Israel, the Occupation, and American Jews

by Harold Gorvine

            Early in July 1967, less than a month after Israel’s victory in the Six Day War, David Ben Gurion came to speak at Beit Berl, the “think tank” of the Labor Party, the party that Ben Gurion had founded but of which he was no longer a member.  The mood in Israel and the Diaspora was one of euphoria, but that was not the mood of Israel’s founding father.

            Rabbi Arthur Herztberg recalls that Ben Gurion “had about him the air of a prophet who had walked out of his tent to die, but had paused on this last journey to tell us truths that the less farsighted could not see…He insisted that all of the territories that had been captured had to be given back very quickly, for holding on to them would distort, and might ultimately destroy, the Jewish state.”  The only exception he made was that Israel should control all of Jerusalem.[1]

            Ben Gurion’s warning was all too prescient.  The occupation has distorted the Jewish state.  It has not destroyed it – at least not yet.

            The occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has been a disaster for Israel.  Because of the limitation of space I will focus on the moral and religious aspects of that disaster.  I will then turn to the role of the American Jewish community in the tragic events that have followed the Six Day War.

            In psychology there is a concept known as enabling.  Unfortunately many individuals in our society engage in neurotic or self-destructive behavior.  An enabler is a member of the person’s family or a friend who enables – often out of the best of motives – the individual to continue to behave in a self destructive way.

            By ignoring Ben Gurion’s warning, Israel embarked on a self-destructive path. And American Jews for the most part have been the enablers.

I

            I do not intend to write a brief history of the occupation.  Instead I shall illustrate why I believe that the occupation has been a disaster for Israel.

            Yehuda Shaul, an ultra-Orthodox twenty-one year old who had served as a soldier in Hebron, recently organized an exhibit of soldiers’ photographs.  The exhibit, which was shown in the gallery of The Academy for Geographic Photography in Tel Aviv, was entitled “Breaking the Silence.”  What is significant is that Shaul found other soldiers who had served in Hebron who were willing to share their photographs and memories.

            Shaul recalls: “It’s a situation that screws up everyone.  Everyone goes through the same process there of the erosion of red lines and a sinking into numbness.  People start out at different points and end up at different points, but everyone goes through this process.  No one returns from the territories without it leaving a deep imprint, messing up his head.”

            One of Shaul’s friends tells about a soldier who had a weapon with a launcher.  He was also given tear gas canisters with which to break up riots.  This particular young man “loved to shoot all his gas, so he would also steal it from other people who had tear gas launchers…If he saw a group of people standing and talking, he would fire the tear gas [sic] just to see them run and cough.  He got a big kick out of it.”

            Shortly after Operation Defensive Shield (an Israeli military incursion into the West Bank in 2002) Shaul returned from Ramallah to Hebron.  When he went up to the second floor of a building where there was a clinic, he found “everything turned upside down.  The windows were open, syringes were scattered on the floor and excrement was smeared over everything.”

            Another one of the soldiers who contributed to the exhibit remembers nights when he and his friends would get up at two A.M. armed with several grenades.  They would “walk among the houses and shout and yell and make terrible noises - all just to frighten our enemies. . . I don’t know if we really just made some kids cry in the middle of the night or if it really had some psychological effect on someone who wanted to hurt us.”

            As part of their regular routine, Shaul reports, soldiers go on patrol in Hebron, “put the women and children in one room and the men in another, check documents, turn the house upside down and then leave.  There are no terrorists there, no special alerts.”  Shaul goes on to describe the “hours upon hours of shooting from a heavy machine gun or a grenade launcher, on a residential neighborhood….  And for four hours in a row.  It’s a situation that brings out the insanity in people.”

            On one Memorial Day for Israel’s Fallen Soldiers, Shaul and his friends were ordered to come to the ceremony held by the settlers.  After the rabbi spoke, settlers read the names of the IDF casualties killed in Hebron, “and at the end, they added the name of Baruch Goldstein” (the American-born Israeli doctor who, one Purim day several years ago at the site where Jews and Muslims believe Abraham is buried, massacred several Muslims while they were praying).  For Shaul, “that was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”   When the interviewer for Haaretz asked him, “And what did the camel do?”  Shaul answered, “Got up and left.”

