Dennis Fox’s Weblog

In a piece in Haaretz on factionalization among Israel’s religious parties, Avirama Golan touches on the Jewish State/democratic state issue:

This rift is reflected in a key issue that has sharpened since the disengagement, but whose roots go back to Gush Emunim: respect for the state. Growing segments of the religious community are abandoning the idea of a democratic state. Young settlement residents despise the idea, rabbis split hairs to explain that western democracy is a flawed product, and political leaders declare that a state that has betrayed its citizens does not deserve their loyalty.

One more sign of things to come.

Technorati Tags: Israel, religious right, Jewish State, theocracy

I submitted this to the Brookline TAB in response to Skip Sesling’s attack on my column last week about Joel Kovel’s talk. The editor declined to publish it. So here it is.

——————

Skip Sesling’s op-ed last week recycles old personal attacks about my efforts to make sense of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Unfortunately, he’s not alone. Some of the comments under my recent column on the TAB website also resort to character assassination, stereotype, and smug sefl-assurance. I don’t mind criticism of what I actually write, but it seems unfair to attack me for things I didn’t say and don’t believe.

Sesling is right about one thing, though. I no longer think the state of Israel can ever be both officially Jewish and substantively democratic. This painful awareness, which began to nag at me even when I was a young Zionist four decades ago, was central to my seminar at Ben Gurion University in 2006, when my students described with much regret their country’s inability to make democracy meaningful.

It is a very big leap, however, from my pessimism about Israeli democracy to Sesling’s absurd insistence that “Fox rejects all that is Jewish, which he calls self-enlightenment.” There is nothing in my column or anything else I’ve ever written to justify this mocking claim.

There is also nothing to justify his statement that “the one state Fox advocates is strictly a Muslim Arab state.” I would object to any outcome legitimizing official supremacy of one religion over another or denying the legitimate rights of Israelis and Palestinians alike.

The most mystifying part of Sesling’s column is his accusation that “Fox finds that Israel, Jews, Judaism and Zionism are all one entity.” He continues: “He should know better. Instead, he chooses to paint everyone who does not agree with his anti-Israel views as evil.”

Sesling has it backwards here: It is the Zionist movement that insistently conflates Israel, Jews, Judaism, and Zionism, as illustrated by the title of his own op-ed, “Anti-Zionism equals Anti-Semitism.” Zionists repeatedly claim that the Israeli state is an essential aspect of Judaism and that its actions are carried out in the name of the Jewish people. Indeed, Israel, which defines itself as the nation of the Jews, does not even recognize “Israeli” as a nationality.

In contrast, it is Israel’s critics, especially perhaps its Jewish critics, who insist that Jewishness and Zionism are not identical. Whether Jewish identity, Jewish culture, and Jewish safety are inextricably linked to Jewish statehood is an important question deserving discussion rather than dogma.

Sesling is also wrong when he says I paint those who disagree with me as evil. I rarely ascribe evil motivation or character just because someone sees the world differently than I do. Perhaps reflecting my training in social psychology, generally I think most people try to do the right thing given their understanding of the world and the circumstances in which they find themselves. The problem is that sometimes we’re wrong.

Our motives and assumptions do not always stem from the sources we ascribe them to. We find ways to justify beliefs and actions that neutral outsiders might think are erroneous or simplistic. We may distort or overlook even the meaning of words to avoid obvious inconsistencies. How else could we call Israel democratic despite the Jewish state’s refusal to endorse the principle of legal equality for all citizens? What does democracy mean, as my Israeli students understood, if not that?

And, sometimes, even decent motivations and accurate perceptons lead to bad outcomes. Israel’s domination of Palestinians is a bad outcome.

Although Sesling’s personal nastiness is annoying, more troubling is that his latest historical account is no more accurate than his similar attacks several years ago. That’s when he ridiculed my proposal that Brookline residents with differing viewpoints meet to talk things over. If you don’t share Sesling’s distaste for learning about alternative views, you can easily find lots of sources. One place to start is this Q&A: html://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/publish/101conflict.shtml.

My column two weeks ago urged Brookline residents to hear what Joel Kovel had to say. From what I could tell, few who protested outside the Coolidge Corner Theatre bothered to go inside. That did not surprise me. But Kovel’s articles are available online. You might find his analysis interesting. You might not. But please — don’t let Skip Sesling tell you what’s worth thinking about.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Joel Kovel, Skip Sesling, social psychology, Zionism

I spent my time on the subway to this afternoon’s demonstration in opposition to the closure of Gaza reading about the toppling of the wall separating Gaza’s Rafah from Egypt’s Rafah. This has gotten a lot of coverage since Hamas, apparently, decided to unilaterally devise a way for Gaza’s increasingly desperate residents to shop for food, clothing, cement, and other necessities. As Jeff Halper, director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, put it in a widely distributed piece yesterday,

I am not a Palestinian; I am not one of the oppressed.  I only hope I can use my privilege in an effective way in order to redeem the gift the people of Gaza have given all of us: the realization that the people do have power and can prevail even in the face of overwhelming power.

Despite the euphoria of Gaza’s residents at their unexpected opportunity to stock up, there’s no guarantee the breach in the wall will remain. Israel might act at any moment to stop the shopping spree, as might Egyptian officials if they feel threats of destabilization at home. Under the circumstances, opposition to Israel’s closure policy remains important.

Today’s small demonstration, sponsored by Jews for Human Rights in Gaza, ewish Voice For Peace Boston, and the Boston Coalition for Palestinian Rights, took place outside the Israeli Consulate in cold downtown Boston.

We tried to bring medical and other supplies inside, to give to the consulate to pass along.

Didn’t get very far.

So we just kept walking around.

Listened to a pep-talk.

Held signs.

Another demonstration is planned for Saturday across the river in Harvard Square. This will be in solidarity with Saturday’s planned convoy of Israeli peace activists and others who will try to bring in carloads of supplies through Gaza’s Erez Crossing.

Technorati Tags: Gaza, Rafah, Israel, Jewish Voice for Peace, Palestine

Today’s Brookline TAB has a couple of letters to the editor blasting my op-ed last week about Joel Kovel’s planned talk at the Coolidge Corner Theatre. There’s also a column by former Brookline Selectman Skip Sesling, which has begun to generate its own comments, all supportive of him so far, on the TAB website.

I may submit a longer response to Sesling to the TAB, or at least a letter to the editor, but in the meantime I can point you to this response I wrote after he blasted me a few years ago on the same topic. His latest effort shows he continues to misquote and misinterpret at will.

The most mystifying part of his response is this accusation:

Fox finds that Israel, Jews, Judaism and Zionism are all one entity. He should know better. Instead, he chooses to paint everyone who does not agree with his anti-Israel views as evil.

Sesling has it backwards here: It is the Zionist movement that conflates Israel, Jews, Judaism, and Zionism, as in the title of his own op-ed: “Anti-Zionism equals Anti-Semitism.” Hard-core Zionists repeatedly insist that the Israeli state is an inherent and essential aspect of Judaism. Israel repeatedly claims its actions are carried out “in the name of the Jewish people.” It is those of us who no longer consider ourselves Zionists who believe Jewishness and Zionism are, or should be, two different things.

More another time.

Technorati Tags: Skip Sesling, Israel, Joel Kovel, Zionism

Joel Kovel’s talk last night at Brookline’s Coolidge Corner Theatre mostly filled the 200+ person upper theater. Seeing his name and the title of his book on the marquee - Overcoming Zionism - must have really annoyed many town residents here in the heart of town.The entrance is to the right of the marquee. Those of us heading to the ticket booth passed by a couple of dozen anti-Kovel protestors from a variety of local Zionist groups, with signs and leaflets.Prominent were Chuck Morse, a local conservative talk-show host and perennial Republican candidate trying to unseat Barney Frank. In his blog last week he blasted Kovel, and me in passing.Also on hand was HIllel Stavis, who shows up everywhere trying to drown out anti-Zionists. Here he has just a still camera, but usually he’s videotaping. So far as I could tell, the protesters complaining about Kovel didn’t bother to come inside to hear what he had to say and maybe even engage in some dialogue. I heard one say he wouldn’t give the organizers $5. So the audience that did come inside was mostly at least sympathetic to some of Kovel’s views and in many cases in full agreement.One questioner at the end asked a few pointed questions, which for the most part Kovel had dealt with in some detail in his book.Throughout Kovel’s talk I could hear the woman behind me  tsk-tsking and muttering under her breath to the man. I was hoping she’d ask questions, but they just left when the Q&A began.Kovel’s presentation covered a lot of ground, but didn’t get into some of the earlier parts of his book where he dissects ancient Jewish history and Biblical texts. I think these portions of the book most likely accounted for some of the intense criticism he’s received. Worth reading.During the talk, I sat with an old friend from my Zionist days. She noted that there was a time we would have been outside with the protesters instead. People do change. Reaching out still makes sense.

Technorati Tags: Chuck Morse, Hillel Stavis, Israel, Joel Kovel, one-state solution, Overcoming Zionism, Palestine, Zionism

My posting the other day about Joel Kovel’s impending talk in Brookline, Massachusetts, generated several emails, all but one from appreciative friends. Two critical readers responded on the website of the Brookline TAB, where my op-ed was posted. Rather than repeat all the TAB comments, you can read them here.

The primary theme running through the comments is that, as history shows, Jews need a state of their own to be safe. On the TAB site, Steven Feinstein puts it this way:

Zionism is essentially “affirmative action” for the Jewish people. After centuries of persecution in Arab countries, and pogroms and then the holocaust in Europe, the Jewish people need and deserve a country of their own…This might seem unjust to some, but it is necessary and just, given the circumstances.

I don’t think the treatment Jews received in Arab countries is really comparable to European pogroms and the Holocaust, but even if it were true, that does not mean the Jews “deserve” a country of their own. Zionism developed as one of several historical options, and in hindsight it doesn’t look to me like the right option. By moving to the US instead of to Palestine, for example, my European grandparents set in motion generations of Jewish Americans living reasonably equal and even relatively charmed lives. The safety of American Jews is a lot more certain than the safety of Israeli Jews, especially if Israel remains a Jewish-priority state at Palestinian expense. Ultimately, improved equality and safety — for Jews as well as for non-Jews — depends more on reinforcing equality and democracy throughout the world and opening all states to those victimized elsewhere than on creating isolating pockets offering false hopes of protection.

The affirmative action analogy has some initial appeal, but it fails because statehood and affirmative action have different purposes. Affirmative action, designed in its clumsy way to counter individual discrimination and institutional inequality, is not applicable to national sovereignty. Groups have no fundamental right to statehood the way individuals have a right to equality. Indeed, thousands of national and tribal societies around the world lack states. I’d be glad to see every cultural and geographic group have more sovereignty and to eliminate the nation-state entirely, but in the meantime those who run the nation-state system will not tolerate thousands of mini-states. I’m not sure Jews have more claim to a state than the Kurds, the Druze, the Iroquois, or any other group.

