American Jewish life: not acquiesence, nor complicity, nor renunciation

Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life by Joshua Leifer is a comprehensive, brave, and thoughtful attempt to describe the history and evolution of his communal home -- and to raise uncomfortable questions.

I was a little hesitant to write about this book -- this is not my tribe after all. I belong to a different and frequently hostile Abrahamic lineage. But I often write ethnographically about my own kind, for example about white supremacy in American Protestantism or Christian nationalism. So I was interested in Leifer's take on his own problematic community. 

His story is full of pointed questions and not a few Jeremiads, well-aimed denunciations of aspects of American Jewish evolution. I will quote here at length from what I think is the fulcrum of his story:

... We are on the cusp of a new -- and in Jewish history, unprecedented -- demographic reality.

By many accounts, Israel has already surpassed the United States as home to the largest single population of Jews in the world. ... By the year 2050, Israel is projected to be home to the majority of the world's Jews. According to a 2015 Pew survey, by mid-century Israel's population "is expected to be significantly larger than the U.S. Jewish population." ...

In raw numerical terms, the eclipse of American Jewry by its Israeli counterpart marked the end of the American Jewish century. From 1945 until the early 2000s, the long postwar period during which the American Jewish identity as we know it took shape, the United States claimed the majority of the world's Jews. No longer...

The Holocaust destroyed European Jewry, and with it the world European Jews had made. In the aftermath, the United States emerged as the demographic center of global Jewish life, while the new state of Israel claimed to be the Jewish people's spiritual core and its national and physical future. ...

For ordinary American Jews, however, Israel mainly made being Jewish easier by allowing them to jettison the pesky rituals and obligations or religious observance for political nationalism. With assimilation imagined by American Jewish leaders as the only alternative, Zionism's replacement of religion seemed a reasonable means of sustaining Jewish identity in a secular age, and the dual-centered model thus appeared as a mutually beneficial arrangement. Most Israeli leaders, however, imagined this situation as merely an interim one. As they saw it, the day Israel surpassed America as the global center of Jewish life -- when the diaspora would finally be negated -- was only a matter of time.

The emergence of Israel as the homeland of the majority of the world's Jews will mark more than a simple demographic shift -- it will constitute a revolution in the most basic conditions of Jewish existence. Diaspora defined Jewish life from 70 CE onward. Centuries of exile constituted Judaism and gave rise to the rabbinic tradition ... By 2050, for the first time in two millennia, most Jews will live in a sovereign Jewish state. It is not just the American Jewish century that will have ended, but an entire era of Jewish history.

American Jews today live in the slipstream of this epochal transformation. The turbulence and incoherence of Jewish life in 2024 owes much to the interregnum in which we find ourselves, the time-space between two paradigms of Jewish existence, increasingly dominated by Israel as the author of Jewish collective fate.

It is a reality to which few have adequately managed to respond. Neither the American Jewish establishment nor the anti-Zionist left offers sufficient avenues for navigating the diasporic double bind. While the former carries on as if nothing has changed, ignorant or inured to the suffering in Israel/Palestine, some on the left hope to escape their condition by fantasizing of Israel's destruction. But neither complicity nor renunciation will work. ...

Leifer sees four main paths forward for American Jewish identity now that the community's century of primacy within the world Jewish community is over: the "Dying Establishment" (think AIPAC, the Israel Lobby), "Prophetic Protest" (think Jewish Voice for Peace), "Neo-Reform" liberal religiosity, and Separatist Orthodoxy. None fully attract him.

The book was completed just days before the October 7 2023 Hamas massacre and Israel's unconstrained devastation of Palestinian Gaza, both the people and the territory. He cannot see his way forward: 

As a Jew and a progressive, I often feel closed in on from both sides, pinched between great shame and great fear. I am infuriated by the crimes of the state that acts in my name, and more worried than I have ever been by the rising acceptability of conspiratorial thinking and demonization of Jews. It often feels like an impossible place.

But it is the place we must hold. ... To change our people, we must be with them. That is our responsibility.

That sentiment should be familiar to any American (which is what Leifer is after all, in addition to being a Jew) who has lived the last 70 years of an ascendent and declining American empire, mucking about the world to the detriment of too many. That too is an impossible place to be. But here we all are.

One year later, somebody has to break the cycle

Can the back and forth, the trading of atrocity and revenge, go on until they are all dead -- until we are all dead? Perhaps. Certainly nothing in the news -- from Palestine, from Israel, from Gaza, the West Bank, from Lebanon, from Iran -- suggests any end ...

Maybe these folks -- Israeli Jews and Israeli Palestinians working together in Standing Together -- seem the only sane voices around. Or maybe they are charlatans. But if so,  they are the kind of charlatans the world needs.

... For as long as we can remember, people who called for peace and non-violence were considered “naïve,” stupid, or even traitors. If the past year has taught us anything - it is that there is nothing more naïve than believing that this cycle of bloodshed and wars is sustainable. There is nothing more naïve than believing that the path we have been on until now is a path we should stay on.

The truth is that on this land live millions of Palestinians and millions of Jews, and nobody is going anywhere. Working toward a sustainable peace that guarantees everyone freedom, safety, equality and independence is imperative for anyone in this land who wants to see a future here. The fates of Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Arabs, are tied. So no, we are not naïve, and you are not either.

In the face of decades of bloodshed and a year of unfathomable violence and destruction, we are insisting on Jewish-Palestinian solidarity, and insisting on calling an end to the bloodshed once and for all. We are calling on our society to fight for life, in the face of our leadership that only speaks of death. We are calling on everyone around the world to pick a side - but for that side not to be Israelis or Palestinians - for the side to be all of us, the Israeli and Palestinian people on the ground who all deserve a real future, against our leaderships that are only dragging us further into the abyss.

There can be no justice, but can there be peace?

An old good news from Palestine

Mitri Raheb  maintains most European Christians don't get it.

Mitri Raheb is Palestinian, a theologian, and the pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem. Faith in the Face of Empire offers his insights, rooted in the conditions of occupied Palestine, into how place and circumstance shape the three great monotheistic faiths, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These faiths, in turn, shape much of global history.