            Shaul also claims that despite the Israeli Supreme Court’s decision forbidding the use by IDF soldiers of Palestinians as human shields, the practice still goes on in Hebron.

            And then there are the graffiti painted onto the walls of Palestinian shops and homes in Hebron by Jewish settlers and perhaps some soldiers:  “Arabs = an inferior race,”  “Spill Arab blood,” “Death to the Arabs,” “Kahane was right,” and the most chilling one of all - “Arabs to the gas chambers.”   One passing car had a bumper sticker that read, “Religious penitence provides strength to expel the Arabs.”[2]

            In a recent article in The New Republic, Yossi Klein Halevi and Michael B. Oren argue that in fighting the second intifada, “Israel has not resorted to the indiscriminate bombings, mass expulsions, blockades of food and fuel that modern states have frequently adopted in wartime.”  Furthermore, they point out that in order to reduce civilian casualties Israeli soldiers hunting for terrorists have put themselves at risk by fighting house-to-house instead of using artillery.  While they admit “that abuses against civilians have occurred,” with the IDF investigating 600 reported incidents thus far, they still conclude that Israel has proven that “a war against terrorism can be fought while preserving basic democratic principles.”[3]  Moreover, nowhere in the three-page article do Klein and Oren even mention Yehuda Shaul’s Hebron exhibit and the horrors that he described in his June 2004 interview with Haaretz.

            Israel has indeed “won” the second intifada.  Most of the leaders of Hamas have been killed, and there is even evidence that more and more Palestinians have turned against the terrorists and suicide bombers.   Targeted assassinations, military operations, and the fence have been effective.[4]

            So what are we to make of all of this?  A member of my family who lives in Israel has said to me that the IDF is the most moral army in the world.  It seems to me, however, that she, Yossi Klein Halevi, and Michael B. Oren are averting their eyes from what Yehuda Shaul and his fellow soldiers are trying to tell us.  The occupation is destroying the moral fiber of Israel’s army.  The IDF was once the most moral army in the world, but now?????

            Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is poised to evacuate all of the Israeli settlements in Gaza and four small settlements on the West Bank, and he is in on record as favoring the creation of a Palestinian state.  However, in a recent interview with the Israeli daily newspaper Yediot Ahronot, Sharon said, “It could very well be that after the evacuation, there will be a very long period in which nothing else will happen. Israel will continue its war on terrorism, and will stay in the territories that will remain [i.e., in most of the West Bank].”[5]

            And so the occupation will continue, along with its morally corrupting effects on Israeli society.  It is a well known fact that Arafat and his cronies are corrupt, but what is not so well known is that the cancer of corruption has infected Israeli society as well.

            It works like this: whatever is imported into Gaza and the West Bank has to go through Israel.  High-ranking officials in the Palestinian authority hold monopolies on gasoline, lumber, cement, cigarettes, and frozen foods.  A number of former Israeli security officials share control of these monopolies.  As Israeli writer Amos Elon puts it, “notwithstanding frequent curfews, the supplies invariably go through.”  And of course, the prices for these goods are much higher than what Israelis have to pay for them.[6]

            The case of gasoline is particularly instructive.  American reporter Richard Ben Cramer describes it in detail in his recent book, How Israel Lost: The Four Questions. The gas that Palestinians have to buy comes from one Israeli company – Dor Energy. Once the gas is delivered to the West Bank and Gaza, “the price is further jacked up by the PA monopoly.”