Feinstein continues:

…you know very well that the Arab world has much more serious problems than the State of Israel. Arab leaders, just like countless dictators and despots before them, point their fingers at the Jews to distract their long-suffering people from their real problems. And you are complicit. More people die from malnutrition in the world each year than have ever lived in Palestine. Is dismantling the State of Israel the most pressing concern…?

Again, I think this is beside the point. That Israel is not the primary source of global oppression does not let its supporters off the hook. Unlike most other countries in this category, Israel claims to be a democracy, thus raising the standard, and its actions are made possible by US tax dollars. My own interest in this issue stems as well from my Jewish identity, which makes me recoil when Israel does things I disapprove of “in the name of the Jewish people.”

Palestinian victims may be outnumbered by victims elsewhere in the world, but victims are victims. At a time when Israel’s closure of the Gaza checkpoints causes hunger and tragedy for hundreds of thousands of civilians, it seems to me immoral to minimize the pain as well as the responsibility.

The second TAB commenter, Cheryl Mavrikos, ends with this:

Those who share your point of view have unfortunately learned very little from history and utterly fail to understand the political dynamics of the Arab world. What is more tragic is that those who view the conflict one-dimensionally proselytize as “political awareness” that which basically amounts to a personal failure of character.

Mavrikos attributes disagreement to either failure to understand or failure of character. Our differences seem to me instead to reflect  different priorities. For all these commenters on my posting, the priority is what is best for the Jewish people. I understand that urge, but my priority is to do what justice requires, taking into account both universally applicable principles and an effort to balance individual circumstances.

Jewish suffering cannot justify oppressing Palestinians. I do think intense need requires solutions. No group of people should be dispensable. But the solution cannot ultimately mean a state for every group, especially states where non-preferred groups are subjected to institutional discrimination and repression. I’m not yet persuaded a single state for Israelis and Palestinians will ever become possible, but I am persuaded that any state based on supremacy of one group over another does not deserve support.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Joel Kovel, one-state solution, Overcoming Zionism, Palestine, two-state solution, Zionism

Op-Ed in Today’s Brookline TAB, titled “Is Brookline Ready to Rethink Israel-Palestine?”
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Here in Brookline we love controversy. From Town Meeting to the weekly TAB to school classrooms, we disagree publicly, and usually respectfully enough, about issues large and small — parking rules and sidewalk snow, high-stakes testing and racial profiling, presidential power and the war in Iraq. Next Tuesday, though, the town’s tolerance will be tested when Joel Kovel challenges conventional thinking about Brookline’s one undebatable topic: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Kovel, a former psychiatrist, is both an academic and an activist. A Bard College professor of social studies, he was the New York Green Party’s senatorial candidate in 1998 and lost his bid to be the Greens’ 2000 presidential candidate to Ralph Nader. He writes frequently in journals that Brookline’s liberal and left-of-liberal residents are likely to read. During his Boston visit he’ll speak elsewhere about topics such as ecosocialism.

It’s Kovel’s new book, however, that’s aroused the pro-Israel forces’ ire. In Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine, Kovel explores in dizzying detail a broad array of themes certain to discomfort Israel’s supporters. His appearance will likely raise the same tired objections facing Mazin Qumsiyeh, who spoke at Brookline High School last September despite frantic efforts to pressure school officials to ban him.

Kovel’s critics did briefly persuade the University of Michigan Press to stop distributing his book, which is published by Pluto Press, a small publisher in the United Kingdom. Michigan soon backed down and resumed distribution, but Kovel’s critics have not given up. One of the things I learned during the years I wrote a regular TAB column was the lengths to which some of Israel’s supporters will go to keep the public ignorant about Middle East realities.

I like to think I was a bit more open-minded when I was a teenage Zionist myself. According to the left-humanist Zionism I had internalized, Israel’s manifestly unjust policies toward its own Arab citizens, obvious even before the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, would someday give way to a humanist, socialist society in which Jews and Arabs would live as equals. At least that’s what I thought when I moved to Israel for what I intended to be the rest of my life.

When I returned to the US in 1973 I was no longer a Zionist. Some combination of growing political awareness, nagging logical questions, and personal transformation had turned me away from what had been the primary focus of my life. But actively rejecting the very rationale for a Jewish state was just too big a leap.

In 2002, my TAB column addressed the questionable arrest a year earlier of Amer Jubran during a Coolidge Corner protest against Israel Independence Day. For a while I tread cautiously and somewhat inconsistently. I tried to spark discussion in Brookline while catching up on the political landscape and then, in two visits to Israel and the West Bank, the physical and personal landscape. My explorations, which included re-connecting with old friends and meeting Israeli and Palestinian students, professors, activists, and others, confirmed my long-time suspicion that Israel’s identity as a Jewish state — at Palestinian expense — fails the test of justice.

Despite its sharp clarity, Joel Kovel’s book was not an easy read. His careful critique of just about everything the Zionist movement taught me four decades ago was painfully direct. Although neither Brookline Booksmith nor the Brookline Public Library carries the book despite the attention it’s received, several essays on his website provide a good sense of Kovel’s position. Kovel will talk about the book on January 22 at 7 pm, unless his critics pressure the Coolidge Corner Theatre to cancel.

Kovel addresses the dilemma of liberal and left Zionists who still imagine, as I no longer can, that a Jewish-but-democratic state is possible. Along the way he enumerates universal principles of justice to support his thesis that Zionism’s logic could only lead to a state built on inequality and expulsion. Dropping my own Zionist identity meant rejecting the position that what matters most is what’s good for the Jews. Along with Kovel and a growing number of other Jewish Americans willing to rethink long-held assumptions, it seems clear to me today that justice is the appropriate bottom line.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Overcoming Zionism, one-state solution, Palestine, Joel Kovel, Zionism

It’s been a while since posting here, mostly because of other priorities, but also because my blogging software tells me this in my 500th entry since beginning to blog in 2004 and I figured I should say something more or less profound. Nothing profound occurs to me, though, so I’ll just mark the passage and move on, as inconsistently as usual.

In the past week or so I’ve added a dozen galleries of this year’s images to my photo site. Collections range from the Boston Sabeel Conference, Zionist counterprotest, and local anti-war rallies to less political subjects, including people, abstracts and macros, hummingbirds, and travel to Colorado, Vancouver and Denman Islands, and even Niagara Falls.

And these ants:

Technorati Tags: ants, photography

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is quoted in Haaretz again on the Israeli-Palestinian future:

“The choice, both 60 years ago and today, is between a Jewish state on part of the Land of Israel and a binational state on all of the Land of Israel,” the prime minister continued. “That is the choice we are faced with today — the existence of two nation-states, Israel and Palestine, in the Land of Israel.”

It looks like the momentum toward a quicker pace of negotiations will continue as Israel looks to celebrate its 60th anniversary this spring. Olmert refers to the one-state/two-state issue as a “choice,” but I doubt he really intends it that way. Combined with his comment last week about the risk of Israel becoming an apartheid state, however, the real question is whether or not Israel effectively killed the two-state option by its decades-long creation of all those facts on the ground.

At a talk last week by Boston-area Workmen’s Circle members who had toured Israel and the West Bank, one participant noted that although activists they met with insisted Palestinian opinion had shifted away from the two-state option, polls showed continued support for it. He took this as a sign of hope for a workable two states. I wonder, though, just what the polls mean.

My suspicion is that most Palestinians, especially older ones, would accept a two-state solution if the Palestinian state was viable and if it met the clear bottom-line Palestinian concerns: Israel’s return to the pre-1967 border (including in Jerusalem), the removal of Jewish settlements, East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital, and recognition of the Palestinian right of return even if not that many acted on the right. If negotiations lead to this outcome, I suspect most Palestinians will accept it. Thus the polls.

On the other hand, if negotiations leave intact the settlement blocs, the separation wall and bypass roads, and all the rest of those on-the-ground facts, if East Jerusalem is sealed off from the West Bank, if Israel continues to reject responsibility for the Nakba, then my guess is Palestinian support plummets and the two-state solution becomes merely a temporary stop-gap rather than a sustainable peace.

I’d like to see polling tease apart these different scenarios.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Olmert, Palestine, Nakba, one-state solution, two-state solution, Workmen’s Circle

Another proposal I’m involved in is for the August conference of the American Psychological Association. Since I’m mostly outside institutionalized academia these days, I don’t often go to APA, but this summer’s conference will be right here in Boston. With a few friends certain to show up, doing a session together might even be fun.

Thomas Teo, Isaac Prilleltensky, and I are proposing a Conversation Hour on the topic Critical Psychology Issues. Instead of a formal panel to read prepared papers, the conversation format is designed to generate discussion with whoever shows up. Here’s our proposal:

Critical psychology has generated an increasing number of books, journals, conferences, and other components of academic respectability. However, despite a general critique of mainstream psychology and a concern for social justice, it remains difficult to define critical psychology by consensus and to identify the principles its various approaches share. Two participants in this conversation hour — Dennis Fox and Isaac Prilleltensky — have just co-edited (with Stephanie Austin) the second edition of Critical Psychology: An Introduction; and Thomas Teo has recently published a book on the history and theory of the critique of psychology.

From these vantage points, the participants seek to raise and discuss a number of questions, including the following:

(a) Allegiances: Are critical psychologists primarily psychologists interested in theoretical rigor, advocating political goals only because they happen to be compatible with critical theory? Or, are we motivated by sources outside psychology such as Marxism, feminism, or anarchism and are we primarily activists interested in social change, using psychology’s theory and methods only when they happen to coincide with our politics?

(b) Methods: Should critical psychologists use traditional positivist methods to expose inequality and injustice and foster political and institutional reform, or should we reject methods that strengthen mainstream claims to legitimacy? Are qualitative methods more appropriate for critical psychology?

(c) Legitimacy: Should critical psychologists claim special expertise as psychologists to advocate social change, or does rejecting positivist methods reduce our rationale for doing so?

(d) Moral relativism: Can we advocate politically preferred values such as equality and empowerment or must we abandon all value preferences as culturally determined?

(e) Audience, style, and diversity: In our writing, conferencing, and teaching can we escape the conventional boundaries of academic life or should we adhere to academic norms? Is it at all important to answer these questions?

The three of us bring to this conversation hour a variety of perspectives on these and other issues within critical and radical psychology. I’ve worked with Isaac Prilleltensky, now Dean of the School of Education at the University of Miami, for about 15 years. Together we co-edited the first edition of Critical Psychology: An Introduction in 1997 and, as noted above, we’re now working on the second edition with Stephanie Austin, a former student of both Isaac and Thomas. We also co-founded RadPsyNet (Radical Psychology Network) in 1993 and have worked on a number of other projects. Thomas Teo is a professor at York University in Toronto, in the History and Theory of Psychology section. His 2005 book is The Critique of Psychology: From Kant to Postcolonial Theory. He is also writing a key chapter for our new critical psychology book describing the development of, and trends within, critical psychology.