His undertaking is ambitious and more than a little mind-bending. And that's a compliment.

He wrote presciently in 2014:

My generation might be the last in Palestine to struggle with scripture and its meaning in its original context of permanent occupation. ... For me, as a Palestinian Christian, Palestine is the land of both my physical and my spiritual forefathers and foremothers. The biblical story is thus part and parcel of my nation’s history, a history of continuous occupation by succeeding empires. In fact, the biblical story can best be understood as a response to the geo-political history of the region.

In Palestine, to live under a cruel occupation is not a novelty:

The Bible is a Middle Eastern book. It is a product of that region with all of its complexities. While it might seem that I am stating the obvious, I firmly believe that this notion has not been given enough attention. ...

... The three monotheistic religions did not take root in and grow out of the Middle East haphazardly. And it is not coincidental that the Bible emerged from Palestine, not from one of the empires. It is, in fact, this context of ongoing oppression, of forever living in the shadow of the empire, that brought about the birth of both Judaism and Christianity, and across the sea, Islam. ... The revelation the people of Palestine received was the ability to spot God where no one else was able to see [God].

Firmly situated in his long suffering land, Raheb interprets Jesus' message:

... one cannot understand the Gospels if they are disconnected from their original context, which is Palestine. ... For the people at Jesus’ time, the occupation began with the Romans. Jesus had a far greater understanding of the history of Palestine. He looked at a thousand years all at once, and he saw a chain of empires.

There isn’t a single regional empire that at some point did not occupy Palestine. The first empire to occupy Palestine was that of the Assyrians, in 722 BC; it stayed for over two hundred years. The Assyrians were replaced by the Babylonians in 587 BC, who didn’t last because they were pushed out by the Persians in 538 BC. The Persians didn’t stay long either, because they were forced to leave by Alexander the Great. Then there were the Romans.

Two thousand years after Jesus we can continue reciting the list of empires that ruled Palestine: the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Crusaders, the Ayyubides, the Ottomans, the British, and last but not least, the Israeli occupation.

... We have been trained to naively connect Israel today with the Israel of the Bible, instead of connecting it to the above chain of occupying empires. If we focus on the latter, Jesus’ words make perfect sense. None of those empires lasted in Palestine forever. They came and stayed for fifty, one hundred, two hundred, a maximum four hundred years, but in the end they were all blown away, gone with the wind.

Jesus wanted to tell his people that the empire would not last, that empires come and go. When empires collapse and depart it is the poor and the meek who remain. The “haves” from the people of the land emigrate; they seek to grow richer within the centers of empire. Those who are well educated are “brain drained” and vacuumed up by the empire. Who remains in the land? The meek, that is, the powerless! Empires come and go, while the meek inherit the land. Jesus’ wisdom is staggering. ... Jesus was telling the Palestinian Jews that the Romans who had built those settlements would not be there forever. They would vanish because Palestine would be inherited by the meek.

Forty years ago, when I was first trying to get some kind of understanding of what most people then would have called the "Arab-Israeli conflict," an Arab friend insisted (I paraphrase from memory) that "we don't look at it that way. ... in 50 years, 100 years, 200 years, this thing called 'Israel' will be gone."

I couldn't imagine this. I wasn't going to argue; I was trying to learn. I still can't quite imagine this.

But this historical awareness of how time works in Palestine is very much the consciousness from within which Raheb elaborates a theology of liberation in Christian terms.

Those who are the "have-nots," those who cannot escape the brutality visited on them by the occupier, they cry out of their desperation, "where is God?"

He believes the life and death of Jesus in the context of imperial oppression answers that question.

If the first disciples had gone forth blaming the empire and trying to elicit sympathy, Christianity would not have been born. If the first disciples had believed all that they had to share was the bad news of the cruelty of the empire, they would have remained unnoticed. The cruelty of the empire is not breaking news, and the world, dominated by the empire, is full of such news.

The Spirit empowered the disciples to proclaim the good news, which was different from that of the empire. The disciples went out with the conviction that they had a message to share and that the world was waiting for just such a message. The world understood that if good news could hail from Palestine, then a miracle must have occurred.

This is faith in the face of empire.

Suicide watch

Writing in the Israeli magazines +972 and Local Call, the Iranian-Israeli political activist Orly Noy expresses the agony of this moment on the verge of an even more catastrophic spasm of violence.

Israeli leaders celebrate assassinations — and make the living pay the price

... “Death-worthy” is probably the most well-worn phrase in Israeli public discourse to describe the recent assassinations. It is one among many justifications Israel has found for its uninhibited violence over the last ten months. But there is something terrifying about the fact that the question of whether or not someone is deemed “death-worthy” dictates our fate here more than whether we civilians are life-worthy.

At every intersection since the massacres of October 7, Israel has chosen the path of violence and escalation. Justifications have never been lacking: we must respond forcefully to the attacks; we must persecute those who initiated and executed it; we must intensify the pressure until they return the hostages; we must attack Lebanon in response to the rockets; we must signal to Iran that we will not be silent about its support for Hezbollah.

Ultimately, however, the automatic choice of violent escalation is suicidal. This inertia is so sweeping that it does not allow us to ask basic, existentially vital questions: Has the criminal genocide we are perpetrating in Gaza increased the security of a single person in Israel? Are we safer now, while we wait for the Iranian response? Is Israel doing better on the world stage than it was on October 7?

... It is easy to pin everything on Netanyahu; to say that the war serves his political survival, and that he has an interest in continuing it indefinitely. This is true, but it is too easy a way out. Netanyahu indeed chose to sacrifice the lives of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, the lives of Israeli hostages, and our collective security for his personal gain. But the Israeli public devoted itself from the very beginning, with chilling joy, to the deadly path that Netanyahu paved.

• • •

While sorting through some of my extensive cache of old demonstration photos the other day, I encountered this.

 The date was December 2008. It's been a long process, but the direction has not changed.

Gaza war: a complete military failure and an ominous political success

What follows is an article, in full, about the murderous Gaza campaign by way of Standing Together, a Jewish and Palestinian movement of citizens of Israel organizing in pursuit of peace, equality, and social and climate justice.

