H. Schenker: 'Don't...shut down discussion'

Hillel Schenker

Sadly, the lack of progress toward a two-state solution is creating a backlash among some Palestinians who are now turning against dialogue and cooperation with dovish Israelis.  An article in Haaretz by our Israeli colleague, Hillel Schenker, "Don't let them shut down discussion,"published on Dec. 30, tells the tale; here are highlights:

.... Last week the Palestine-Israel Journal, the quarterly I co-edit, was obliged to postpone a public conference we were organizing at an East Jerusalem hotel about the impact of the so-called Arab Spring on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, due to pressure on Palestinian speakers and threats against the hotel owner. ...
A news item ... earlier in the week stated that the Fatah leadership had decided to halt all unofficial Palestinian-Israeli meetings due to ... Prime Minister's Netanyahu's insistence on continuing settlement expansion. Unnamed Palestinian officials were quoted claiming that Israel exploits such meetings in order to tell the world that a dialogue is taking place between the two peoples, and that it is only the Palestinian Authority that refuses to sit down at the negotiating table.
This seems like a parallel to the familiar criticism of such meetings by right-wing Israelis, who accuse Israeli participants of being concerned only about Palestinian

Widening concern for Israeli democracy

Two very different articles pointing to the same problems: one by Yossi Sarid, former  Minister of Education and former Meretz party leader, writing about how Israelis have gotten used to the deterioration of morality, especially public morality, to the encroachment of church and state in the form of more and more limits on women -- "get thee to the back of the bus," voices of women "polluting" the poor ears of religious men, etc. This links to his article online at the Haaretz website.

The other article is by Daniel Gordis-- hardly my favorite columnist, but he too writes about the deterioration of Israeli democracy-- also focusing on the medieval laws coming down and limiting women's rights.  I don't know if anyone is paying attention; I think that Israelis who don't like what is going on are no longer watching or hearing what happens in the public sphere.  They have turned off. Sorry to depress you in these dark times.  Last night I made an attempt, during Chanuka, to seek a sliver of light.

Yet wasn't it Prime Minister Netanyahu (whom Gordis likely supports) who not very long ago warned of this being 1938 all over again, regarding the nuclear threat from Iran? The Gordis article can be read in its entirety at the Jerusalem Post website, but here's its core:

What Are Israelis So Happy About?

Partners for Progressive Israel executive director Ron Skolnik, in his latest column for Jewish Currents magazine, tries to explain puzzling polling results which consistently show a majority of Israelis optimistic about their lives and satisfied with the direction of the country, despite their massive support for last summer's social protest movement.  The following are selected passages of Ron's article:

If things in Israel are so bad, how can they be so good? That’s the paradoxical question that formulated in my brain as I perused the surprising results of a string of public opinion polls commissioned and published by Israel’s newspapers on the eve of Rosh Hashanah. They found that the vast majority of Israelis are happy with their lot and generally pleased with the national situation. ...

In March of last year, I had written for my organization’s on-line publication that “Israel’s part-fence, part-wall barrier has not only added security . . . Psychologically, it has severed the average Israeli’s sense of responsibility for what goes on under the Occupation on the other side: Out of sight, out of mind, as it were — except when spasms of violence temporarily upset the general equilibrium.” The Rosh Hashanah poll results substantiated this analysis — that with terrorism down over the past years, thanks in large part to the improved security cooperation of the Palestinian Authority forces in the West Bank, Israelis are happy to push the difficult question of war and peace to the back burner. Pessimism about peace prospects therefore does not translate to pessimism overall because Israelis have essentially tuned out the “Palestinian problem” as a day-to-day concern. ...

Israel polls obsessively to gauge support for the various political parties. These polls, too, have recently made it clear that pessimism about peace is doing little to dampen Israeli optimism. To the contrary, Israel’s two main opposition parties were experiencing a reversal of fortune that was very much the result of the public’s inward focus. Labor’s star was rising with a new party chief, MK Shelly Yachimovich, who is closely identified with Israelis’ bread-and-butter concerns, while Kadima continued to sink under the leadership of Tzipi Livni, who has branded herself as a sober alternative to Netanyahu in the diplomatic arena but has failed to stake a claim as a populist

Hannukah & history: the pride & the pity

This is a reprise and slight update of past postings about Hannukah.  It comes every year, after all, and its bottom-line lesson for us has not changed:

History is of necessity an interpretive process, and these interpretations often spawn self-serving myths. National myths are not usually complete fabrications, but they tend to romanticize and sanitize real events.

The traditional Hanukkah story is a source of pride for the Jewish people. We are taught that a small army of freedom fighters, the Maccabees, led by the heroic priestly family of Mattathias and his seven sons, successfully resisted the cruel pagan tyranny of the ancient Greco-Syrian Seleucid dynasty. This is not untrue, but it's only part of the story.