The new edition of Critical Psychology, to be published in 2009, will address more directly the dilemmas critical psychologists confront. For my own approach to some of these issues, see my website.

Technorati Tags: American Psychological Association, critical psychology, Isaac Prilleltensky, positivism, social psychology, Stephanie Austin, Thomas Teo, RadPsyNet

In September I noted here a planned academic conference in Connecticut next March on Israeli/Palestinian “Pathways to Peace.” I also described my hesitations about its focus, which seems much in line with the  book Planting Hatred, Sowing Pain: The Psychology of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict by Moises F. Salinas, which I reviewed here.

Despite my cautions, I tried to arouse interest in collaborating on a panel discussion on any of several relevant issues. No luck. But in the end I decided to submit a presentation proposal on my own. Here’s the proposal. Reflecting several themes I’ve touched on previously, it’s titled “Academic Objectivity, Political Neutrality, and Other Barriers to Israeli-Palestinian Reconciliation”.

It is not self-evident that academic research can help resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A traditional academic stance often promises more than it delivers. Conventional norms highlight approaches adaptable to status quo requirements while relegating to the sidelines scholarship that challenges underlying assumptions. Efforts to extend boundaries are routinely dismissed as impractical or irrelevant.

Norms demanding the appearance of objectivity mask the passion that drives researchers into contentous fields to begin with while over-emphasizing rock-no-boats approaches. They also reinforce the ideological belief that significant social problems derive from poor data rather than conflicting values and access to power. The combination of academic objectivity, political neutrality, and the language and styles of even-handed mediation and dialogue should be treated cautiously precisely because it is so powerful. When it gets things wrong, the damage can be significant.

In this paper I will apply these considerations to various approaches to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For example, although this conference’s Call for Proposals “encourage[s] researchers from all sides of the conflict to send their proposals,” the primary sponsors all seek a two-state solution representing what many consider to be an international consensus. it is not clear if this underlying goal will be open to reassessment.

Similarly, assuming an equivalence of perception and victimization, depoliticized models based on neutrality-based negotiation, mediation, and dialogue often discount appropriate external standards. Approaching issues initially as a neutral can help identify complex issues for further exploration, but a primary research goal should be to sort through complexity as a means of assessing responsibility. That does not mean taking sides. It does mean using reasonable principles and standards regardless of which side benefits more. Scholarship that reinforces inaccurate perceptions is unlikely to lead to stable outcomes.

I’ll let you know if they accept the proposal.

Technorati Tags: academic objectivity, dialogue, Israel, Moises Salinas, Palestine, Planting Hatred, Sowing Pain, Reconciliation, social psychology, Zionism

Ehud Olmert’s much-discussed comment after the Annapolis conference was reported this way in The Guardian:

Israel’s prime minister issued a rare warning yesterday that his nation risked being compared to apartheid-era South Africa if it failed to agree an independent state for the Palestinians. In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, Ehud Olmert said Israel was “finished” if it forced the Palestinians into a struggle for equal rights.

If the two-state solution collapsed, he said, Israel would “face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, and as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished”. Israel’s supporters abroad would quickly turn against such a state, he said.

Whether the terminology of apartheid is applicable to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in occupied territories as well as inside Israel has become an increasingly intense issue. I noted here last month the Boston Sabeel Conference on that very theme. What strikes as potentially useful about Olmert’s comment is that it will now be harder for Israel’s Jewish-community supporters to attack anyone who uses the term as an anti-Semite. Ehud Olmert is no Jimmy Carter.

Olmert went on to say this about the role of those Jewish supporters:

“The Jewish organisations, which were our power base in America, will be the first to come out against us because they will say they cannot support a state that does not support democracy and equal voting rights for all its residents,” he said.
 

Maybe so. Israel institutionalization of apartheid-like policies would make many American Jews uncomfortable, and for some might have an Emperor-has-no-clothes effect. Others, though, would no doubt buy into the expected new line: Israel’s Jewish character and its role as haven for persecuted Jews worldwide are more important than democracy and equality. That’s already the line of people like Benny Morris, and the more Jews feel put-upon, the more likely many of them will turn toward hard-nosed tribalism.

A few nights ago I went to a report-back session from a Workmen’s Circle delegation to Israel and the West Bank last summer. I know a few of the people who went, and was curious to hear more about their experiences. Here in Brookline, many WC members are in either Brit Tzedek, which advocates a two-state solution partially on the grounds that this is what’s best for Israel, or Jewish Voice for Peace, which is open to a one-state solution or any other solution that yields justice (I belong to JVP). The tone of much of the discussion was two-state focused, with some people pushing the Geneva Accord.

A few years ago I still thought a two-state solution with a viable Palestinian state was possible, even if unlikely. Since then, partly as a result of my two visits to the region where I could see for myself the impact of four decades of Israel’s “facts on the ground,” and as the Separation Wall added a new level of concreteness to institutionalizing those facts, it’s become clear to me that a viable Palestinian state is no longer possible. Israel’s effort over four decades to make that impossible has succeeded.

So Olmert’s warning seems to me to be a couple of decades too late.

Technorati Tags: apartheid, Israel, Olmert, Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, Workmen’s Circle

In a new posting on Subtopia, a fascinating blog exploring in part architecture’s political implications, Bryan Finoki interviews Jay Isenberg, the architect/artist who organized the Dialogue on the Wall multimedia art installation at Form and Content Gallery in Minneapolis last August. I’ve described here before my experience participating in the panel discussion related to the exhibit, which included some of my photos of Israel and Palestine.

Jay says much of interest about his work, the preparation for the exhibit, the politics of architecture, and more. I like Jay and respect his efforts to tackle this difficult subject. He took on a huge project, despite opposiiton. Where I differ from him, though, is his commitment to a form of neutrality that is more likely to be a barrier than an aid to justice-based solutions.

In the interview, Jay explains his stance this way:  “My natural viewpoint is as a neutral and from there I navigate through issues.” I think this stance leads many astray. It may be useful in Jay’s own work as a mediator in architecture-related disputes, but I don’t think the dynamics work the same for more complex issues such as Israel and Palestine and even at times in more mundane but troubling settings such as divorce mediation.

Approaching issues as a neutral can help a newcomer, a mediator, a helping professional identify issues to explore further. It can help make sense of complexity. It can prevent premature commitment to one side or the other. But that initial neutral stance is less justified once there is enough information to assess responsibility for right and wrong. That does not mean taking sides. It does mean using reasonable principles or standards regardless of which side benefits more. It is both wrong and dangerous to make believe both sides have equal power and responsibility, to act as if the perceptions of the batterer are as valid as those of the battered.
Responding to a comment of mine on his blog, Bryan seems to agree that the dialogue approach is now  “seemingly such an exhausted model” and asks “how might we explore new formats for discussion?”

By coincidence, today I received a link to this  column by Tom Pessah, a young Israeli coming to terms with the knowledge that his Tel Aviv home was buit on land belonging to a Palestinian village destroyed and erased from the map at Israel’s birth. The portions most relevant to the Dialogue approach include this:

The meeting between Israeli and Palestinian college students was organized by Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salaam, a community that tries to promote coexistence between Jews and Arabs. Unlike other groups, their idea wasn’t to help us find friends, to realize the “Other” wasn’t so bad, to create a shared belief in some kind of vague peace, tame and apolitical. It was quite the opposite: they tried to push us to confront some of the hardest issues, without guaranteeing any agreement would be found.

Pessah later realizes this:

It seems much simpler to me now: Palestine/Israel isn’t mine to give; Palestinians have as much of a right to it as I do. The former inhabitants of Sumeil don’t need my big-hearted generosity: they need my recognition of the injustice committed towards them when they were expelled from their homes in 1948. They need me to remind people that most of Israel is built upon land that belonged to Palestinians. They need me to invite them and their children to come and live with us.

Like Pessah, I think even-handed approaches based on a refusal to assess responsibility cannot possibly help. Insisting that each side’s perspective is equally valid makes some sense if the goal is understanding psychological motivation. It is mostly irrelevant, though, if the goal is an outcome based even partially on justice.

In other words, it is undeniably true that people on different sides have different perspectives and assumptions. That’s one factor that extends the conflict, though not the only factor (I’m setting aside for the moment those who fully understand and accept their role as oppressors, such as Benny Morris and others — going back at least to Vladimir Jabotinsky — who accept as simply necessary Israel’s expulsion of Palestinians and the destruction of villages such as the one Pessah’s house stands upon). But the role of outsiders not inherently committed to one side or the other is not to make believe all positions are equally valid but to assess the situation based on available universal, external principles and to urge resolution based on those principles. The proper stance is not to be “pro-Israel” or “pro-Palestine” but “pro-justice.” When justice points the blame at one side more than the other, neutrality is no longer a morally acceptable stance. It simply reassures the guilty that their actions are justified.

It took me a long time to reach the point of looking at all this from the perspective of universally applicable principles of justice and fairness instead of from a primary concern with what’s best for Israel or the Jewish people — the perspective I absorbed in the 1960s as a teenage Zionist in Brooklyn. The appeals of nationalism and ethnic identity and in-group culture that seemed so obvious 40 years ago now seem unjust and regressive. If we are to get to a future where nationalist, religious, ethnic, and other tribe-like identities no longer justify oppression and repression and no longer risk plunging us all into technologically out-of-control conflagration, the only reasonable principles are universal rather than specific.

Under those principles — whether it’s international law, which I’m not a particular fan of, or simple commonsense notions that it’s wrong to bully the weak no matter how much you’ve been bullied in the past — any effort to portray Israelis and Palestinians as equal victims and perpetrators is morally wrong as well as counterproductive. Dialogue groups and similar processes that assume equivalence can only strengthen support for Israel’s intransigence, prevent justice for Palestinians, and extend the conflict into the future.

Given this, I don’t have a good answer to Bryan’s question about new formats for discussion. I understand the importance of settings and formats and fair process. But these are meaningless if justice is left out, and sometimes they hinder getting to the real issues. I’ve touched on this elsewhere, recently in criticizing Moises Salinas’s book on the psychology of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for its determined focus on low-level negotiation issues and the like rather than on history, justice, law, and other factors apparently irrelevant to those who just want people to get along. I’d like people to get along too, but the reasons they don’t are not likely to be resolved if they are smoothed over with talk, even if the talk come with smiles, hugs, and tea.

Technorati Tags: co-existence, mediation, dialogue group, international law, Israel, Jay Isenberg, Moises Salinas, Palestine, social psychology, Zionism

Kobi Snitz from Anarchists Against the Wall and Rateb Abu Rahma from the Bil’in village organizing committee have been speaking at colleges around the northeastern US for the past couple of weeks. They stayed at my place when they were in Boston, and I went with them to talks at Brandeis and Harvard. Their tour was hosted by FFIPP, Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, the group that organized the delegation I went to Israel and Palestine with almost three years ago.

