Toronto Jews Challenge Jewish Identity Based on 'Indoctrination in Ethnic Nationalism'

One of my themes on this blog is that our policymaking in the Mideast will stay broken until Jews have the courage to openly describe and, if they need to, challenge the construction of Jewish identity. The problem with the neocons is that they have by and large acted out of a strong sense of essentially religious concern with the security needs of the Jewish state, but suppressed that component of their thinking in the public square. For instance, Charles Jacobs identifies himself only as the president of a Darfur group on a neocon foundation's website, leaving out his many Zionist activities. He offers opacity, where the state of the world demands transparency. Tikkun of Toronto has blazed new ground in this area by posting "Israel stories," ten-minute oral narratives from Jews talking in the most personal and plain manner about what Israel meant to them growing up and what it means now. Obviously, these are progressives, but the four narratives I've listened to so far all get at the crisis that is enveloping Jewish identity for the next generation when at its core is support for a state that practices apartheid in the West Bank. As Tikkun says, gently, in publishing the stories: "There is a tension raised in our lives when the clothes of our ancestors, passed down to us, do not fit who we are. And there is a tension when the truths we learned in childhood no longer seem true." And so Harvey, a religious kid and the son of Holocaust survivors, describes the impact on his worldview of being jailed in Morocco on a drug charge and finding that his Arab prison-mates treated him as an equal. Married to an Israeli, he admits that he has not been back to the Jewish state in 18 years because his and his wife's views have the potential to divide her family. As his own family was once divided when his mother retracted an invitation to a Passover seder to a relative who had reached out to Arafat.

[more]

Israel Says 'No'

On Jan. 23 Ha'aretz readers were utterly embarrassed. Just as the quality paper was printing its top headline, based on Israel's omniscient "security sources" – "New Israeli Policy in Gaza: Border Crossings Will Stay Closed" – the border crossings between Gaza and Egypt were being opened; a few hours later, they didn't exist anymore. Once again, the regional power was caught in surprise; Hamas won by breaking the siege. A good indication for a declining empire is its inherent tendency to say "no" to reality. The Soviet Union gave the English language the interjection "nyet." Long ago, it was the Arabs who said "no" – no to negotiations, no to normalization, no to recognition, no to peace. This changed, at the latest, with the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002. Now it's Israel that has become the nyet-sayer. Get prepared to look up "lo," the Hebrew "no," in the Oxford English Dictionary. The Israeli border town of Sderot is under attack. Rockets from Gaza are fired at the civilian population on a daily basis. No country can tolerate that for long, but the attacks have been going on for seven years. Military operations have all failed to stop or even significantly reduce the fire. Any rational adviser would say (1) protect or evict the inhabitants of Sderot; (2) talk to those firing the missiles and see what they want. Israel, however, says "no" to both suggestions.

[more]

Israel’s Self-Defeating ‘Liquidation’

As chance would have it, the “liquidation” was carried out only a few days after I wrote an article about the inability of occupying powers to understand the inner logic of resistance organizations. Mughniyeh’s “liquidation” is an outstanding example of this. (Of course, Israel gave up its occupation of South Lebanon some years ago, but the relationship between the parties has remained as it was.) In the eyes of the Israeli leadership, the “liquidation” was a huge success. We have “cut off the head of the serpent” (another headline from Haaretz). We have inflicted on Hizbullah immense damage, so much that it cannot be repaired. “This is not revenge but prevention”, as another of the guided reporters (Haaretz again) declared. This is such an important achievement, that it outweighs the inevitable revenge, whatever the number of victims-to-be. In the eyes of Hizbullah, thing look quite different. The organization has acquired another precious asset: a national hero, whose name fills the air from Iran to Morocco. The “liquidated” Mughniyeh is worth more than the live Mughniyeh, irrespective of what his real status may have been at the end of his life. Enough to remember what happened here in 1942, when the British “liquidated” Abraham Stern (a.k.a. Ya’ir): from his blood the Lehi organization (a.k.a. Stern Gang) was born and became perhaps the most efficient terrorist organization of the 20th century. Therefore, Hizbullah has no interest at all in belittling the status of the liquidatee. On the contrary, Hassan Nasrallah, exactly like Ehud Olmert, has every interest in blowing up his stature to huge proportions.

[more]

Learning From Arab Jews

Column: David Shasha, the founder and director of the Center for Sephardic Heritage in Brooklyn, New York, is one of my favorite weekly email reads. (You can subscribe, too, by contacting him directly.) Arab and Jew are not mutually exclusive categories. Quite the contrary. Anyone who tells you, as so many “pundits” do in this society when trying to explain the Middle East, that “Jews and Arabs have been fighting for thousands of years,” is speaking from ignorance. The idea of a conflict between “Jews” and “Arabs” is really only as old as modern political Zionism, and really only took on a generalized form in the second half of the 20th century amid the trauma that accompanied the creation of the State of Israel. Jews and Arabs had, in fact, lived together for hundreds of years in the Muslim world, and many Jews have always considered themselves Arab. David Shasha makes the case that this branch of Judaism, what he calls the “Levantine Option”, is tragically silenced and excluded from the mainstream Ashkenazi and Zionist narrative that dominates discussion of the Jewish experience. He argues that while the Ashkenazi tradition was both heavily influenced by Western Christian traditions and also, because of persecution, evolved a far more narrow, insular “shtetl” outlook on Jewish identity. By contrast, he argues, the Sephardic experience, in the “convivienca” of Moorish Spain and the Arab lands in the Islamic golden age actually has much more to offer Jews looking for an expansive, universalist version of their identity in a multi-cultural, cosmopolitan world. It’s fascinating stuff: Read on!

[more]