            Ben Cramer continues: “It doesn’t matter what level of [border] ‘closure’ has been announced, or who has ‘declared war’ on whom.  The petroleum tankers must go through – and they do.  In fact, at a main crossing between Israel and Gaza, there’s a nice army-guarded petroleum depot… [that] has never been hit [by terrorists], or even interrupted in its operations – go figure!  Another amazement: the Palestinian tankers [delivering gasoline throughout the West Bank] never have a problem [going though checkpoints and] delivering in safety…it turns out, one stockholder in the PA oil monopoly is Muhammad Dahlan, the [former] Gazan chief of Preventive Security.”[7]

            Near the end of his life in the early 1920s the great proponent of cultural Zionism Ahad Ha’am heard rumors that Jews had killed innocent Arabs in acts of vengeance.  In a letter to one of the Hebrew newspapers he wrote, “Is this the dream of a return to Zion which our people have dreamt for centuries: that we now come to Zion to stain its soil with innocent blood?  Many years ago… I stated that our people will willingly give their money to build up their state, but they will never sacrifice their prophets for it.  And now…the people[’s] inclination grows to sacrifice their prophets on the altar of their ‘renaissance.’”

            He concluded with a cry of anguish: “Are we really doing it only to add in an Oriental corner a small people of new Levantines who vie with other Levantines in shedding blood, in desire for vengeance, and in angry violence?  If this be the ‘Messiah,’ then I do not wish to see his coming.”[8]

            Ahad Ha’am’s question haunts us to this day.

II

            The occupation has been a religious disaster as well as a moral one.  What has happened is that the voices of religious extremism in Israel have drowned out those of religious moderation.

            Again, I do not have the space to go into great detail about how this has happened. One figure stands out, however: HaRav Tzvi Yehuda HaCohen Kook, the son of the chief rabbi of the yishuv (the name of the Jewish community in Palestine before the 1948 creation of the State of Israel) – Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook.

            The second Rav Kook, who was the Rosh Yeshivat Mercaz HaRav, inspired many of the members of Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful), who decided that it was their mission to settle Biblical Judea and Samaria in order to fulfill the divine command to reclaim all of Biblical Eretz Yisrael.

            Drawing on various poskim (arbitrators and interpreters of Torah law) including the Ramban, the second Rav Kook stated “that the precept of conquering the land applies in all generations – and all of them agree that it is a commandment of the Torah.”  He emphasized that “Jewish sovereignty in Eretz HaKodesh, meaning the state of Israel…is an essential and clearly stated commandment, a precept incumbent on all of Clal Yisrael [the entire community of Jews worldwide].”[9]

            In another one of his sichot (discussions) the second Rav Kook explained that the commandment come and possess is performed, “If need be, through the waging of war to conquer the land – whether this be enjoyable to us, or whether it goes against our nature and spirit.”   And then in a dig against any who might disagree with his interpretations: “We don’t choose between mitzvot, like certain ‘Orthodox’ Jews do.”[10]  The true mark of a fanatic: one who thinks that he has a monopoly of the truth. 

            For Rav Kook, the principal meaning of a compulsory war (milchemet mitzvah) is “liberating the Land…The concept of a Torah–commanded war is bound up with entering the Land, as explained by the Ramban that this Land must be in our hands, under our active sovereignty and government, and not under the rule of any other nation.”[11]

            Surrendering land, he argued, is absolutely forbidden. “…we are not allowed to make a tiny, mini-state with the name of Eretz Yisrael, G-d forbid.”  The land belongs to million of Jews all over the world. To relinquish any of the land “…is a disgrace,…and a violation of the Torah, as Halachically derived from [Talmudic] tractate Avodah Zarah, on the verse, v’lo t’nachem, Not to show them mercy, which means, not to give them (gentiles) a place on the Land.”[12]

            In this last passage Rav Kook is giving Jews license to expel the Arabs from Israel and the territories.

            The second Rav Kook acknowledged the importance of Pekuach Nefesh [guarding the sanctity of life] which he says “exists in all wars.”  However, for him “the precept to conquer the land of Israel and to rule over it comes even at the risk of one’s life.”[13]

            Rav Kook was a true believer.  He was absolutely certain that he understood what God wants.  He also was drawing on some of the ugliest parts of our tradition, i.e., the command in Deuteronomy that the Israelites must kill most of the inhabitants of the land – something that the archaeologists tell us did not happen, thank God!   At the same time, of course, Rav Kook was promoting a political agenda – the annexation of the West Bank and Gaza, which for him were all part of Biblical Eretz Yisrael.