As noted in my last posting, I don’t have time now to say much, but I wanted to link to Bil’in’s struggle against the Separation Wall, or fence in this case, a topic I’ve written about many times. Bil’in’s very useful website has lots of photos, video, news releases, and more. The village has been fighting the wall for years, and the weekly non-violent demonstrations have gone on for almost three years. Rateb and Kobi’s’ slideshow did a great job showing the varied creative efforts to dramatize the Wall’s impact on Palestinian life. These photos and more are on the Bil’in village website. I was glad to saw a few of my own photos there, like this one from January 2005 showing village committee members pointing out the barrier’s route just before construction started (I have many more on my photo site):

Although the tour’s primary focus wasn’t fund-raising, the Bil’in committee and Anarchists Against the Wall have huge legal bills. The village is in constant litigation against the fence in Israeli courts. Although they recently won a partial victory, there’s much more to go.

Anarchists Against the Wall has continuing legal expenses for Israelis arrested during the weekly Bil’in protests. If you can, please donate.

Technorati Tags: Anarchists Against the Wall, Bil’in, FFIPP, Israel, Palestine

It’s been busy, and things won’t really ease up until sometime next week. All I can do now is list things I haven’t had time to blog about, and throw in a few photos to replace a few thousand words.

1. Across the street from last weekend’s Sabeel Conference at Boston’s Old South Church were Zionist counter-protestors organized by the Jewish Community Relations Council and other groups. Some recognized and harangued Jeff Halper of Israel Committee Against House Demolitions when he went to see what they were up to. The guy with the camera in the second and third photos is Hillel Stavis. He was pretty obnoxious, even cutting off people on his own side, who he clearly doesn’t think know as much as he thinks he knows.

2. Inside the conference, Halper spoke, as did Noam Chomsky, Archibishop Desmond Tutu, and others. I don’t relate well to religious worldviews, but the strong opposition to Israeli occupation policy was good to see. There’s already been a lot written about the conference, so I’m not going to go into any detail.

When I have more time I will try to mull over the pragmatics of the apartheid terminology. It does seem clear that the occupation is worse than apartheid in many ways. In response to a question, Halper said Israel is “on its way to apartheid,” while others thought the term is already accurate. Halper says it may become accurate if the Annapolis peace conference formalizes a powerless Palestinian state, which seems to be the US and Israeli plan.

On a personal note, I was glad to see 8 or 9 my photos used in this display set up by the Boston Committee for Palestinian Rights:

3. The Sabeel conference’s anti-occupation agenda didn’t go far enough for another set of protestors, who I think are among those who consider any acceptance of a two-state solution to be a Zionist plot:

The cops separated the two sets of counter-protestors from each other and from the conference:

One of the Zionist protestors (I think that’s this guy’s crowd) took my picture.

4. As the conference ended, Desmond Tutu led us to the anti-Occupation demonstration organized by Jewish Voice for Peace.

4. A few minutes later, the larger anti-war demo that had rallied on the Boston Common marched around Copley Square, led by Iraq Veterans Against the War. Impressive. And sad.

Some people drew connections:

During World Series week, some drew other connections:

Technorati Tags: Boston Committee for Palestinian Rights, Desmond Tutu, Hillel Stavis, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Israel, JCRC, Jewish Voice for Peace, Palestine, Red Sox, Sabeel, Zionism

When I was in Israel last year I wrote several postings about Rahat, the Bedouin city a few miles to the north of where I was staying in Beer Sheva. Later, I described a new film by Uri Rosenwaks about the film class he taught to black Bedouin women. A really intriguing film about an aspect of Bedouin life getting just about no attention elsewhere.

Film Class will show this Sunday afternoon at the Boston Jewish Film Festival, at the great Coolidge Corner Theatre. Here’s the film’s series information:

The Film Class
Hachug Lekolnoa
Director:  Uri Rosenwaks
Country:  Israel  
Released 2006
Duration: 53 min.
Language:  Arabic / Hebrew  w/ subtitles

Director Uri Rosenwaks went to Rahat, a town in the Negev desert, to teach beginning filmmaking to a class of Afro-Bedouin women. When he learns that the Afro-Bedouins were enslaved by the white Bedouins as recently as 50 years ago, he accompanies his students on an astounding and unforgettable journey of discovery that leads back to Africa. 

Earlier on Sunday, Rosenwaks will be part of a panel discussion on Israeli film. What makes an Israeli film “Israeli”? What makes an Israeli film about Bedouin fit into a Jewish Film Festival? Should be an interesting panel.

Technorati Tags: Rahat, Bedouin, Israel, Uri Rosenwaks

Philip Weiss went to a CAMERA conference:

Yesterday CAMERA (the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) held a conference on fighting “Jewish defamers of Israel.” A couple hundred people in the basement of the Park Avenue Synagogue– that beacon to assimilationist German Jews. I found the conference enormously encouraging.

For one thing, the group was almost all older generation. I put the average age at 62. Even the snacks were out of date, all brownies and sweet muffins and cupcakes with a quarter inch of icing. This group is more out of the mainstream than I am! For another thing, I recognized these older Jews as my people. I felt comfortable with them. I had a warm reunion with an old friend from the Jewish scientific community that I went to as a boy, and we talked about antisemitism in the newspaper business. All the people in the room were Jews with a traditional sense of ethnic cohesion: Jews who feel deeply isolated from the gentile community and have little sense of the death of anti-Semitism in America. Several of the speakers had old world accents. Walt and Mearsheimer’s names were invoked again and again, from start to finish, as if they were Nazis.

This description meshes with my own experiences. Although I’ve also been noticing younger Zionists who seem as strongly and dogmatically pro-Israel as these older conference attendees, I do think more have dropped the past’s Zionist fervor. I certainly see this in my own family, most recently during a trip to New York two weeks ago for a relative’s ultra-Orthodox wedding. My extended multi-cultural family is multi-religious and multi-racial, and although the Jewish religious core’s support for Israel is unbreakable, the views of the others range completely across the spectrum. I imagine this is the audience CAMERA would like to bring back.

Weiss goes on to this:

The CAMERA people are losing and they know it. Near the end Cynthia Ozick was asked how we should go about delegitimizing the delegitimizers of the Jewish state and she sighed and said, “It’s hopeless.” …..

…
The reason It’s hopeless for the other side is that there was, in the basement of the synagogue, little to zero acknowledgement of the three great realities that are feeding Jewish post-Zionism. 1, the end of anti-Semitism. My old friend and I talked about a Jewish Daily News columnist who refused to hire Jews. That was 50 years ago. The injury is fresh. As the memories of anti-Semitism are for my parents. And they are virtually meaningless to young Americans. A panelist very briefly acknowledged this at the end, saying that Jews are so comfortable in America, how do we stir them? 2, the Israeli occupation of Arab lands and Israel’s brutal treatment of Palestinians were at no time acknowledged, but endlessly rationalized. The separate roadway system for settlers and Palestinian Arabs–rationalized. The incursion into Jenin–whitewashed. And so on. This sort of denial went on in South Africa during the campaign against apartheid. Young people don’t feel quite so defiant. 3, Not a word about Iraq. I have this feeling often in conservative Jewish gatherings. Iraq doesn’t touch them. It’s not a big deal to them, they are removed from it, they are for a hawkish policy in the Mideast and so they talk about Darfur/Sudan more than Baghdad.

Technorati Tags: anti-Semitism, CAMERA, Israel, Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, Zionism

That the planning and subsequent cancellation of last week’s OneVoice Summit and concerts in Jericho and Tel Aviv generated controversy didn’t surprise me. One Million Voices to End the Conflict describes itself as “an unprecedented mobilization of moderate voices to achieve a two state solution that fulfills the overdue aspirations of the Palestinian and Israeli people to end the occupation, to end all forms of violence, to permanently end the conflict, and achieve international recognition, respect, peace, and prosperity.” This sounds okay as far as it goes, but the carefully worded self-description seems to skip over many of the key issues. It doesn’t go far enough.

I’ve discussed here before efforts to seek peace and reconciliation based on little more than a mutual longing to end the fighting. Unfortunately, dialogue groups, neutral moderation, and similar approaches too often ignore, by explicit design, history, context, and power. Without acknowledging the fundamental imbalance in power and responsibility between Israelis and Palestinians, I just don’t see how a meaningful peace can come about.

In recent months I’ve addressed this problem in several contexts, from the Dialogue on the Wall panel discussion in Minneapolis to Moises Salinas’s book on the psychology of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to a planned March “Pathways to Peace” conference in Connecticut. These are among many examples of efforts to set up a symmetric two-party framework that imagines that the conflict and the solution are even-handed. Both sides are portrayed as equally victimized. So to end the conflict, one side gives something up, the other side gives something else up, and everyone walks away with a down-the-middle compromise.

What this framework ignores is that compromise between two sides with vastly different resources and degrees of power is bound to over-represent the interests of the stronger side. At last in the short- and medium-term, Israel can afford to be stubborn and unyielding, since the longer the conflict persists, the stronger the Israeli hold on occupied Palestine. But for those Palestinians who still seek a two-state solution, however, the pressure to settle for something, for anything, no matter how remote from justice, becomes increasingly desperate.

There’s been much written recently about public opinion in the US, for decades reliably pro-Israel, beginning to slip. The hysteria over Jimmy Carter’s book for using apartheid in the title, over Walt and Mearsheimer’s book on the Israel lobby, over Mazin Qumsiyeh’s talks around the country eventually led even to banning Desmond Tutu from a Minneapolis college, a development so ludicrous that even the ADL issued an appeal to reconsider. I’ve mentioned all these incidents in earlier postings, and there are many more.

Next week Tutu will be in Boston again, for the Sabeel conference on “the apartheid paradigm in Palestine-Israel.” I plan to attend, and am curious to see what ground is covered and how much both sides — including protesters and counter-protesters — focus on terminology versus substance. Whether Israeli policy should be called apartheid by whatever legal definitions apply, or instead merely “the equivalent” of apartheid, or “apartheid-like,” seems to me a semantic point detracting from the more important discussion of how to oppose unjust policies, whatever definition they fall under.

And next month, maybe, there’ll be the US-sponsored peace conference Condoleeza Rice is running around the world trying to drum up support for. As Neta Golan and Mohammed Khatib wrote last week,

Even the participants in the summit realize that the Israeli occupation is no longer sustainable in its current form.  If we, the peace and justice community, manage to expose this latest maneuver for what it really is, Israel could be forced into fair negotiations for the first time.

For this to happen we must mobilize immediately. It is our job to educate the rest of the world about what these talks really mean and the truth about what is happening. The writing is literally on the wall and on the ground. It took many months if not years to expose the ugly truth behind the first “generous offer.” Let’s not make that mistake again.

It’s a busy time. Lots to do.

Technorati Tags: conflict resolution, Desmond Tutu, international law, Israel, Palestine, Sabeel

Laurie Ornstein, an old friend whose song in support of Bedouin organizer Nuri El Okbi I’ve mentioned before, spent yesterday singing protest songs outside the Ministry of Education in Beer Sheva. Her one-woman action was in support of the Israeli teacher strike, a response to horrendous under-funding of Israeli schools.