The author, Dr. Guy Laron, is a lecturer in the Department of International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Bringing about the collapse of Hamas isn’t one of the goals of the war in Gaza  

If we judge the military operation in Gaza by the goals that the government presented to the public, it is obviously a complete failure. After six months of combat, the IDF hasn’t reached its primary goal: destroying Hamas’s control in Gaza. The assessments are that thus far the IDF has disabled a third of Hamas’s combat force and destroyed about twenty percent of the organization’s tunnels. This is a hard hit but not a fatal blow and Hamas is alive and kicking. Not only that, but Hamas has managed to take control of areas that the IDF withdrew from and shoot rockets from those areas to the towns in the Gaza Envelope. 

Moreover, the other declared goal of the operation - bringing back the hostages - hasn’t been achieved either. The absolute majority of hostages that were released thus far were freed as a result of a deal in which they were swapped for Palestinian prisoners.
 In contrast, only three hostages were released as a result of a military operation. Even worse, three hostages were shot dead by the IDF and an unknown number of hostages were killed as a result of the IDF’s indiscriminate bombings (according to what Hamas ordered the Israeli hostage Hersh Goldberg to say in a recently released video, Hamas estimates that 70 hostages died this way). 

The cabinet that decided to go to war included two retired Chiefs of General Staff,
one retired Major General and a Prime Minister, who has approved and supervised many military operations. Moreover, the current Chief of Staff pushed and pressured the cabinet to approve the military ground operation in Gaza. These people knew full well the limits of what could or could not be achieved by the military plans they were approving. Proof of this can be found in the interview that Gadi Eisenkot gave to Ilana Dayan. The experienced General explained well to the senior journalist why the operation has no chance to free hostages: the hostages aren’t held above ground in an isolated object like a plane or a bus, he said, but are hidden in tunnels that the IDF will struggle to reach. Therefore, it’s easy to conclude that the goals of the operation as they were presented to the public were meant to recruit public support for it, but were never the real goals that the cabinet aimed for. 

What then are the real goals of the operation? 

The first real goal of the operation - and it is valuable to the current coalition - is protecting the settlements in the West Bank. The settlers’ movement’s leadership has gained representation in key offices in the current administration: The ministries of Finance, Security, and National Security which is in charge of the police. The judicial reform that the coalition was promoting was also meant to enable a unilateral annexation of the West Bank without providing civil rights to the Palestinians living there. If implemented, this reform would have enshrined the property rights of the settlers. 

In the decade and a half preceding Hamas’s attack, Netanyahu did all he could to convince the Israeli public that the occupation comes at a low cost. Israel, Netanyahu claimed, could become a high-tech powerhouse and forge ties with countries in the region despite the expansion of the settlement project in the West Bank. The key to that, the Prime Minister explained, is to keep the divide between the West Bank and Gaza, as a result of the two areas being controlled by opposing and competing Palestinian organizations. Netanyahu also seems to have thought that Hamas had an interest in becoming a collaborator to the Jewish colonialism in the West Bank as a result of the money they received from Qatar. 

Hamas’s attack on October 7th destroyed all of these assumptions. Hamas used the money from Qatar to build a sophisticated war machine, making a laughing stock of Netanyahu in Israel and around the world. Had Israel limited its response to the attack, focused on rebuilding the security fence and on a hostage deal, the public would have had time to discuss the collapse of “the Bibi doctrine” and demand snap elections. By deciding to start a military operation, the government bought itself time and postponed a public debate over the true costs in money, blood, and reputation, of the settlements in the West Bank. 

By rejecting another hostage deal, the government is taking off the table the question of the “day after”, and any agreement or peace accord which would ensure a long-
term calm along the borders. This is because the government is afraid that any formal agreement with the Palestinians will require an evacuation of some of the settlements. 

In addition, the government isn’t only acting to protect the settlements, but also working on expanding this project through activity that is meant to destabilize the West Bank. For example, the government is refusing to allow Palestinian workers from the West Bank to return to work within Israel and it’s trying to hurt the Palestinian Authority (PA) by refusing to transfer money that the PA deserves according to the Paris Agreements.  

In this way, financial suffocation is created in the West Bank and the ability of the PA to pay officials and police officers is curtailed. The activity of settler militias who damage Palestinian property and expel Palestinian farmers has also continued after October 7th.  

While the fighting continues, the government is acting to promote the second real
 goal of the war, which is the continuation of the government's judicial reform. This continuation is meant not only to reduce Israel’s democratic space but to completely privatize all government services. The government is working towards total privatization relying on sectorial politics to garner support. These are, in fact, complementary steps. Reducing the freedom of speech and the freedom of assembly are tools to suffocate the protests over the collapse of the welfare state. Those who are working most ardently to promote these goals are the ministers of the Religious Zionist party.  

For example, the Minister of National Security continues the task of appointing the police’s senior ranks, turning it into a political party’s militia. Furthermore, Itamar Ben Gvir is privatizing national security by doling out tens of thousands of weapon permits. Thus, the police is losing its status as the keeper of order and security, to a host of local militias. Personal security turns into the mission of individual citizens rather than the state. 

At the same time, the Minister of Finance continues to distribute money to sectors that are close to the government, the Ultra-Orthodox and the settlers. All of this is happening while the health, education and public transportation services are collapsing due to painful cuts that the Minister of Finance is forcing upon them. In this way, following the collapse of the education and health systems that belong to all of the public, the only route for citizens to get education and health services is by joining the settler or Orthodox sectors.  

The third real goal of the operation is a live ammo demonstration of the army’s capabilities, combined with its attempt to recover its reputation. The guilt of the military establishment goes beyond the devastating defeat of October 7th. No organization internalized “the Bibi doctrine” to a greater extent than the army. The army wasn’t only securing the settlements, but creating bureaucratic and technological arrangements that turned the occupation and the settlements into a low-cost operation.
The army identified the unease of the educated bourgeoisie from the mission of policing in the West Bank, so it assigned the mission to the working class that served in specialized police battalions. The sons and daughters of the educated bourgeoisie were integrated into high-tech army units that were meant to allow the management of the conflict even with a small number of personnel. They got to serve in units that promised them profitable employment in the future, and along the way solved the army’s manpower shortage problem.  