            We all know that the rabbis in the Talmud often made major changes in Biblical law, even though they claimed that they were merely discerning God’s will.  It is possible – indeed necessary –lifsok– to interpret our tradition, as did our sages, in the light of changing circumstances.  What about the commandment in the Torah: “Remember the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”   Put this command together with the principle of Pekuach Nefesh, and one can conclude that it is God’s will that we not rule over another people and that it is a mitzvah to relinquish the West Bank and Gaza.

            When I look at the photograph of Rav Kook on the cover of Torat Eretz Yisrael, I see the face of a kindly old man who might have been my grandfather.   As a shomer mitzvot (an observant Jew) he undoubtedly visited the sick, comforted the mourner, and performed acts of loving kindness all of his life.  This makes what he advocated in regard to the territories all the more terrifying.  How could such a good man have put forth views that guarantee permanent war between Jews and Arabs?

            As I see it, Rav Kook’s interpretation of the tradition – and this applies as well to those Jews who today subscribe to it – is chilul Ha’Shem: profaning God’s name.  Worse, it puts land above God and is therefore avodah zarah – a form of idolatry.   And finally, it converts Judaism from a religion of life to a religion of death.   Could a real tzaddik (righteous person) have authored such views in the wake of the horrors of two world wars and the Holocaust?

III

            What is the situation, or as Israelis call it, hamatzav?  Recently, there were two suicide bombings - one in Beer Sheva and another on September 22 near a bus stop in Jerusalem’s French Hill neighborhood.  The last one before these two was six months ago.  So, while the intifada may have been crushed, sporadic attacks will continue.

            In the meantime, Prime Minister Sharon seems determined to go ahead with evacuating all of the Jewish settlements in Gaza and four small ones on the West Bank. He is meeting political resistance within his own party and hearing calls from some sectors of the secular and religious right that any such evacuation orders are illegal.  In late June 2004 the Committee of Settlement Rabbis ruled that “no person – civilian, soldier, or policeman – may aid or actively participate in uprooting settlements.”[14]

            Incidentally, in June 1974 a group of religious Jews decided to make the first attempt to settle the northern West Bank in defiance of the government of then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.  Ariel Sharon, then an ex-soldier and a first term Knesset member, suggested to the young people in the group exactly where they should make their stand.  When Rabin sent troops to evict the squatters, Sharon, protected by his parliamentary immunity, urged them to refuse orders.  When soldiers pulled at one of the young activists, Sharon threw them aside, shouting, “An order like that you shouldn’t obey.  It’s an immoral order.”[15]

            There have been threats against Sharon’s life from right wing extremists. Remember, a religious zealot assassinated Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.

            The chilling thing about all of this is that in the first century C.E. it was religious zealots who launched a disastrous revolt against Rome that brought about the destruction of the Second Jewish Commonwealth.  Read Josephus’ The Jewish War Against the Romans.  And in the next century a misguided messianism culminated in the Bar Kochba revolt that led to further Roman expulsions of Jews from Judea.

            I do not think that it will come to that.  I believe that most soldiers will obey orders to evacuate settlements.  But as I said earlier, the occupation will continue.

IV

            I now come to the role of American Jewry.  Many American Jews have maintained over the years since 1948 that it is necessary for world Jewry to retain a united front when facing the rest of the world.  Since Israel is under constant threat, washing Jewish dirty linen in public will hurt Israel’s security.  If Israel does something wrong, don’t let the goyim know about it. 

            The first time that dissent surfaced was in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War.  The group took the name Breira -alternative- as an answer to the Israeli cry of ein breira - “there is no alternative.”   Its full name was Breira: A Project of Concern in Diaspora -Israel Relations.