Laurie teaches English in both Jewish and Bedouin schools. She has a column in today’s Haaretz, which includes this reminder of Israel’s two-tiered society”

Most Jewish-sector schools, mine included, lack sufficient classroom or office space. If teachers are to spend preparatory hours in school, they must have proper work space. Nor are there sufficient conference rooms for meeting with pupils or parents, not to mention lunchrooms.

If things are bad in the Jewish sector, they’re worse in the Arab sector. While some Bedouin pupils and teachers finally have new school buildings, many are still studying and working in crowded trailers with primitive infrastructure. I recently visited a new trailer school in Bir Hadaj, which had no running water in September. There is water now, but the toilets are still not functioning. Classes of 40 are the norm in most Bedouin schools. How can people function in such deplorable conditions?

Technology is not a luxury today. Access to information is knowledge and a window to the world. There are still many schools today lacking the infrastructure for Internet. Many Bedouin schools do not even have regular phone lines.

Given my opposition to high-stakes testing in the US, this part interests me also:

In its response to the widespread feeling that the schools aren’t doing their job, the Ministry of Education has become obsessed with assessment. In the end, the high schools are seen as little more than training institutes for Meitzav and bagrut (matriculation) exams, which now too often take precedence over teaching the subjects themselves. Under pressure, many teachers feel they have little choice but to focus on exam skills to achieve high scores. Again, in large classes, the needs of both weak and strong pupils are often not addressed, as teachers teach to mid-level. Special needs pupils are left struggling.

A related article in Hebrew, in Yidiot Ahronot, includes a couple of photos, including this.

Go, Laurie!

Technorati Tags: Bedouin, Israel, Laurie Ornstein

Committee for Open Discussion of Zionism, with letter from Howard Zinn:

The Committee for Open Discussion of Zionism arises in response to the troubling practice in the United States of suppressing alternative views on Israel/Palestine and Zionism, which is growing more desperate and severe. A major instance of this is the recent effort to force the University of Michigan Press to suppress the distribution of Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine by Professor Joel Kovel and pressuring it to cancel its contract to distribute Pluto Press in the U.S.

The suppression of discussion of Zionism occurs within the context of a broader assault on academic freedom and critical thought; it is a concentrated expression of that assault. We need only look at the tenure battles of Norman Finkelstein (DePaul) and Nadia Abu El-Haj (Barnard), the assault on books written by Mearsheimer and Walt and by former President Jimmy Carter, and the canceling of the play ‘My Name is Rachel Corrie’ by the New York Theater Workshop.

We believe that such campaigns of suppression are wrong from every angle. They fly in the face of the most cherished constitutional traditions of democracy; they deprive the American public and government of the necessary viewpoints and information to conduct a debate on what are urgent, and certainly the most contentious, issues of policy; and as a result they make impossible a rational and just policy in the Middle East; they therefore promote endless regional war and terrorism and a continuing brutal colonial policy against a displaced population. Suppression of open discussion of Zionism is bad for everyone: for Palestinians, for Jews, for the citizenry of the United States, and indeed for the whole world.

Our goal is to actively confront and expose instances of such suppression, and open a democratic debate that is long overdue.

Technorati Tags: Zionism

After my recent exposure in Minneapolis to restricting discussion about Israeli policy, it’s not surprising to read in today’s MuzzleWatch that a local university has cancelled a visit by Archbishop Desmond Tutu:

Rumors have been circulating for some time that Archbishop Desmond Tutu was banned by the University of St Thomas in Minnesota because of statements he made that some consider anti-Semitic. Now it’s official: winning the Nobel Peace Prize doesn’t protect you from charges of anti-Semitism if you criticize Israeli human rights practices. Neither, apparently, does being one of the most compelling voices for social justice in the world today, or even getting an honorary degree from and giving the commencement address at Brandeis.

As Cecilie Surasky reports,

Minneapolis/St.Paul’s City Pages just reported that members of the St Thomas Justice and Peace Studies program were thrilled when Bishop Tutu agreed to speak at the University– but administrators did a scientific survey of the Jews of Minneapolis, which included querying exactly one spokesperson for Minnesota’s Jewish Community Relations Council and several rabbis who taught in a University program– and concluded that Tutu is bad for the Jews and should therefore be barred from campus.

The university cancelled the talk after talking “to Julie Swiler, a spokeswoman for the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas”:

“I told him that I;d run across some statements that were of concern to me,” says Swiler. “In a 2002 speech in Boston, he made some comments that were especially hurtful. … I think there’s a consensus in the Jewish community that his words [during a 2002 Boston speech] were offensive.”

I briefly met Julie Swiler at the Dialogue on the Wall panel discussion when I was in Minneapolis. The presence on the panel of Swiler’s boss, JCRC director Steve Hunegs, was part of the dynamic that led the moderator to restrict discussion. It doesn’t surprise me that the JCRC would try to keep Tutu from speaking to the public.

Surasky’s MuzzleWatch goes into some detail about Tutu’s 2002’s talk and his work with Sabeel, a Christian liberation theology group based in Jerusalem. She ends with this:

The talk is notable for its philo-Semitism and its equally passionate condemnation of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land and people. For anyone who has been to the Occupied Territories, let alone lived through it, his words of condemnation are impossible to argue with. His language is challenging in part because it is imbued with the disappointment of a Christian raised to look up to Jews, and the heartache of an anti-apartheid leader who was once buoyed by passionate Jewish support. He struggles to make sense of the checkpoints, the home demolitions, the land confiscations, done by a state that says it represents the very same people.

What is clear is that he at times uses language loosely without understanding how it might hurt or offend us Jews. Does that make him an anti-Semite? Of course not. Should he be banned for using a term like “Jewish lobby” that makes many of us uncomfortable? Are you kidding?

Tutu never wavers in expressing his love of and hope for peace and security for both peoples. “Peace based on justice,” Tutu says, “is possible. We will do all we can to assist you to achieve this peace, because it is God’s dream, and you will be able to live amicably together as sisters and brothers. “

Tutu will be in Boston again later this month, when he’ll deliver the keynote address for a Sabeel conference on “The Apartheid Paradigm in Palestine-Israel: Issues of Justice and Equality.” Personally gratifying for me, beyond the event itself, is that the lobby exhibit accompanying the conference will include several of my photos. I’m glad to be of use.

Technorati Tags: Desmond Tutu, Israel, JCRC, Minneapolis, Palestine, Sabeel, Jewish Community Relations Council

Book Review of Moises F. Salinas (2007), Planting Hatred, Sowing Pain: The Psychology of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers.

—————————————-
This is an electronic version of an article published in the online journal of SPSSI, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. Citation: Dennis Fox, Can Social Psychology Depoliticize the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict? Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy (OnlineEarly Articles). doi:10.1111/j.1530-2415.2007.00130.x
—————————————-

Moises F. Salinas seeks in Planting Hatred, Sowing Pain: The Psychology of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict to outline “some of the social and psychological factors that are central to the conflict and its resolution.” The author deserves credit for bringing this sensitive subject to an undergraduate psychology audience. Perhaps unsurprisingly for such a complex conflict, though, this brief book promises somewhat more than it delivers.

After a useful introductory overview emphasizing competing historical narratives, the book’s four main chapters review research findings demonstrating the impact of stereotypes and prejudice, hate (extremism, dehumanization, and violence), pain (trauma), and hope (reconciliation and the psychology of peace). Some of the summarized research is particularly revealing of Israeli and Palestinian attitudes and perceptions, and the level is appropriate to the target audience in social psychology, Middle East studies, and similar courses. Each chapter ends with two illustrative interview transcripts, one of a Jewish Israeli, one of a Palestinian from either Israel, Gaza, or the West Bank. A brief epilogue reiterates the book’s main point: “the obstacles to achieving peace are more psychological than political.”

Despite its helpful literature review, Planting Hatred, Sowing Pain has several perplexing omissions. At the methodological level, Salinas tells us almost nothing about his “dramatic ethnographic interviews” (p. xxv). Instead of an extended description of what must have been a challenging enterprise, a single paragraph notes the “innovative methodology” and the help of “250 Palestinian and Jewish Israeli student interviewers.” Eight transcripts, varying widely in scope, method, and style, appear after the relevant chapter without explanation or assessment of interviewees’ statements, some of which are confusing, disjointed, and even shocking. Student readers accustomed to standard research reports will wonder about many details, such as whether the interviewers received course credit and what their instructions were. The author does not explain how he used these interviews to help identify his themes or whether instead they merely illustrate the traditional social psychological points he intended to make anyway. I could find no citation to a more extensive research report.

Also left hanging is the 32-page appendix, which presents the full text of the Geneva Accord, a peace agreement proposed in 2003 by prominent Palestinian and Israeli political figures without official authorization. Salinas explains that the proposal parallels similar efforts supported by “the majority of both peoples [who] agree (or at least are resigned) on the broad parameters” of “a two-state solution with borders approximating the pre-1967 armistice lines; compensation to all 1948 and 1967 Palestinian refugees, while only a smaller group of them would be allowed to return to Israel proper; [and] a joint solution for Jerusalem that will allow both sides to claim some sovereignty” (p. xiii). Instead of using this document’s many controversial specifics and omissions to demonstrate how a future reconciliation process might fare, however, Salinas does little more than point to the proposal as the basis for a solution.

A more substantive concern is that the book’s even-handed tone studiously avoids the politics behind its analysis. Some will consider this an advantage, required by academic norms demanding at least the appearance of objectivity. Sometimes, though, avowed neutrality deflects the gaze from much that is relevant. Readers should always wonder how an author’s background and commitments affect choices about what evidence to credit and what lessons to draw.

In this case, the author’s insistence that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is social psychological rather than political and that “perception is more important than reality” may reflect more than just straightforward reading of the research and traditional academic awareness of complexity. Indeed, the best clue to Salinas’s own views comes not in his endorsement of the Geneva Accord but in the book’s concluding “About the Author” page. Here we learn that the Mexican-born Salinas, who lived in Israel for several years and took part in left-Zionist peace activities before moving to the United States, was “one of fourteen young Zionist leaders worldwide to be honored with the first Herzl Awards from the World Zionist Organization [in 2004 ] … for his contributions to the Zionist movement.” At the risk of impoliteness, it is worth asking if this personal history might affect the book’s structure and conclusions. Salinas doesn’t say.

One example is the book’s shunting aside Middle East history after the brief introduction. That makes sense if one considers all perceptions equally valid or even equally invalid, or if conflict is defined as a technical problem rather than an indication of injustice and oppression, or if the proposed ahistorical process leads to a politically preferred result. It might make less sense to Ibrahim, one of Salinas’s interviewees, who says the only “really unlikely” alternative to permanent total war is that “the large countries will force Israel to sign and agree with international law.”