Thanks to this, the IDF could move most of its infantry to security missions in the West Bank and leave only a small number of forces along the northern and southern borders. The army convinced itself that the intelligence capabilities of the 8200 unit, as well as the robotic technologies that were deployed along the southern border, would ensure that the army wouldn't be caught unawares, and if it was, it could respond immediately. 

The IDF believed in the “Bibi doctrine” to such an extent that the high-ranking officers in the Intelligence Corps refused to understand the obvious signs of an impending attack. Even when the lower ranks in the intelligence forces - like the field observers or non- commissioned officers in the 8200 unit - brought convincing proof of a coming attack, the colonels at the military intelligence branch shut their ears. Hamas’s surprise attack on October 7th exposed the incompetence of Israel's military leadership. 

To deal with the fear and the shock of the Israeli public, the army is holding onto the military operation as an immediate solution to the hit its image took on October 7th. Since 2006, the General Staff of the IDF, which is usually led by officers from the ground forces, invested in technological capabilities that would allow the army to improve over its poor performances in the 2006 Lebanon war. The current "Iron Swords" war has given these generals an opportunity to check if the investment succeeded and test it on the battlefield. 

When those generals understood that the ground operation wouldn't lead to the defeat of Hamas, the fourth real goal of the operation was born: the mission of revenge. Though they knew that it would create a difficult problem for Israel with the international judicial system, the generals in the General Staff and battalion commanders in the field allowed the soldiers on the frontlines to upload videos and photos that would satisfy the public’s lust for revenge and make them forget the fact that the operation won’t be able to destroy the Hamas. 

That is how the ground operation in Gaza became a military failure and a political success. Under the guise of the operation, the army and the government are rehabilitating their public image and promoting their institutional interests. Their political egoism is expressed in their willingness to ignore the difficult problems that they create: the regional and global isolation of Israel, an eternal conflict in the Gaza Strip, an economic crisis, and political polarization in Israel. These ministers and generals lead to an endless war. After them, the deluge!

Editing: Tom Alfia


Translation to English: Tal Vinogradov 

There's an arc to campus protests

A glance at Derf Backderf's meticulously researched graphic novel Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio seems right on time today.

This artist really did the work, in archives and interviews, to reconstruct the events of the Ohio college massacre on May 4, 1970. A barrage of gun fire from National Guard troops killed four students and maimed more in response to student protests. He tries to portray accurately what students, politicians, cops, and Guardsmen were thinking as the movement against the ongoing Vietnam war both intensified and shifted focus under ham-handed state repression. Overall theme: nobody really knew what they were doing!

Here are a few panels (click to enlarge):

Spring had come and students enjoyed the campus's grassy open lawn.

"Out of the bars and into the streets." During a boisterous evening in town on Friday night, some students interrupted a night of drinking and cruising to take common chants into the streets. The town police department had no idea what to do and bashed heads while intoxicated student rioters smashed store fronts.

The town called in the National Guard. No one seemed to know quite how to act in the aftermath.

Non-campus actors believed all sorts of myths about the mysterious campus activities. What had got into these kids?

For the students, their occupied campus was novel and insulting.

On Monday on campus, a small fraction of students reverted what they had been doing for weeks -- marching in protest. Students had a new target - the occupation of their turf by tired, frustrated, and uncomprehending troops. Many of the Guardsmen despised students they saw as privileged snots.

And so tragedy. A random crew of students were dead; all sides told their own stories. No one was punished. At the time, 58 percent of Americans thought the protesters had it coming to them.

I can highly recommended Backderf's reconstruction of Kent State events, much more detailed and nuanced than what I've offered here.

The book is not a great graphic novel because, for all the artist's efforts, all these characters seem to blend into each other, classic hippies in one stereotype and malevolent pols in another. He could probably have created a clearer visual experience with a lot of editing, but he's determined to report all the available historical strands and the result is not pictures which are easily understood. But this is a terrific effort to tell a complex story.

I got the book from the public library; I hope it is readily available in this moment.

• • •

A few observations from having lived similar events at UC Berkeley during attendance there from 1965-1969 and watching student protests over Gaza today:

• As at Kent State, most students can and do navigate around the edges of passionate protests, going about their lives. They may sympathize, but they are not there. The passionate activists are usually a small minority.

• Repression of campus protests draws a far larger fraction of students (and profs and staff) into the protests, for good and ill. College students, at least back then and likely still, come to think of campus as their place and broadly resent being invaded.

• This can create incentives among a small fraction of protesters to try to create a situation in which cops or others beat protesters' heads. I'm not saying that is all that goes on, but there are always provocateurs, some honest and some not.

• When under attack on campus, it becomes hard for protest leaders to keep the focus on the initial animating issue -- today the call for a Gaza ceasefire and for an end to US complicity in Israel's oppression of Palestinians. If the issue becomes mean cops, the movement is losing.

• Protest leadership demands teaching serious protest discipline. This is hard because the aim is to grow fast. And also, the power of campus protest is attractive moral creativity; apparent rigid automatons chanting only approved messages do not attract.

And we'd be a far worse country if students could never be moved by atrocity. So far, we seem to be that kind of country.

The tiny dinosaurs we share a world with

Don't miss this current article from Erudite Partner in the LA Progressive:

... Many of us, myself included a few times a year, do eat birds, but an extraordinary number of people all over the world are also beguiled and delighted by them in their wild state. People deeper into bird culture than I am make a distinction between birdwatchers — anyone who pays a bit of attention to birds and can perhaps identify a few local species like the handsome rock dove, better known as a pigeon — and birders, people who devote time (and often money) to the practice, who may travel to see particular birds, and who most likely maintain a birding life list of every species they’ve spotted.

Mandy and Lara Sirdah of Gaza City are birders. Those twin sisters, now in their late forties, started photographing birds in their backyard almost a decade ago....

If it weren’t for the Israeli occupation — and now the full-scale war ... Gaza would be ideal for birding. ...

Who knew? -- don't you want to know more? I certainly did.

Many Israelis are not European-origin white people.

And too much of American discourse about the present horrific phase of the long Israeli/Palestinian war tries to shove the conflict into a framework derived from U.S. racial history, a Black/White binary.