            Its national chairman, Rabbi Arnold Wolf, stated that the name signified, “our desire for an alternative to the intransigence of both the PLO and the several governments of Israel.”   The group proposed a two state solution.   Bill Novak, another of the founders, explained that the name was chosen as a challenge to the assumptions behind the phrase ein-breira, which he said, is sometimes used indiscriminately and reflexively as a defense of the status quo.  “It was also,” he went on, “a comment about the importance of Israel and the Hebrew language.”

            Within a year, Breira became a national membership organization.  Its members included one hundred Reform and Conservative rabbis and a number of important American Jewish writers and intellectuals, including Steven M. Cohen, Paul Cowan, Arthur Green, Irving Howe, Paula Hyman, Jack Nusan Porter, Henry Schwarschild, and Milton Viorst.  In addition, “young Jewish radicals and students in the Jewish counter-culture helped to found Breira.”[16]

            As Michael E. Staub puts it in his book Torn At the Roots: The Crisis of Jewish Liberalism in Postwar America, “Breira survived four tumultuous years.  Its proposals on Israeli-Diaspora Jewish relations and Palestinian nationalism generated fierce international debate over the limits of public dissent and conflict in Jewish communal life, and virtually every major American Jewish organization took a public stand on the group and what it advocated.”[17]

            At first Breira seemed to thrive as an alternative to AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) and to the right wing religious Zionism of Rabbi Meir Kabane’s Jewish Defense League and Gush Emunim in Israel.[18]

            I do not have the space to describe in detail how the right wing of the American Zionist movement destroyed Breira.  What did the organization in ultimately were meetings that some of its members held with two Arabs who had ties to the Palestine Liberation Organization.  The American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization, arranged the meetings.  The participants agreed to keep the meetings secret, and the American Jews from Breira made it clear that they were attending merely as private citizens.

            However, when the Jerusalem Post broke the story, Breira was finished.  A campaign of hysterical and vicious vilification took place in the American Jewish press.  One target was an American Jewish political radical, Arthur Waskow, who was portrayed as a PLO supporter.  On February 20, 1977 when Breira held its first national membership conference in Chevy Chase, Maryland, JDL members demonstrated outside carrying placards that read, “No Deals with Baby Killers,” “Breira Is the Choice of Death,” and “Breira Means Suicide.” 

            Even moderate American Jews such as Rabbi Ira Eisenstein, the son-in-law of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, made a point of stating in the Reconstructionist magazine of February 1977 that he had resigned from Breira a year before.  And he concluded, “There is a serious question whether safe and fairly prosperous American Jews, from their comfortable armchairs in the USA, have the moral right to urge policies upon Israelis which could well involve their very lives and the life of the State.”[19]

            Breira had been destroyed.  The radical secular and religious Zionist right had silenced a moderate left wing group, and centrist Jewish leaders such as Rabbi Eisenstein had acquiesced and had retreated from their earlier principled positions in acts of abject moral cowardice.

            And just what was Breira’s great sin?  It supported the cause of two states - a Jewish state and a Palestinian one comprising the West Bank and Gaza.  This is exactly the position taken later by Israel’s Labor Party during the 1990’s.  And now Ariel Sharon, who opposed the idea when Labor was in power, has embraced it, although whether his projected Palestinian state would be a viable one remains at best an open question. 

            Two other examples of attempts by the American Jewish and Zionist right to silence dissent:  A group of American Jews formed an organization called Americans for Peace Now to support Shalom Achshav in Israel.  They sought admission to the Conference of Presidents of American Jewish Organizations.  They were admitted, but there was a significant and bitter struggle; in the end, the vote was not unanimous.  Among those voting to block admission of APN was the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA).

            What colossal chutzpah!  Shalom Achshav was a legal, accepted part of the political landscape in Israel, but ZOA sought to make APN a pariah!

The second instance involved two American academics, both brilliant, articulate, knowledgeable Ph.D.s - Daniel Pipes and Ian Lustick.  Pipes, a political activist and ardent supporter of Israel, created a list of academics whom he considered enemies of Israel, and posted this list on the Internet.  He wanted to include Lustick, an accomplished and well-published professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania.  Lustick, like Pipes, is an ardent supporter of Israel, but his views are decidedly left wing.  Lustick protested at his inclusion on Pipes’ list, and Pipes backed off.  (I do not know whether Pipes continued to put out any list on the Internet.)