Salinas doesn’t tell us if Ibrahim’s appeal to an external legal standard should matter. Instead, the chapter on reconciliation emphasizes relevant but incomplete subjects: paying more attention to different negotiation and communication styles, creating more effective procedures, providing alternative cultural and educational settings, and so on. Although Salinas notes Israel’s superior negotiating power, he does not address a central issue: whether meaningful reconciliation requires acknowledging past injustice and committing one’s side to end it. It is not just the violent extremists the author criticizes who reject splitting the difference through decontextualized dialogue and then moving on.

What form reconciliation might take is particularly touchy now that Israel’s Arab citizens increasingly define themselves as Palestinian and insist that their country become a “state for all its citizens” rather than a state for the worldwide Jewish people, while Palestinian society in Gaza and the West Bank continues to fragment. Which assumptions are up for grabs? Which aren’t? A text designed to help students understand complexity should broaden exploration rather than narrow it.

The problem is not that Salinas is a Zionist activist. The problem rather is that he does not consider how his own political identity might shape his argument, a possibility very relevant to the book’s discussion of negotiation complications. Knowledgeable readers on both sides, thus, are likely to find the author’s approach frustratingly off the mark. More troubling, those less knowledgeable won’t be able to dissect Planting Hatred, Sowing Pain’s ideological underpinnings unless their instructors also assign more varied supplemental readings. Those supplements might help students recognize that Moises Salinas may be his own best example of how preexisting assumptions can shape both political and social scientific analysis.

Technorati Tags: conflict resolution, international law, Israel, academic objectivity, Palestine, social psychology, Zionism

From Apio comes links to two Italian anarchist assessments of Israel/Palestine.

1. Palestine, mon amour offers a decade of short pieces by Alfred M. Bonanno. Here are excerpts from the introduction, written in 2003, with some apparently awkward translation:

…
The ‘official’ terms of the controversy are well known. The Israelis chased the Palestinians off their land, but this happened so long ago that some of the people born in huts in the camps are now fifty years old. Ridiculous arguments between States have resulted in pieces of land being returned to people who had been driven away, but it is impossible to live on them. In Israel if you don’t work you go hungry. The colons [colonists] of the second Zionist wave got rich through the exploitation of a cheap Palestinian work force and the free use of fields in territories that should now constitute the new State of Palestine. But not only does all this fail to grasp the essence of the problem, it does not even begin to describe it. Perhaps it made sense at the time of the first popular insurrection of the people of the ‘territories’, that of the stones. Now things are moving towards an increasingly ferocious ‘Lebanisation’.
…
And so they continue to attack each other in a never-ending cycle. Each side uses the weapons they have at their disposal: the Palestinians blow themselves up with their own bombs, the Israelis bomb houses in the territories from planes. There are the pacification maps, the internal agreements, the UN guarantees and Bush’s empty rhetoric.

The problem is developing at its own pace, one that can only be grasped by someone who is familiar with such situations, and it is becoming chronic. Hatred becomes acute when one lives in conditions like the Palestinians’, with prospects like theirs, i.e., none at all. There is no hope for their children or for the future of the place where they were born…. They realize that there is nothing for them but a prospect of hatred of an enemy that imprisons, bombs and tortures. On the other side, everyone lives in fear of being blown up as they go to work, dance in a disco, lie asleep in their beds. Here again, blind hatred that sees no alternative is pushing people to demand that the government apply stronger measures. …

There is no prospect of peace in sight. The ideal solution, at least as far as all those who have the freedom of peoples at heart can see, would be generalised insurrection. In other words, an intifada starting from the Israeli people, that is capable of destroying the institutions that govern them and of proposing peace based on collaboration and mutual respect with the Palestinian people directly, without intermediaries. But for the time being this perspective is only a dream. We must prepare for the worst.

2. I’m less clear about the author of Fawda (Anarchy). It begins with a quote from Martin Buber from 1929:

“Let’s remember the way other people have treated us and how they still treat us everywhere, as foreigners, as inferiors. Let’s guard against considering what is foreign and insufficiently known as inferior! Let’s guard against doing ourselves that which was done to us.”

It ends with this:

As the supreme representative of the victims of the supreme anti-democratic horror – nazism – Israel could thus administer a symbolic capital all the more powerful because the neighboring lands are in the hands of dictatorial regimes that don’t hesitate in resorting to violence against their own populations (particularly Palestinians) when necessary. And since the state of Israel cultivated a form of democracy that would like to resemble that of ancient Greece – where the “freedom” of the citizens was based on the slavery of the helots – it was consecrated as the local representative of democracy and western reason, bulwark against the shadow of Islamism. The state of Israel can therefore cause terror to reign all around itself, firm in its super-right, proud of its super-good conscience. This does not prevent it from being condemned to practice a politics of separation at its interior and aggression at its exterior in order to survive. Meanwhile the constant reminders of the misfortunes suffered in the past by the Jews only serve as moral justifications for covering up the horrors carried out in the present. 

Objecting to my previous comment about Mazin Qumsiyeh’s appearance in Brookline, Hillel Stavis of the Boston-area David Project wondered about my use of the term “right-wing Zionist” when I didn’t describe Palestinian society as fascist. Here I touch on several related issues.

I generally use “right-wing Zionist” as a short-hand distinction from “left-wing Zionist” even though I know exceptions exist to any generalization. Still, as I see it, right-wing Zionists are those whose support for a Jewish state tends to outweigh any other political or, arguably, moral consideraton. They support policies endorsed by Israel’s more conservative nationalist and/or religious elements despite horrendous consequences for Palestinians or indeed for any other non-Jews. We could call this approach hard-core tribalism. Left-wing Zionists, on the other hand, feel bad, even guilty, that Israel’s creation, expansion, and survival hurts others. They try to balance their Jewish-state support with some concern for the victims. Maybe this could be called humanistic tribalism. At least that’s how I learned to look at it four decades ago, when I was a left-wing humanist Zionist myself.

Although they generally deny it in public, honest Zionists on both left and right often acknowledge privately, especially in Jewish-only settings, that the balancing act between Jewish and democratic statehood is unresolvable. It seems to me they are more likely to do this when they actually live in Israel than when they merely support it from afar. Those on the left feel bad about this state of affairs and, like liberals elsewhere, wander back and forth between two irreconcilable poles, unable to pick one over the other; as I’ve noted many times on this blog and elsewhere, this interplay between tribal and universal values forms the heart of Israel’s inability to reach a reasonable reconciliation with Palestinians.

Zionists on the right, on the other hand, generally don’t feel so bad. Finding it easier to simply blame Palestinians for everything, they are more willing than left-Zionists to conclude that democracy isn’t a Jewish value and that a Jewish life is worth more than any other. The distinction between these left- and right-Zionist attitudes is abundantly clear to anyone who reads Israeli newspapers, court decisions, or Benny Morris.

Stavis’s depiction of Israeli and Palestinian society is filled with inaccurate descriptions and questionable value judgments, but I’m willing enough to agree that a Hamas-led government would be far from ideal and likely repressive. Fatah, too, is no paragon of political virtue. But Stavis is clearly wrong to assume most Palestinians will happily live in a repressive theocratic anti-Jewish state. Indeed, the speaker Stavis protested the other night, Mazin Qumsiyeh, criticized both Hamas and Fatah, as did many others I met during my two recent visits to the West Bank. Hamas and Fatah may be the big guys in town, but enough independent secular democrats exist in the highly educated Palestinian society to make a real difference if a Palestinian state ever comes into existence — if the state is viable and if its citizens’ justice-based needs are met. Of course, these independent secular democrats are just as insistent as Stavis’s devils that justice counts.

The real problem for Zionists is not that Palestinians don’t care about justice and fair treatment, but that they care so much. So long as Zionists of both right and left use a tribal standard rather than a universal one, a viable Palestinian state will be impossible. Also impossible will be any chance that the conflict will end.

After CAMERA and other Zionist groups tried to block Mazin Qumsiyeh’s planned presentation at Brookline High School last Sunday night, the school forced the sponsoring group, Brookline Peaceworks, to pay for police protection in case the event drew hostile picketers. As it turned out, though, the sole Brookline rent-a-cop got to relax on the high school steps overlooking the quiet below.

Across the street, the only organized group was the one I belong to, Jewish Voice for Peace, which showed up to support Qumsiyeh’s appearance. JVPers responded to sometimes-heated questioning by opponents, only some of whom seemed interested in the answers.

Inside, some 60 people came to BHS’s Martin Luther King Room to watch the film Occupation 101 and hear Mazin talk about the occupation in general and his own one-state approach more specifically. The audience was more supportive than not, which makes sense since the event was organized by the local Peaceworks group. Those more hostile mostly remained quiet until the question-and-answer period.

Listening to the questions and comments and watching the body language, it seemed clear that some in the audience did come simply to do verbal battle. Sometimes anger was barely controlled. Others, though, seemed open to hearing what the speaker had to say. Qumsiyeh did a good job reminding people they should check things out for themselves.

I found myself wondering, not for the first time, if there’s much point trying to engage committed Zionists who already know what they think. People can change their views — I’ve certainly changed mine. But neither Mazin’s book (Sharing the Land of Canaan) and presentation nor Occupation 101 seemed aimed at Israel’s hard-core supporters. The target audience instead is those who have already begun to question officially received wisdom and who are looking for an array of views about how to deal with the problem.

One of the questioners complained they were hearing only one side. Mazin responded, in part, that there are many more than two sides, since both Israelis and Palestinians each differ among themselves on core principles. I agree with that, and think there’s value in this kind of event. But I don’t think this is the way to reach the Zionist right-wing. That’s not Mazin’s goal, and not Peacework’s either really. Maybe it’s pointless, but since Zionist organizations are still effective at influencing US policy, approaches designed to make re-thinking Zionism more palatable remain important enough to try, despite the frustrations. That’s most likely to work, I suspect, coming from Jewish groups than from those focused more broadly on the general public.

I’ve been asked to publicize this March conference. First the publicity, then my hesitations.

“Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Pathways to Peace”

March 28-30, 2008

CALL FOR PRESENTATIONS DUE NOVEMBER 30, 2007

Sponsored by:

• Central Connecticut State University
• Jewish Academic Network for Israeli-Palestinian Peace
• American Task force for Palestine
• Geneva Initiative North America

The goal of the conference will be to highlight the contribution that social scientific and humanistic research and scholarship can bring towards peace and reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians. Presentations and panels will focus on research examining the factors fueling the longest conflict of modern times, and contributions with instrumental ideas to achieve a just and equitable solution to the conflict.

The meeting will include keynote speakers, concurrent presentations and panels. We will strive to maintain a balance between Israeli, Palestinian and other U.S. and  international speakers and encourage researchers from all sides of the conflict to send their proposals.