Insisting that this terrible conflict is different than U.S. experience and carries its own complications in no way justifies Israel's current brutal effort to simply eradicate or expel the people of Gaza and the West Bank. Nor does it justify hostage taking and vengeance raids. I'm tempted to say there aren't any good guys, though the work of the Jewish and Palestinian group Standing Together may point to better possibilities.

Standing Together on the Gaza border: marching for LIFE, PEACE, FREEDOM & SAFETY FOR ALL. "We need to end the war. We need to end the occupation. We need to end this cycle of violence and killing. We need a real, just peace that gives everyone a future here - Palestinians and Israelis." via Xitter

But it isn't adequate to think of the hell of the two clashing nations as indigenous dark Palestinians rising up against white Jewish intruders. Both justice and compassion require a more nuanced view.

John Ganz [@lionel_trolling], historian and Xitter pundit extraordinaire, has attempted to recomplicate the agony of Israel/Palestine in simplified form. I've excerpted some of this here, but urge those concerned to Read the Whole Thing.

... as many others have pointed out, the more than half of Israeli Jews—between 50% or 55%—are Mizrahim or Sephardim, rather than Ashkenazim.

... The fact that most of the Israeli population is of non-European descent—including a sizable population of Ethiopian Jews—somewhat complicates the picture given by some Western activists of Israel as a white supremacist settler-colonial state lording it over darker peoples. The Mizrahi population tends to be more religious, more conservative, less educated, less prosperous, and to vote for right-wing parties, like Likud, Shas and the Judeo-Fascist Otzma Yehudit, headed by the national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, himself of Mizrahi descent. ...

... Mizrahi and other non-European Jews are also more likely to be IDF combat troops involved in the most dangerous and violent missions in the occupied territories and Gaza: They do a lot of the grunt work of repression. ...

 ... “Living in Israel is for us, coming from Arab countries, the continuation of our Jewish identity. Whereas the programme presented by the left is cosmopolitan - in which nationalism is overcome - we, Mizrahi Jews, do not relate at all to this discourse, in which human and civil rights come before our Jewish identity,” as one Likud activist told Middle East Eye.

... To understand why the Mizrahim became so right wing and nationalist, we have to look to the process by which they became integrated into Israeli society and politics. In the wake of the U.N. Partition vote of 1947 and the 1948 Israeli-Arab war, some 900,000 Jews from the Middle East fled their homes. Around two thirds of these would end up in Israel. When they arrived, the Israeli state was dominated by the largely Ashkenazi founding generation, figures you will have heard of like David Ben-Gurion, Chaim Weizmann, and Golda Meir. The Ashkenazi elite had a paternalistic and prejudiced attitude towards their newly arrived cousins, who were often extremely poor and uneducated. ...

... It would be a mistake, however, to put too much weight on the Ashkenazi-Mizrahi distinction as the sole explanatory factor in Israeli politics. The ethnic issue is often a proxy for other things. A recent study shows that as educational attainment rises, voting behavior starts to look the same. Some argue that increasing rate of mixed marriages is reducing the saliency of ethnic politics. Not all class differences map easily onto these ethnic differences: for instance, Iraqi Jews are often part of the elite. One should also not map Mizrahi onto “Settler” or Religious Zionist: Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich is the head of the more Ashkenazi National Religious Party. ...

Click to get a look at Smotrich

Would it matter if we learned a more nuanced view of the agony we watch and seek to impede from here? Perhaps not. But more truth still seems better to me  ...

It's beginning to feel a little 1968ish ...

Republican politicians are licking their chops. They hope beating up on protesting college students will distract their fellow citizens while their leader sits in a dingy New York court room defending a sordid con. Meanwhile the economy chugs along and majorities tell pollsters we're feeling pretty good about our individual lives. Gotta raise the temperature. Beat up on some students ...

Via the Austin American

This dodge has succeeded before. Last time we got Richard Nixon and it took every intact strand in the democratic fabric of the rule of law to evict him. This time they want to ride a stupid, sociopathic, toddler-strong man. 

They want to leverage genuine moral outrage over Gaza for their ugly purposes. Escalating violence on campuses is not the students' fault, even if some are unthinking and overwrought. 

Atlantic editor Adam Server cuts to the essence of the moment:

... As we approach the summer of 2024, the economy is growing, migration to the border has declined at least temporarily owing to what appears to be a new crackdown by Mexican authorities, and in many major cities, crime is returning to historic lows, leaving protests as the most suitable target for demagoguery. The Biden administration’s support for Israel divides Democrats and unites Republicans, so the longer the issue remains salient, the better it is for the GOP.

More broadly, the politics of “American carnage” do not work as well in the absence of carnage. Far-right politics operate best when there is a public perception of disorder and chaos, an atmosphere in which the only solution such politicians ever offer can sound appealing to desperate voters. Social-media bubbles can suffice to maintain this sense of siege among the extremely online, but cultivating this perception among most voters demands constant reinforcement.

This is why the Republican Party is constantly seeking to play up chaos at the border and an epidemic of crime in American cities, no matter what the reality of the situation might actually be. ... any escalation in chaos would redound to their political benefit. They don’t want to solve any problems; they want to make them worse so that the public will warm to “solutions” that will continue to make them worse. They don’t want order, or safety, or peace. What they want is carnage.

They want carnage and they'll make it where it doesn't yet exist. They want to use protesting students in their theater of carnage. And when your cause is just, it's hard not to play.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. It's not entirely clear who first said it, but the French aphorism seems all too true of the horrors we see, again, being acted out on the bodies and souls on Gazan Palestinians and traumatized Jewish Israelis.

Dr. Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, has as much access to broad scale American media as any Palestinian; he uses this to try to explain the tribulations of the land of his ancestors.  In 2020, he published his seventh history, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017. It's more than slightly appalling to realize how little has changed in the interaction of Palestinians and Zionist Jews since a Jewish nationalism to be based in Palestine was first articulated the 19th century.