            The position of various American administrations has been that the expansion of settlements is an obstacle to peace.  However, only one president, the first George Bush, was willing to put teeth into his opposition.  In 1991 Israel asked the United States for a loan guarantee of ten billion dollars to help settle Russian immigrants, many of them in the West Bank.  Bush was determined to hold up the loan, even though Congress could override his veto.

            Two Israeli cabinet ministers called Bush an anti-Semite, although to his credit Prime Minister Itzhak Shamir tried to quiet them.  Some American Jews also cried anti-Semitism, although the charge was given some credence when Bush’s Secretary of State James Baker was overheard saying “**** the Jews. They don’t vote for us anyway” (which was true since most Jews had been voting Democratic in presidential elections.)

            The President got his back up and told a press conference, “I heard today there was something like a thousand lobbyists on the Hill working on the other side of the question.  We’ve got one lonely little guy down here doing it.”   The result, as author Geoffrey Wheatcroft put it, was that “… the president’s outburst worked. Jewish-American support for the loan guarantee crumbled…As one Jewish leader put it, Bush ‘clobbered the Jewish community, left us in a state of shock.  People were deeply hurt and offended, and it also scared…us.’ The guarantee was held up, then frozen.” 20

            Anti-Semitism? No way!!!  A powerful lobby – in this case a Jewish lobby – had challenged the President of the United States.  As in many other instances when a president fought back, Bush had his way with Congress.  And, in my view, Bush’s position was sound public policy – good for the United States and good for Israel.

            A small footnote to this incident:  In the midst of the controversy over the loan guarantee, a small group of Jews from Philadelphia and its suburbs went to Washington to lobby a local congressman on behalf of President Bush’s position.  The congressman was very sympathetic but indicated that he could not support the group’s position. Although he did not say why, it was probably because he was coming up for reelection the following year.  His opponent was popular and attractive, and the congressman must have believed that he could not afford to lose the Jewish vote in what did prove to be a close election.

V

            I come now to the most difficult part of my article because it involves me personally.  In 1987 I was a member of a Reconstructionist congregation in Media.  The rabbi was Brian Walt, who incidentally had worked as a teacher at Akiba during the 1970s.

            On Yom Kippur, about three months before the outbreak of the first Palestinian intifada in December, Brian (he wasn’t just my rabbi, he also was my friend) gave a sermon in which he said that Israelis were oppressing another people, the Palestinians, in the West Bank and Gaza.  Needless to say, a furor erupted.  Many in the congregation were appalled and angry.  Things got only worse in December.  Shortly after the outbreak of the intifada Brian took part in a demonstration outside of the Israeli consulate; what made the situation even more combustible was that Brian was the spokesman for the protesters.

            The upshot was that the congregation was bitterly divided between the supporters and opponents of Brian.  After a few months he decided that the situation was intolerable; and even though his contract still had about a year to run, he asked the congregation for a vote of confidence.  He lost.  Those of us who supported him left with him and founded a new synagogue, Mishkan Shalom, to which my wife and I still belong. (Brian, who had a lifetime contract at Mishkan Shalom, left in June 2003; he is now North American director of Rabbis for Human Rights, an organization founded in Israel.)

            During the years when he was my rabbi at Beth Israel and Mishkan Shalom, he opened my eyes.  Throughout my years at Akiba from 1964 to the mid 1980’s I had been only dimly aware of what was going on in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza.  I was happily teaching American and European history, integrating general and Jewish history, and even teaching Bible for two years.  However, because of Brian I was alerted to the situation in Israel and the Middle East, and I began to educate myself by reading and using my skills as an historian.