We are usually not taught the far more complex reality that the Maccabean war of liberation was also a civil war between rural “fundamentalist” religious adherents of the old order and the more educated and cosmopolitan Hellenized Jews of the city, who voluntarily and eagerly embraced  

Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011): 'Jewish' gadfly

I last saw him at the New York Public Library in June 2010, days before he learned of his illness.  There, in the NYPL's magnificent main building, he spoke about his recent autobiography ("Hitch-22"), making a point of saying that he wanted to write it at a not-yet-advanced age, because you never know when you'll breathe your last.  He was about three weeks older than I.

I frequently read his articles and essays with great interest, and I was amused by his brilliant exposé of Mother Teresa.  I disagreed about as often as I agreed with his positions.  In particular, I did not agree with his stubborn defense of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq and of George W. Bush, even though I fully appreciated the human rights considerations which motivated his support for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.  (Full disclosure: I initially supported the run-up to the invasion, until the US lost the vote in the UN Security Council and insisted on unilateral military action; I rejoiced at Saddam's overthrow for humanitarian reasons, but also came to know that the terribly ill-advised decisions of US "proconsul" Paul Bremer-- to fire Saddam's military and to bar even lowly Bathist Party members from government jobs-- made Iraq's sectarian civil war inevitable.)

The JTA's obit article on Hitchens is particularly interesting to me, as it focuses upon his long and complicated track record regarding Jews, Judaism and Israel:

Israel alarmist tackles post-Holocaust thought

Alvin Rosenfeld, the Indiana University professor of English and Jewish Studies engaged in dialogue at the NY Museum of Jewish Heritage, Dec. 14, with David Harris, director of the American Jewish Committee, on his new book, The End of the Holocaust (Indiana University Press, 2011).  Prof. Rosenfeld had achieved a measure of notoriety with an essay published by the AJC in 2006, “Progressive Jewish Thought and the New Antisemitism.” The controversy that followed is admirably summarized in this Wikipedia article.

You might wish to read “Shotgun Blast,” an analysis of the essay in The American Prospect magazine by Gershom Gorenberg.  He praised Rosenfeld's idea, but criticized his "sloppiness":

.... While attacking vituperative opponents of Israel who call themselves "progressive," he identifies their views with all who call themselves progressives – rather like letting James Dobson define what "Christian" means. He fires the shotgun of his criticism at such a wide flock of writers that his reader can wonder where he is aiming. Does The Washington Post's pro-Israel columnist Richard Cohen really belong to the same ideological species as those who accuse Israel of genocide? [Cohen apparently went overboard in one column, cited by Rosenfeld, when he characterized Israel’s creation as a “mistake”; in another column published not long after Rosenfeld’s essay came out, Cohen complains (in much the same way that Rosenfeld would) about the left’s outsized focus upon Israel, while often giving far worse human rights offenders (like China, Sudan, Zimbabwe and Iran) a bye.--R. Seliger]
The blurriness is a shame, because Rosenfeld has a legitimate argument. ... his intended target is those Jews who reject the very existence of a Jewish state, and who express their opposition in shrieks that rise to equating Israel with the Nazis.

Another excellent critique was written by Andrew Sillow-Carroll, editor-in-chief of the New Jersey Jewish News, in an editorial that I reproduced on this blog.  Since I share Rosenfeld’s concern for the more outlandish and unfair arguments against Israel that characterize so much of the left, and occasionally seep into mainstream liberal discourse, my response was rather mild. 

Yet, as in the AJC essay, Rosenfeld (judging from this public appearance) engages in overkill in

Republican contenders love Israel to death

With characteristic boldness (perhaps we should call it the "audacity of nope"), the GOP front-runner du jour, Newt Gingrich, asserts that the Palestinians are "an invented people."  This was a telling moment at the pander fest that was the Republican Jewish Coalition's candidates' forum.  Having carefully not invited Rep. Ron Paul, the RJC insured that it would be no less.  From the little that I saw of it, only Jon Huntsman-- while being warm toward his audience-- seems not to have gone overboard in this mode. 

Although Gingrich's comment, according to the JTA account, drew "rebukes" from some of his rivals, these were not anything like the points I'll raise here.  First off, all nations are "invented" at the formative stage in their history.  Whether due to geography, history, language, culture or religion, they obtain a level of self-consciousness as a distinct people and generally press their claim in some organized way.  As the well-known Palestinian-American scholar Prof. Rashid Khalidi indicated in Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (Columbia University Press, 1997), "National identity is constructed; it is not an essential, transcendent given...."

Arab-Palestinian identity was largely a reaction to the Zionist movement reestablishing Jewish nationhood in Palestine, the ancient birthplace of the Jewish people, as recorded in the Bible and remembered reverentially in the Jewish religion for two millennia.  Just as Palestinian nationalism was born of the Arab struggle against the Jews in the early to mid 20th century, the Jewish national rebirth occurred in Palestine, with Jewish identity made over from what was primarily (but not only) a religious heritage -- because of the tragic experience of Jews as a frequently trod-upon minority in Christian Europe and the Muslim Middle East.