Khalidi's great-great great uncle Yusef Diya, was mayor of Jerusalem under the Ottoman empire. He corresponded with Theodor Herzl, the Austrian founder of European Zionism, and tried to warn Herzl that Palestine "is inhabited by others ..." The point was not taken then and remains obscured to this day, says the professor:

Either the Zionist leader meant deceive him by concealing the true aims of the Zionist movement, or Herzl simply did not see Yusuf Diya and the Arabs of Palestine as being worthy of being taken seriously."

When it came to pass in 1948, the founding of the Jewish Israeli state depended on the nakba, the cleansing, dispossession, and expulsion of as much of the Palestinian population as Zionists could manage. Once the Zionists had seized homes and power, they needed to deny the legitimacy of the history, culture, and society that had been displaced.

If they did not exist, then even well-founded Palestinian objections to the Zionist movement's plans could be simply ignored.

The Hundred Years War reports on a series of periods of Zionist upending of Palestinian life, beginning with the British imperial control of 1917-39, through the wars of 1947-1948, 1967, and 1982. Khalidi's account of the time of the first intifada (the locally led, predominantly non-violent protests 1987-1995) becomes more directly personal. He served as part of a Palestinian negotiating team involved in what came to be called "the Oslo process" which brought the old Palestinian leadership back inside the country without autonomy and with responsibility for tamping down local Palestinian unrest on behalf of the Israeli state.

His conclusions, written half a decade before current agonies, still seems on point:

 ... the great powers have repeatedly tried to act in spite of the Palestinians, ignoring them, talking for them over their heads, or pretending they do not exist. In the face of the heavy odds against them, however, the Palestinians have shown a stubborn capacity to resist these efforts to eliminate them politically and scatter them to the four winds.... for all its might, its nuclear weapons, and its alliance with the United States, today the Jewish state is at least as contested globally as it was at any time in the past.

... While the fundamentally colonial nature of the Palestinian-Israel encounter must be acknowledged, there are now two peoples in Palestine, irrespective of how they came into being, and the conflict between them cannot be resolved as long as the national existence of each is denied by the other. Their mutual acceptance can only be based on complete equality of rights, including national rights, notwithstanding the crucial historical differences between the two. There is no other possible sustainable solution, barring the unthinkable notion of one people's extermination or expulsion by the other.

 • • •

Today (April 11, 2024) Khalidi writes in the Guardian that too little has changed since Hamas' raid of 10/7 and Israel's vengeful punitive war on Gaza.

... While much has changed since 7 October, the events of the past six months are not unique, and do not stand outside history. We can only properly understand them within the context of the century-long war waged on Palestine, notwithstanding efforts by Israel to deny the relevance of context, and to explain them in terms of the “barbarity” characteristic of its enemies. While the actions of Hamas and Israel since 7 October might appear to represent a change or a departure, they are consistent with decades of Israeli ethnic cleansing, military occupation and theft of Palestinian land, with years of the siege and deprivation of the Gaza Strip, and with an often violent Palestinian response to these actions. ... an upheaval that might have been a catalyst of change may in fact produce continuity of colonisation and occupation, of the Israeli establishment’s exclusive reliance on force, and of armed Palestinian resistance.

... One constant in the 100 years of this war is that Palestinians have not been allowed to choose who represents them. ... In the absence of Palestinian agreement on a unified and credible political voice representing a national consensus, this would mean that crucial decisions about the future of their people will be made by outside powers, as has happened so many times in the past.

... Looking back over the past six months – at the cruel slaughter of civilians on an unprecedented scale, the millions of people made homeless, the mass famine and disease induced by Israel – it is clear that this marks a new abyss into which the struggle over Palestine has sunk. While this phase reflects the underlying lineaments of previous ones in this 100 years’ war, its intensity is unique, and it has created deep new traumas. Not only does no end to this carnage appear in sight: we seem to be further than ever from a lasting and sustainable resolution, one based on dismantling structures of oppression and supremacy, and on justice, completely equal rights and mutual recognition.

Something has to give and it is not clear how. Neither national people is going away.

When hope has been murdered ...

Israelis demonstrate for a ceasefire and return of the hostages of 10/7

These demonstrators, Jewish and Palestinian, are a tiny minority in their country. But they know what must be done. Nothing to do but keep on keeping on.

• • •

In +972, Meron Rapoport explains Why do Israelis feel so threatened by a ceasefire?

Until October 6, the consensus among the Jewish-Israeli public was that the “Palestinian issue” should not bother them too much. October 7 shattered this myth. The “Palestinian issue” returned, in full, bloody force, to the agenda.

There were two ostensible responses to the destruction of this status quo: a political arrangement that genuinely recognized the presence of another people in this land and their right to a life of dignity and freedom, or a war of extinction against the enemy beyond the wall. The Jewish public, which never really internalized the first option, chose the second.

In this light, the very idea of a ceasefire seems threatening. It would force the Jewish public to recognize that the goals presented by Netanyahu and the army — “toppling Hamas” and releasing the hostages through military pressure — were simply unrealistic. The public would have to concede what may be perceived as a failure, even a defeat, in the face of Hamas. After the trauma and humiliation of October 7, it is hard for many to swallow such a defeat.

But there is a deeper threat. A ceasefire could force the Jewish public to confront more fundamental questions. If the status quo does not work, and a constant war with the Palestinians cannot achieve the desired victory, then what remains is the truth: that the only way for Jews to live in security is through a political compromise that respects the rights of the Palestinians.

+972 Magazine is an independent, online, nonprofit magazine run by a group of Palestinian and Israeli journalists. ... The name of the site is derived from the telephone country code that can be used to dial throughout Israel-Palestine.

Consider the alternative

Erudite Partner tackles the moral dilemma of our moment: can we, in order to block Donald Trump's ambitious fascist plans, vote to re-elect the enabler of Bibi Netanyahu's slaughter of Gaza Palestinians? Can we? She reports a recent conversation.

... [a] college student told us he wouldn’t be voting for Joe Biden—and that none of his friends would either. The president’s initial support of, and later far too-tepid objections to, the genocidal horror transpiring in Gaza were simply too much for him. That Biden has managed to use his executive powers to cancel $138 billion in student debt didn’t outweigh the repugnance he and his friends feel for the president’s largely unquestioning support of Israel’s destruction of that 25-mile strip of land on the Mediterranean Sea. To vote for Biden would be like taking a knife to his conscience. And I do understand.