            Eventually I took on to teach Akiba’s 11th grade Israel course.  And I want to make something totally clear. As is quite evident from this long article, I have a strong political position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  However, when I step into the classroom, I put on a different hat, so to speak.  I am a teacher and historian.  It is not simply a matter of presenting all sides of an issue and encouraging students to argue their positions.  More importantly, it is the task of the historian and history teacher to seek historical truth and help his/her students find it.  This is difficult to do, because sometimes the truth uncovers the ugly as well as the beautiful.  But only by seeking truth can real commitment be built.  Students see through propaganda.

            So for me at Akiba things were going well, and my new synagogue was flourishing.  However, Brian had become a pariah, an outcast in the Greater Philadelphia Jewish community.  At one point a rumor surfaced that he had told his congregants not to contribute to the Jewish Federation.  It never happened.  I was there.  I know.  He said no such thing.

            Where did the rumor come from?  As a professional historian, I am very suspicious of conspiracy theories.  In this case, however, I wonder.  Did someone or more than one person deliberately spread this lie to further discredit Brian as “pro-Palestinian” – a man who had spent considerable time in Israel after leaving South Africa, a man who is a Zionist to the core?

            The “punishment” was that Brian was banned from the pages of the Jewish Exponent.  An eloquent voice of dissent had been effectively silenced.  When a memorial was held to commemorate the tragedy of Rabin’s assassination, Brian was allowed to read a psalm, but he was not permitted by the event’s organizers to speak in his own name.  One of the approved speakers was a rabbi who had never had the courage to condemn or even criticize the occupation.

            Finally, however, a new president of the Jewish Federation met with Brian and agreed to lift the ban.  Yet Brian had a condition.  Arthur Waskow had also been banned from the Jewish Exponent, and Brian wanted Arthur to be granted “amnesty.”  The answer was no to Arthur, and so the ban on Brian continued.

            And just what was the objection to Arthur?  I cannot say for sure; I can only guess.  Arthur was a radical and had been an active member of Breira.  But now that the Israeli government was moving towards accepting a Palestinian state, why continue to “punish” Arthur?

            There is an historical analogy that I think solves the riddle.  During the McCarthy period of the 1950’s, left-wing Americans who had not been members of the Communist Party in the 1930’s were accused of being Communists.  The proof?  They had been premature anti-Fascists.  That is, in the years before the Soviet-Nazi nonaggression pact of 1939 the American Communist Party had been anti-Fascist.  So if you had been anti-Fascist during the 1930’s, you must have been a Communist.

            By that logic Arthur was to be banned from the pages of the Exponent because he had been right too soon and must still be “pro-Palestinian” in his heart of hearts.  Or maybe it was just a matter of killing the messenger who had brought the bad news.

            And now to the Jewish Exponent.  I was not a member of Breira during the 1970’s, but I did attend two demonstrations outside of the Israeli consulate in the late 1980’s and mid 1990’s.  Of course, I was also a very respected and trusted member of Akiba’s faculty, and I had taught many of the children of the Jewish establishment, and they and their children were very pleased with what the students had learned.

            However, when I wrote letters to the Jewish Exponent expressing my views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they were never published.  I eventually gave up and stopped writing letters.

In the September 16, 2004 pages of the Exponent its editor Jonathan Tobin refers to the “corrupt dictatorship” of the Palestinian Authority.21 He is certainly correct in his characterization of Arafat and his cronies.  But has the Exponent ever devoted space to the corruption of Israelis who collaborate with corrupt Palestinians to enrich themselves of the expense of poor Palestinians?  For that information, one must turn to Richard Ben Cramer’s book or to the article by Amos Elon in The New York Review of Books.

            And what about Yehuda Shaul’s heartbreaking exhibit?  For that one must turn to the pages of Haaretz.  So Israelis and Americans can read about the exhibit there, but those Jews in Philadelphia who get their information about Israel only from the Exponent do not know about it.

            Yes, the Exponent now prints the views of some moderate left wingers such as Leonard Fein.  However, on the whole the Exponent has not done what a good newspaper should.

            Many Jews in Philadelphia have complained for years about the anti-Israel bias in the Philadelphia Inquirer.  At times this has been true.  However, the Exponent is guilty of much worse.  It has suppressed information that its readers need to make informed decisions.