Presentations will highlight research regarding obstacles and opportunities to the achievement of peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to) research in:

• Social and psychological factors in the conflict
• Historical, philosophical, and theological issues
• Economic factors and cooperation
• Demographic realities and solutions
• Geographic obstacles to peace
• Negotiations – Models, perceptions and strategies

Given my recent experience participating in the Dialogue on the Wall in Minneapolis, which left me feeling burned by the moderator’s acknowledged failure to treat Palestinians in the audience even-handedly, I’m proceeding cautiously. Besides, conferences based on conventional academic norms about appropriate topics and styles generally leave me frustrated and worn out; that problem is likely to be magnified when the focus is Israel and Palestine.

Another issue: The chair of the conference is Moises Salinas, a JANIP member who has written a new book called Planting Hatred, Sowing Pain: The Psychology of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. My critical review of the book will soon appear in ASAP, the online journal of SPSSI (Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues). The book, which so far has gotten positive reviews elsewhere, reflects what seems to me a narrowly focused social psychological conflict-resolution analysis, devoid of political context, that happens to match Salinas’s own position as a left-Zionist Meretz member who supports the Geneva Accord. In brief, the book emphasizes things like taking into account the different negotiating styles of Israelis and Palestinians and downplays or ignores history, justice, and law — crucial concerns also dismissed by the rabbi who moderated last month’s Minneapolis panel.

Perhaps not coincidentally, neither justice nor law appears in the conference’s list of suggested topics.

So when Salinas asked me to spread word of the conference, I asked in return if it would be open to people who do not share the two-state goal of the sponsoring organizations or who depart from mainstream perspectives in other ways. Encouragingly, he responded by saying the organizers had already said yes:

[A]s long as a paper was methodologically sound (for the discipline) and that it was an analysis of obstacles/opportunities to end the conflict (not ‘Side Bashing’), it should be welcome. We have a wide field of reviewers that espouse many points of view, but we’ll do our best to keep political views out of the reviewing process.

Salinas added that a panel on the issue of Single State/Two-State Solution would be welcome.

That’s encouraging. So right now I’m leaning toward submitting something, probably along the lines of things I’ve written about here and on my website. Several other possible panels come to mind, such as the relevance for peace and justice of Israel’s effort to be both a Jewish and a democratic state and the Palestinian divide over how much compromise is feasible or acceptable. For the moment I’m assuming political criteria won’t be imposed later, perhaps masked by overly zealous “academic” concerns. But after Minneapolis, I’m taking nothing for granted.

Technorati Tags: critical psychology, Israel, Palestine, social psychology, Zionism

Three months ago I reported on Joel Kovel’s new book, Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine. Despite my decades-long reassessment of my early Zionist assumptions, the book was an often disturbing read. It’s powerful and pointed. I’ve recommended it to several people since then.

Yesterday, Jewish Voice for Peace’s MuzzleWatch reported efforts to halt distribution of the book in the US:

Inside Higher Education reports, in A Book on Hold, that “University of Michigan Press last month halted distribution of Overcoming Zionism, which argues that the creation of Israel was a mistake and urges adoption of the “one state” solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in which Israelis and Palestinians would form a new country, without a Jewish character.”

When Bard professor Joel Kovel’s new book, Overcoming Zionism, caught the attention of the Michigan chapter of Stand With Us, a right wing Israel group, they launched a campaign to press the University of Michigan Press for “an explanation of the arrangement with Pluto Press”, the left wing UK-based publishers of the Bard book. They charge the Univ of Michigan Press with distributing over thirty “anti-Israel” and 50 “anti-American” texts.

That Stand With Us is out to censor Kovel is no surprise. That the director of the University of Michigan Press decided to pull the book because of Kovel’s alleged “hate speech” is much more disturbing. The book is strong medicine, but hate speech it’s not.

According to Kovel, writing to Dissident Veteran for Peace, which highlighted the controversy, U of M has now resumed distribution. That’s good news for American readers as well as for the independent Pluto Press, which specializes in books presenting critical takes on controversial issues. As Kovel notes, “Pluto, in particular, is very edgy about the situation, as their survival is at stake.”

I’ve mentioned before a couple of other Pluto Press books I’ve read: Alice Rothchild’s Broken Promises, Broken Dreams: Stories of Jewish and Palestinian Trauma and Resilience and Jonathan Cook’s Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State. Both, though different in focus and tone from each other as well as from Kovel, are excellent treatments of difficult issues. I’m not endorsing every point each author makes, but each deals with important issues in a serious way.

I’m now reading another Pluto book, Mazin Qumsiyeh’s Sharing the Land of Canaan: Human Rights and the Israeli-Palestinian Struggle. By coincidence, Qumsiyeh will be speaking Sunday night a few blocks from my home, at Brookline High School. At least that’s the plan. According to Peaceworks, the group sponsoring the event, members of CAMERA (the mis-named “Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America”) are trying to prevent Qumsiyeh’s appearance. So far the Superintendent of Schools is coming down on the side of free speech, but CAMERA no doubt will make its own appearance. It could be an interesting evening.

I’m writing this on my way home. It’s more than two weeks since I left Minneapolis, following the mis-named Dialogue on the Wall, for what’s becoming my annual visit to British Columbia’s Denman Island. Last week, anarchist writer and activist Ron Sakolsky interviewed me on his weekly Tree Frog Radio show, mostly about Israel’s Anarchists Against the Wall. Last Wednesday I gave a slideshow and presentation to a group of interested islanders, mostly about the weekly Bil’in protests.

By coincidence, on Tuesday and Wednesday Israel’s Supreme Court issued two decisions about the Separation Wall’s route through Bil’in’s land. The first decision — to re-route the barrier slightly and make it easier for villagers to reach their land — is being celebrated by villagers as a victory, and in many ways it is. The second decision, though — to allow Israeli settlers to remain in buildings the court had already declared illegally constructed — seems to me more typical of Israeli policy. I’ll be surprised if the first decision is fully implemented; in any case, the barrier’s incursion into the West Bank to take in Modiin Ilit and related settlements remains undisturbed.

Israel/Palestine also came up at this weekend’s Anarchist Bookfair in Victoria. Talk of occupation seemed especially natural in connection with Vancouver Island’s own indigenous occupied nations. Local anarchists took close to a hundred visiting anarchists on an anti-colonial walking tour of downtown Victoria. It was a fascinating, and heart-breaking, look at the continuing consequences of occupation in this very British-toned city.

In talking about Anarchists Against the Wall, I noted two things in particular. One was the group’s sensitivity to the needs of the Bil’in village organizers and residents who invite them to participate in the weekly protests. The other was the refreshing lack of ambivalence about Israel’s oppressive policies. Many Israelis I met during my recent visits — students, professors, friends, taxi drivers, many others, mostly on the liberal-to-left Zionist mainstream –  were fully aware of Israel’s failure to live up to its democratic pretensions but seemed incapable of moving further. Anarchists Against the Wall, on the other hand, freed of allegiance to state or religion, had a clearer awareness that injustice is something to try to eradicate rather than endure. I liked that.

The anarchists I met at the Victoria bookfair also departed in many ways from the public image of anarchy as violent chaos. Sure, there’s plenty of young tattooed people wearing black. But It’s worth getting past the image to learn what anarchists have to say about a issues central to life in society. Or at least read some of the immensely diverse literature an anarchist bookfair, or online bookseller, displays.

More another time. My plane is about to board. Time to go..

Sometimes when things go as bad as I expect I think, though don’t always say, “I told you so.” But in Minneapolis last week, a problem I had tried to prevent surfaced despite my efforts, so any satisfaction at my predictive ability was tempered by disappointment. In my brief posting immediately after the panel discussion at Form + Content Gallery, which is still showing the exhibit Dialogue on the Wall, I noted both negative and positive aspects. Right now I want to explore the negative side.

Since being asked to allow my Israel/Palestine photos to be used for the exhibit, which is designed to stimulate thinking about the Separation Wall, I had tried without success to prevent the evening discussion from becoming a Jewish-only panel. At some point maybe I’ll describe that two-month period in more detail, but suffice it to say that my immediate discomfort with being part of what gradually became a Jewish panel in a non-Jewish setting was not shared by the others. Their primary focus was broadening discussion in the Jewish community within which they were embedded, a goal I share despite believing that this public forum was not the appropriate place for it.

At a lunch meeting the day of the panel designed to prepare for the discussion, I reiterated my concerns and my interest in making sure Palestinians in the audience and their supporters would have ample time to participate. The rabbi who had been asked to moderate the event, a professor and left-Zionist with something of a reputation for rubbing people the wrong way, committed himself to making everyone feel comfortable and to moderating even-handedly. He was most concerned, though, about making sure the panel member from the Jewish Community Relations Council would not feel personally attacked by critics of Israeli policy.

The evening started well, and the three panelists and moderator kept close to our 30-minute introductory comments. That left an hour for what was described as open-ended audience discussion. There were useful comments and questions, but two problems quickly became apparent:

1. The third panel member, also a left-Zionist rabbi and a specialist in dialogue groups, announced a list of guidelines designed to prevent things from deteriorating into shouting. The goal was reasonable, but the method, which included points such as being open to learning rather debating previous positions, proved problematic for the setting.

2. The moderator began to cut off audience members whose comments stuck him as demonstrating “positions” rather than openness to mutual exploration. He only cut off, and sometimes insulted more directly, Palestinians and their supporters, including a Palestinian American lawyer who referred to international law. He did not cut off an Israeli who attended as part of his position working with the local Jewish community. He also did not cut off the panel members, who clearly came with a range of positions.

As a result of these developments, not only did those critical of Israel who spoke up rightly feel aggrieved, so did at least several members of the audience, including Jewish peace and Palestine solidarity activists, who felt intimidated by the rabbi’s abuse of power. By the time the rabbi/moderator stood behind the JCRC representative and wrapped his arms around his shoulders to shield him from verbal attack, any pretense of neutrality had long disappeared.

Beginning right after the panel and continuing for my remaining two days in Minneapolis, my time was filled talking with the Palestinian solidarity activists and panel organizers, trying to sort out what had happened and what might happen next. Maybe Thursday’s negatives can be transformed into something positive. Whether things move in that direction depends on those who remain in Minneapolis, but by the time I left it did seem there would be less formal communication among some of the various players.

But not everyone, perhaps. Later Thursday evening, the moderator/rabbi emailed  the panel members and organizers. The subject line was “an amazing evening,” but his satisfaction with the event was tempered by his acknowledgment that he “crossed a line,” though he still blamed “those whose sense of certainty on any topic is offered with a tone of distain.”

After mulling this over for a day, I responded with a long email to him and the others who were involved, suggesting that any apology should go to the people he cut off and intimidated, and that it was his own actions that were most disdainful. I said he might consider how closely he mirrored Israel’s historical insistence on setting every proposed peace-talk agenda and determining in advance just what it is Israeli-approved Palestinian participants are allowed to talk about. I had a lot more to say, some of it veering on the insulting myself, but my concern was not so much making nice with the rabbi as supporting those who had been led to believe they would be treated with respect. I was also trying, I suppose, to make up for having gotten myself into this situation in the first place. That I had predicted, warned against, and tried to prevent the final outcome, and still failed, remains personally distressing. It helps that the activists involved say they’re glad I participated despite it all, but I remain unsure about what I should have done instead.