Oh, do I ever understand! My first vote for President was for Democrat Hubert Humphrey in 1968, a moral coward who dared not repudiate Lyndon Johnson's futile, endless war against the Vietnamese and Vietnamese nationalism. I had spent years working to turn a confused country around, yet I was stuck with only a lesser evil choice. The alternative was Richard Nixon who got us more war and finally corruption and disgrace. 

The E.P. reminds us what we'd get with the alternative to Biden:

... lest we forget, this is the man who tried once before to end American democracy. It would be true madness to give him a second chance.

In the California primary, I left the presidential line blank. I cast that vote before the campaign in Michigan to protest through voting "uncommitted" took off -- my protest was instinctive and it seems about 10 percent of Californians did the same without much organizing.  

But in the fall I'll be working to re-elect Biden in some swing state, I hope. Maybe I'll skip Biden again on my California ballot. But people located where their presidential votes matter, should consider the alternative.

Spring in the Mission

I know, it is not even the end of standard time. Spring is officially two weeks away. Yet the coming season is in the air. 

 

The view out my window is wildly lush.

The people gather as well. 

 

San Franciscans demand to be heard.

And on light polls and walls around the Mission, these flyers turn up.

click to enlarge if you want to read.

Odd one this. I'm as little a fan of Mayor London Breed as anyone. 

But these flyers call to mind a long time useful axiom I've developed for understanding San Francisco leftist politics: if somebody seems to be trying to co-opt the legitimate moral energy of your justice movement, run -- don't walk -- away from them. These aren't your friends. They are either bloodsuckers or opportunists. They may be actual enemies of justice or they may be deluded, but they aren't your friends. They are trying to seize the legitimate space you are fighting to open.

For love or money, people get around

You might think that a deadly war in somebody else's country would repel most people who had any option to stay well away. And, in general, that's true. But there are exceptions.

In Ukraine, from the earliest days of Russia's attempt at conquest, there have been quite a few voluntary international participants. According to the Associated Press:

In early 2022, authorities said 20,000 people from 52 countries were in Ukraine. Now, in keeping with the secrecy surrounding any military numbers, authorities will not say how many are on the battlefield but they do say fighters’ profile has changed.

The first waves of volunteers came mostly from post-Soviet or English-speaking countries. Speaking Russian or English made it easier for them to integrate into Ukraine’s military, [Oleksandr Shahuri, an officer of the Department of Coordination of Foreigners in the Armed Forces of Ukraine] said.

Last year the military developed an infrastructure of Spanish-speaking recruiters, instructors and junior operational officers, he added.

And recruitment is succeeding in Bogota, Columbia where 10,000 highly trained soldiers retire every year. Service in Ukraine is a good deal for these vets.

Corporals in Colombia get a basic salary of around $400 a month, while experienced drill sergeants can earn up to $900. Colombia’s monthly minimum wage is currently $330.

In Ukraine any member of the armed forces, regardless of citizenship, is entitled to a monthly salary of up to $3,300, depending on their rank and type of service. They are also entitled to up to $28,660 if they are injured, depending on the severity of the wounds. If they are killed in action, their families are due $400,000 compensation.

Let's hope these recruits are not bringing a Columbian record of human rights abuses with them.

Meanwhile on the other side of that war, in Russia, hungry Cubans are providing recruits to be ground up in mass human wave operations, according to Reuters:

Cuban seamstress Yamidely Cervantes has bought a new sewing machine for the first time in years, plus a refrigerator and a cellphone - all on Russia's dime.

She said her 49-year-old husband Enrique Gonzalez, a struggling bricklayer, left their home in the small town of La Federal on July 19 to fight for the Russian army in Ukraine. Days later, he wired her part of his signing-on bonus of about 200,000 roubles ($2,040) which she received in Cuban pesos, Cervantes told Reuters.

... On the 100-meter dirt road where Cervantes lives, at least three men have left for Russia since June, and another had sold his home in anticipation of going, she said.

"You can count on one hand those who are left," the 42-year-old said as she surveyed the street from a small terrace where she'd repurposed two broken toilet bowls as flower pots.

"Necessity is what is driving this."

From its onset, the Israeli war on Gaza has presented challenges to Israel's human economy. The war pushes Israel toward becoming ever more an unsustainable, malignant Sparta. Many men who make its modern economy hum were called up to serve in the Israeli Defense Force, while Palestinian laborers were locked out of the agricultural sector to be replaced by whatever migrant workers Israel could import.

According to a report in the Guardian, Israeli recruitment of foreign construction workers is focusing on India.

The industry relied on approximately 80,000 Palestinian workers, who are now barred from entering Israeli territory. As a result, half-finished residential blocks are everywhere, yellow tower cranes waiting motionlessly overhead. In the West Bank, poverty rates have soared.

The economic impact for Israel could also be severe. The finance ministry has estimated the expulsion of Palestinian construction workers is costing 3bn shekels (£656m) a month, and could eventually lead to a loss of 3% of GDP because the building and housing industries owe 400bn shekels in loans.

... “Right now I earn around 15,000 rupees (£150) a month,” said Rajat Kumar, 27, from the north Indian state of Haryana. Though he has a bachelor’s degree, for six years he had been unable to get any other job except construction, earning a salary he described as “peanuts”. The prospect of travelling abroad to a country engulfed in conflict was a small price to pay for regular, well-paid work, said Kumar, who got his first passport in order to apply for a job as a plasterer in Israel.

The job he has applied for in Israel would pay 138,000 rupees a month, with accommodation provided, which he saw as a small fortune. “When I compare it with what I earn here, I can’t think of anything but the better life I and my family will have,” he said.

A bilateral labour agreement was signed between Israel and New Delhi last May, before the war in Gaza broke out, but has since become a priority for both countries. Israeli transportation minister, Miri Regev, said during a visit to India earlier this month that Israel would be “lessening its dependence on Palestinian workers” by replacing them with skilled foreign workers.

As always in contemplating migrant flows, let's hope this is worth it to the human individuals caught up in the flow of people. But people always get around, something US immigration restrictionists fail to understand.