            The silencing goes on in other parts of the Greater Philadelphia community as well.  When left-of-center Israelis come to Philadelphia to seek support, most of our synagogues will not allow them to speak.  My synagogue does, and to its credit Akiba has allowed them to speak to our students.  Sadly, many of these Israelis have to speak under the auspices of the American Friends Service Committee, a group that is not exactly friendly to Israel. (And please, please do not confuse the American Friends Service Committee with Quakers as a whole.)

            So, if the AFSC is not a friend to Israel, why do Israeli dissenters speak under its auspices?  The answer is that they need support in this country.

            Those to whom I have spoken over the years have told me that they want us to speak out against the occupation and the expansion of settlements.  They have in effect told me that if we American Jews do not publicly dissent, we are hurting Israel.  Speak out, they say.  If you let the right silence you, you are hurting Israel and are enabling Israel to continue an occupation that is slowly destroying the country.

         On erev Yom Kippur I received an email from Mark Braverman, who graduated from Akiba in 1966.  This past summer when he visited Israel for a family event, several Israelis with whom he spoke – “compassionate, intelligent people, on the left, … were curious and disturbed about our (American) policies toward Israel.  Why do you support the present (Israeli) government's policies, they asked.  Atem dofkim otanu!  [You are beating us up – or (slang) You are screwing us up!]   Could it be put more clearly?”22

VI – Conclusion

            For me there is a profound disconnect between the Israel that I love – the land, the beautiful scenery, the historical places, the people, my wife’s family, my former students who made aliyah, my childhood friend who has lived in Jerusalem since 1963 – and the horrors that I have described in this article.  Writing this piece for L’Shem Shamayim has been therapeutic for me.

            Recently one of my former students who has lived and worked in Beer Sheva for seventeen years told me that her area of Israel, the Negev, does not get its fair share of the country’s tax revenues.  She attributed this partly to the fact that under Israel’s political system specific areas do not elect representatives, as is the case in the United States.  The other reason, of course, is that the government continues to invest so much money in the territories. I would add:  shouldn’t more money be going to the Galil as well?

            When David Ben Gurion retired, he went to live in S’deh Boker as an example to young Israelis.  Settle and develop the Negev, he urged.   Once again Israelis ignored his advice.

            As for Yasser Arafat:  he certainly is a corrupt leader who has failed his own people.  He probably is wholly or partly responsible for initiating the second intifada in 2000, and for the deaths of hundreds of innocent Israelis murdered by suicide bombers.

            I believe that he is not a suitable negotiating partner for peace.  Interestingly, some individuals in the Israeli intelligence community think that Israel can negotiate with him.  Other Israeli intelligence officials, of course, and a large majority of Israeli Jews do not trust him and want the Israeli government to have nothing to do with him.  Of course, whether he is or is not a suitable negotiating partner, no other leader can emerge on the Palestinian side as long as he is alive.

            On the American Jewish scene there are signs that the wall of silence is again beginning to crack. Americans for Peace Now has been around for several years now.  And there is a new organization that has attracted thousands of members – Brit Tzedek V’Shalom.

            The American Jewish and Israeli right wing have entered into an unholy alliance with the Christian Right in the United States.  Think about it!  Many of these American evangelicals and fundamentalists support Israeli settlement of the entire West Bank because they believe that Jews must possess all of Biblical Eretz Yisrael before Jesus can come back to earth a second time.  So they are perfectly willing to enable thousands of Jews and Arabs to kill each other so that their Messiah will come back from the dead and usher in the Messianic age.  When this happens, of course, Jews who do not convert to Christianity will die in a horrible war.  With such friends…

            Finally, even if all of the terrible anti-Semitism were to be removed from the textbooks used by Palestinian children and Arafat were to die, the hatred of these children for Israel and Israelis will not go away as long as Israel continues to occupy large parts of the West Bank.  Sometime in the future a third intifada will break out.

            There is no such thing as a benevolent occupation.  Occupation destroys the occupied and the occupiers alike.