I also remain as skeptical as ever that mainstream “dialogue” groups can really help forge a better Israeli-Palestinian future. As typically used, and as enforced during last week’s panel, dialogue assumes that responsibility and suffering are divided evenly and that the goal is to move forward without assessing whether one side’s perspective is more accurate, more defensible, more just than the other’s. This stance serves Israel’s interests, just as it serves the interests of the stronger party in many other contexts. Thursday’s Dialogue on the Wall made that abundantly clear.

Something else made clear is that the mainstream Jewish community’s exclusive focus on Israel’s needs and wants may not be as permanent as it often appears. The bulk of Thursday’s audience was from that community, although not from its most right-wing segment, and many showed verbally and through body language that they wanted more information and were willing to listen. The JCRC and other mainstream Jewish organizations do not have a completely monolithic community behind them. At the panel, it was easy to see that this mainstream but open-minded audience was dismayed by the effort to silence critics in the audience, and by the shallow rehearsed responses of the Israeli in the audience and the JCRC panelist.

Still, internal Jewish debate is somewhat beside the point to Palestinians, who understandably often tire of Jews discussing among themselves whether justice for Palestinians is a good idea.

Tonight’s Dialogue on the Wall panel discussion in Minneapolis, a primary focus of mine for the past couple of months, is now over. More than 50 people came to look at the exhibit and attend the discussion, bringing a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives. It’s too late to go into any detail, but I did want to say a couple of things briefly.

1. Jay Isenberg’s gallery exhibit at Form + Content succeeded in drawing a diverse audience and stimulating a discussion that touched on a wide variety of issues. Many of those in attendance were exposed to perspectives they might not otherwise have encountered. I like to think it was useful for the many Jewish audience members in particular to hear dissident Jewish voices.

2. For some others in attendance, most noticeably the few Palestinians and Palestine solidarity activists I met during the pre-discusision reception, I think the discussion remained frustratingly centered on Jewish concerns. That the panel was composed, in the end, of three American Jews and a Jewish moderator had a lot to do with this. The panel tried to compensate by quickly opening up discussion to the entire audience, allowing people to join the conversation to whatever degree they found comfortable, but this was not a perfect solution. I hope there is some followup to this event that brings local American Jews and Palestinians together on a more equal footing, where Palestinians have equal input on the agenda and the process.

3. No one screamed at anyone, or accused people of being anti-Semites or self-hating Jews. A couple of people told me afterwards that people in Minneapolis don’t scream all that much. Whatever the reason, I was glad to see a group of people with intense disagreements manage to sit in the same room for two hours.

4. I continue to doubt the ultimate value of dialogue for its own sake. I continue to reject the notion that every side of every conflict is equally to blame, or that a solution requires forgetting the past. Justice remains important. One way to justice is through the application of general universal values. Dialogue and understanding may be necessary, but they are clearly not sufficient.

5. It felt good to have so many people thank me afterwards for participating. I know I was the out-of-town guest, but I do believe I got to say things that wouldn’t have been addressed otherwise.

6. It felt just as good when people spoke so highly of my photos of Israel and Palestine. Made me feel like a photographer.

7. Tomorrow morning from 11 to 11:30 Central Time I will be one of several panel and gallery members interviewed on community radio station KFAI  (”Radio Without Boundaries”) on Lydia Howell’s show Catalyst: Politics and Culture (90.3 in Minneapolis, 106.7 in Saint Paul). If this interests you, you can listen online live; the station keeps these interviews available for two weeks.

Good night.

Last fall, when I visited Rahat, the Bedouin city a few minutes north of Be’er Sheva, my host was Jamal Alkirnawi, a social worker who was a guest speaker in my class on Psychology, Law, and Justice at Ben Gurion University. According to the following article, it looks like Jamal will soon be returning to Montreal, where he received his MSW:

Canada-Israel Committee - A Successful Blend of Four Identities:

Who is he? An Arab, a Bedouin, an Israeli, or a Palestinian? Jamal Alkirnawi, 28, identifies with and sees himself as all four - a bit of a head-scratcher. The education activist, working for social change in the Israeli Bedouin community, has been chosen to participate in a McGill University peace forum this fall. It is not the first time Alkirnawi has been to Canada and he is excited about the upcoming trip. He is hoping the experience will add to his mission as a “social changer” for people in the Middle East…..

Not surprisingly in a Jewish-communty forum focused on Canada-Israel relations, the article doesn’t provide much depth about reconciling conflicting identities in a society where Jewish citizens count more than everyone else. Jamal is one of many who grapple with confusing priorities and allegiances. He’s done a remarkable job, as have some other Bedouin and Palestinians I met in Israel, but the process has not been as smooth as the article reassuringly implies. I wish him well.

I flew into Minneapolis last night to participate in tonight’s panel discussion at Form + Content Gallery, where the month-long Dialogue on the Wall exhibit uses some of my Israel/Palestine photos. Fittingly, as the plane touched down I came to the final page of Alice Rothchild’s new book Broken Promises, Broken Dreams: Stories of Jewish and Palestinian Trauma and Resilience. The book was fascinating on a variety of political and personal levels.

Here’s Alice’s summary:

This book is an intimate journey grappling with the complicated historical legacy of Israel and Palestine and my relationship to these issues as a Jewish American physician, grounded by the traumas of the Holocaust and my family’s passionate love of Israel.

I begin by sharing the voices of three Jewish women, two born in the Diaspora and one in pre-1948 Palestine. The remaining chapters of this book examine the complexity of Jewish Israeli attitudes, both Ashkenazic and Sephardic, and then delve into the lives of a number of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza. Working with a health and human rights project, collaborating with Physicians for Human Rights-Israel and the Palestinian Medical Relief Society, I bring to life the voices of people mutually entwined in trauma and conflict, and explore individual examples of resilience and resistance.

The personal and political consequences of crossing lines raises troubling questions regarding US policy and the mainstream Jewish community’s insistence on standing, unquestioning, behind Israeli policy.

Through first-hand narratives, I invite the reader to engage in a different kind of conversation about Israel and Palestine, rooted in Jewish humanism, grounded in empathy and forgiveness, and coupled with an appreciation of the urgent need for political action.

Alice Rothchild is a neighbor of mine. I met her five years ago, after I started writing about local aspects of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict in my Brookline TAB column. Alice was a founder of Visions of Peace with Justice in Israel-Palestine, which has since become the Boston chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace. A medical doctor, she was instrumental in organizing a series of fact-finding and service delegations to Israel and Palestine, originally called the Jewish American Medical Project. In the past year the focus expanded. Last October I spent the first week of my ten-week visit to Israel and the West Bank with the re-named Health and Human Rights Delegation, which I described in detail on this blog.

Broken Promises, Broken Dreams is Alice’s detailed account of her own efforts to make sense of the conflict during three delegation visits. After an introductory chapter recounting the personal journey that brought her to this issue, the book explores a wide range of issues. Her approach, both descriptive and personal, makes good use of her perspective as a medical doctor concerned with the public health consequences of Israel’s occupation. Those consequences will shock readers who have paid little attention to the people ordinarily omitted from mainstream news coverage.

Alice’s concerns go much further than the purely medical, but as she describes the situation on the ground in Gaza and the West Bank, it’s clear that the devastating public health situation is completely intertwined with the political. Israel’s imposition of roadblocks, checkpoints, permits, curfews, and the other mechanisms of occupation make ordinary life impossible. Alice doesn’t shy away from discussing Israel’s rationale for the Separation Wall and everything that goes with it, but she make it clear that the humiliation, disruption, and even deaths of innocents go well beyond any legitimate security concerns.

On a personal level, I was glad to see Alice’s descriptions of people I met and places I visited during my own delegation visit. It’s good to see people persisting, despite everything.

At tonight’s panel discussion, which I hope will draw an audience from across the political spectrum, I will recommend Broken Promises, Broken Dreams  to those who want to get past assumptions and stereotypes unquestioned for far too long. If you want to explore these issues for yourself, join the next Health and Human Rights Delegation. And if you’d like to bring Alice Rothchild to your community to speak about the book, see her website.

Architect Magazine has a short piece on Form + Content’s Dialogue on the Wall exhibit. I hadn’t realized before that the exhibit’s preparation had begun with a different concept:

When Minnesota architect Jay H. Isenberg was planning the architectural installation “Dialogue on the Wall,” the Palestinian crisis loomed as a two-sided affair—Israel on one side, Palestine on the other. Isenberg conceived the show as a 10-foot tall concrete wall, and he hoped through artistic narrative, multimedia productions, and performance art (accomplished with help from his artist wife, Lynda Monick-Isenberg), to come to terms with the powerful nature of a wall as divisive force. The concept was relatively simple for representing a region so inflamed: The gallery would be split into two spaces, with the voice and story of each group on its own side.

Then a clash among Palestinians in Gaza added a third dynamic. Isenberg shifted from symmetry and the “equal presentation of views” to an asymmetrical setup in which the wall becomes a dividing line between cacophony and contemplation, regardless of one’s point of view. “Design always changes,” he says. “It becomes a collage of both sides intermingled.”

Barriers, whether built by the Chinese, dedicated to the emperor Hadrian, or considered to block illegal immigration in the American Southwest, are paradoxical, Isenberg argues. They create likable serpentine patterns. “Visually, if you pull out the political connotation, these things in the landscape are quite beautiful,” he says.

I’ll find out when I see the exhibit on Thursday if the projection of my photos on one side of the wall from three projectors is part of the “cacophony” side. That would make sense. The contemplation side sounds more comforting.

Jay’s mention of the sometimes-beautiful dividing patterns brings to mind one of my favorite Separation Wall photos, at Abu Dis, which I’ve shown here before:

:

Those of you who like my photos might want to look at the new (still short) list where I brag about where they’ve been published, exhibited, or used in other ways.

The list doesn’t include all those people who simply link to my photos from MySpace or other pages without asking permission, giving me credit, or linking back to my site. I learn of this when my website statistics show lots of hits from various sites around the Internet, where I then discover a photo of mine being used as background or to make one point or another. Every time someone looks at those pages it registers as a hit on my photo site, but the viewer never sees my site and doesn’t know that’s where the image comes from. I find this annoying.

Most attention has focused on my photos of Israel and Palestine, as in the currently running Dialogue on the Wall exhibit in Minneapolis. I’m glad these have proven useful for a variety of organizing purposes. That lets me combine my various artistic, political, and even academic interests. I hope to do more of this.
Still, I like my apolitical subjects, too. I become fascinated by things I stumble across, and have been experimenting with different strategies as I try to improve my skills.

Here’s one I took the other day of a muddy San Miguel River running by my cousin’s house in Colorado. One of many.