From the Israeli ground

A Washington Post story about the Israeli war on Gaza as it plays in the city schools reports this from a mother: 

“In Berkeley, you can only be an oppressor or the oppressed,” she said.

Would that reality were so simple! But, all too often, it just isn't. And peace is not advanced by pretending it is. Yes -- Gazans are being wantonly made homeless and slaughtered by superior Israeli fire power. And yes, rightful Palestinian claims in their homeland were being shamelessly erased until Hamas took violent action. But 10/7 was nonetheless criminal and also cannot be erased.

Israeli peace activist Dana Mills (her affiliations include 972+ Magazine and Standing Together) reflects on the horror of struggling for a moral stance while a citizen of a country engaged on atrocity.

... Israelis and Palestinians, both, are constantly frustrated by the unequivocalness in which people from around the world weigh in and tell us what they think we must do in order to save our homelands. The question of having "stakes" in something is very real here. There are degrees of removal from what is happening here. If your family is implicated in what has been unfolding since the 7 October-- on either side-- you are in a different emotional and ideational position than if you are observing it from a distance. If your choices, the issues you're advocating for will have direct consequence on your everyday life you are in a different position to that of advocating for something that will never circle back to you.

Is moral humanism an empty idea, then?

I think not. It is very clear to me that the attack on Gaza is an attack on humanity itself. Not just the humanity of the Palestinian people, but the absolute wreckage, targeting many cultural institutions, demolishing whole neighborhoods--- this is not just an attack on Gazans or Palestinians.

Conversely, I would say that the 7 October attacks were, too, attack on humanity itself. Entering civilian homes at dawn and kidnapping young children is an attack on everyone who is asleep in their bed on an autumnal morning anywhere.

However, I started by writing about Gaza due to the horrendous magnitude-- and longevity-- of the Israeli attack, and thus its consequences. It might be argued that Hamas would have wished to inflict the same devastation on Israel had it had the means. But, well, it didn't.

And the attack on humanity is now apparent from my (wrong) side of history. I can sympathize and understand when people want to act in solidarity with Gaza, even if it pushes them to strange moral positions (and ineffective political positions). I can understand the helplessness of watching this horror unfold live before our eyes and not being able to do anything.

I can also understand those who have stakes in different ways; whose countries send arms to Israel, who feel that their leaders continue to be allies to Netanyahu despite him obviously losing any control over what is unfolding here. I am not a legal scholar so I do not want to weigh on the question of genocide. But I do know an attack of this magnitude warrants a response from humanity at large.

Captured by Mills in Tel Aviv

Condemning the Israeli state that is enacting those actions does not mean losing hold of the humanity of Israelis who are trying -- in different ways-- to resist it. I also feel, strongly, that we, Israelis, are losing our humanity the more this continues, the more we see these horrific actions done in our name. The longer we see our own abducted citizens neglected in the name of revenge and eternal war.

Many of us are trying to hold on to our humanity in different ways: writing, reading, dancing, painting, engaging what it means to be human. This is a grave crisis for anyone who sees themselves as humanist. It is not enough to eternally return to the question of "philosophy after Auschwitz". We need to live life with clear and open eyes to the wrongs enacted by us, around us, in the here and now.

These thoughts did not leave me with a clear action-plan: I do not know what it means to be a humanist during a war/genocide, apart from calling for its end, searching hard for humanism in different corners of your world, finding a way to connect it and encouraging it in myself and others. But I know we are living through a major test for humanity and humanism. May we get through it and learn our lessons.

For Americans who care about peace, all this should be all too familiar. 

We too have launched murderous wars of revenge, slaughtering and torturing Iraqis, Afghans, and so many more. 

And for us, the action plan is simpler -- let's force our government to stop paying for Israel's war. And we can be very glad that there are Israelis, even though only a small remnant, that are struggling to comprehend what peace and justice might mean in their circumstances. We've been there.

Interrupting misinformation

It's my own fault; I should have known better. In an effort to be fair to multiple voices, I listened to the thoughtful Ezra Klein's interview with New York Times uber-pundit and friend to US presidents and Israeli prime ministers, Thomas Friedman. And I was stopped cold when Friedman asked this:

What if [Hamas leader Yahya] Sinwar had sent a million Gazans to walk to the border carrying the Arab Peace Initiative, not one, not 10,000, a million. What if a million Gazans announced that they were walking to the border peacefully, each carrying the Arab Peace Initiative? ...

Ezra didn't rise to the occasion to correct the record, so I'll give that job to UNWRA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East). A non-violent Palestinian march on the Gaza border actually took place during 2018-19. 

...  after the start in Gaza of demonstrations that became known as The Great March of Return (GMR),  scores of people, particularly young men, have been left dead and many others injured, as well as in need of long term medical and psychosocial assistance. According to OCHA figures, as of 22 March 2019, 195 Palestinians (including 41 children) have been killed and close to 29,000 people injured. The United Nations has expressed concerns about the excessive use of force deployed by the Israeli Security Forces (ISF) contrary to applicable standards under international law.

... the Agency is concerned about and deeply affected by the death of 13 of its students, the injury of 227 others, most of them aged between 13 and 15 years, and the likely inability of injured students to keep up with their studies, especially in cases of prolonged absences.

“Since the largely peaceful demonstrations started a year ago, not only did nearly 200 people die, but thousands of others have suffered injuries that will scar them forever,” said UNRWA Director of UNRWA Operations in Gaza, Matthias Schmale. “The tragic and unnecessary loss of lives, the inability of injured people to work or go back to school and the long-term psychological implications of this violence will affect them for many years to come, adding to their despair.”

Non-violent Palestinians get shot when they protest and their pain is discounted. The rest of the world must stop sweeping this into the forgettery.

We can assume that both Youseff's physical therapy program and the hospital where he was treated has been obliterated by Israel's current assault on Gaza.

• • •

Since I made myself listen to the self-aggrandizing Friedman interview, I can report one interesting observation. He asserts that Joe Biden thinks "Hamas is ISIS," which in U.S. terms translates to something like "evil we are not obliged to understand." I'm not sure that flies in any situation, but most certainly not in this one.