, nothing much will change to alter the Israeli government's aggressive behavior until and unless the United Staes and its allies finally say enough. And act accordingly.

February 5, 2014--Boycott Israel?

When the American Studies Association late last year voted to exclude Israeli academic institutions from participating in events it sponsors, it was a blip on the academic landscape. After all, the ASA has only a few thousand members and, truth be told, who cares.

But when Secretary of State John Kerry made some relatively innocuous comments about a larger, economic boycott of Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nearly had a stroke.

Forget for the moment that Kerry was not advocating a boycott but rather referring to talk about it that he feels will grow louder if the American-sponsored peace talks between Palestinians and Israelis fail to produce even a fig leaf of results, the very fact that Netanyahu went, pardon the reference, ballistic should tell us something.

That "something" being that there is a growing movement among some Western people (Jews as well as non-Jews, which is significant) and corporations to boycott Israel if the government in Jerusalem continues to expand the occupation of the West Bank and refuses to get serious in negotiations with the Palestinians.

Netanyahu and his associates can try to ignore more local calls for a boycott (by New York Times op-ed columnist and Palestinian human rights activist, Omar Barghouti, for example) but they cannot so easily  shrug it off when the $200 billion Dutch Pension fund PGGM begins to divest itself of investments in Israel and Secretary Kerry says that unless there is serious progress on a deal the nascent boycott will be dwarfed by what will follow--in his words, a "boycott on steroids."

That's what friends are for--not to threaten (as Netanyahu sees it), but when necessary for your well-being, to tell you the unpleasant truth. And, in Kerry's case, to, by implication, imply such a boycott would be understandable. Kerry also knows how to play hardball.

So, he's not Netanyahu's best friend.

A boycott would be understandable because even reasonably objective observers are seeing comparisons between today's Israel and yesterday's South Africa.

How else to put it--with so many Palestinians forced to live behind militarized fences, allowed to enter and leave at the behest of Israeli occupiers of their territory, it feels to many to be too much like the old South African apartheid state.

And, recall, the worldwide imposition of economic sanctions ultimately brought an end to that hideous era. And, it appears, equivalent sanctions may be gaining the attention of even Iran's formally impervious "supreme leaders."

Perhaps, then, an expanding boycott of Israel may be the best and only thing that will enable the peace movement there to again assert itself.