semitism.net

(Brad Brooks-Rubin posting here, with Andrew’s indulgence. As you see, my family and I are heading to Israel for 3 months, so I hope to be writing more from there about our experiences.)

Next week, my family and I leave to spend close to 3 months in Israel. I have not been to Israel in 9 years – not as a married man and certainly not as a father of 2 young children. So much has changed in 9 years, and I have been thinking a lot about how I will deal with those changes: with the crushing new realities on the ground, with how I will process it all through the prism of what I remember (which, of course, seemed horrible enough at the time), with how I will even begin to try to teach my 2.5 year old even a sliver of what is happening around him, or what it will be like for him when he gets home. What will he come to think of the place he has just spent 3 months, or the people and place he is coming back to? (Yes, he’s only 2.5, but I expect a lot).

What better teaching tool could I ask for than the interim Winograd report? Now, people much smarter, more in the know on day-to-day events, and with far more interesting things to say will be commenting on the details of the report over the coming days (and I look forward to reading Andrew’s comments and other posts on this blog). But, in sum, the report finds that there were “very serious failings” in last year’s war with Hezbollah, and the primary responsibility for those failings lay at the feet of PM Olmert, Defense Minister Peretz, and outgoing IDF Chief of Staff Halutz. The failings include: failure to study and understand the Lebanese arena; failure to consider a range of options; failure to present clear goals; failure to adapt in the face of new information; and so on. Then the report presents a range of recommendations on how to fix both decision-making and conduct in the future. The report has been met with thunderous calls in Israel for Olmert to resign.

Now, of course, this is the war that, less than a year ago, led to rallies and emergency campaigns across the U.S. to “stand with Israel” and to fend off international pressure for a cease fire because, well, because Israel knew what it was doing, knows how to fight wars, and needed to do this in order to protect itself (and, by extension, the rest of the western world facing threats from Iranian-backed, Islamic forces like Hezbollah’s). Even a mention of the thought that Israel had taken the wrong course was met with derision, or worse. Consider this from the Forward of July 28, 2006:

In the face of the criticism and the troublesome implementation of the war effort, the government of Israel and the United States this week seemed steadfast in support of a controversial war, to the deep appreciation of America’s major Jewish groups.

“The crisis in the Middle East today has brought us to one of those rare moments that transcend party and ideological lines. There is no daylight at all between the government of Israel, the Bush administration, Congress and the American Jewish community,” said William Daroff, director of the Washington office of United Jewish Communities, the national roof body of local Jewish charitable federations.

Officials at the Jewish community’s two most influential policy coalitions agreed.

“There is unanimity of conviction and concern” in the Jewish community regarding Israel’s actions in Lebanon, said Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice president of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Hadar Susskind, who directs the Washington office of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, said that there is “zero dissent” within the Jewish community.

“As opposed to everything else we do, on this we have absolute unanimity,” he said. The JCPA, a consultative group that coordinates the policies of 13 national agencies and 123 local Jewish community-relations councils, is often critical of the Bush administration’s domestic policies. This week it called on its members to send letters to the White House, thanking Bush for his solid support of the war.

Zero dissent. Absolute unanimity. About support for a war that we now read – in a report by an official Israeli commission — was a failure in just about every respect from start to finish. Does absolute unanimity, all the way to outright encouragement and cheering on the efforts, itself constitute a failing that bears some responsibility? If the American Jewish community had really said, and asked Congress and the Administration to say, “Wait a minute, Ehud, are you sure you’re ready for this,” does anyone really think he and the others would have ignored that and carried on in precisely the same fashion?

So how does the mainstream reckon with its own actions – its own failings – during the war? Well, like most other things in the mainstream American Jewish approach to Israel, pretend the uncomfortable reality doesn’t exist and that the past never really happened.

So as to not repeat my own failings during the war and write on and on endlessly, I will stick to one example of what I mean, the American Jewish Committee. Eran Lerman, director of AJCommittee’s Israel office, has written a relatively fair and straightforward, even congratulatory, piece about the report, precisely the type of article one would expect AJCommittee should provide for its members. The conclusion:

What we learned is that the IDF is in problematic mid-transition; that Israeli politics are a mess; and that our policy process is deeply flawed. But looked upon from another angle, we learned also that Israel also has the institutional capacity for soul-searching self criticism, and a very resilient civil society which will now have to decide how far, and how deep, it wants the system, and the people who led it last summer, to be reformed or replaced.

One clause stands out for me: “Israel also has the institutional capacity for soul-searching self criticism.” I am sure we will see this a lot in the coming days: lauding the report for showing what a strong democracy Israel has. And that’s true; one need look no farther than how our democracy has dealt with Iraq to see that. But what of the American Jewish community’s “institutional capacity for soul-searching self criticism?” Will we see any of that?

AJCommittee certainly could have started such soul-searching with this piece. After all, this is the same organization whose President (Robert Goodkind) and Executive Director (David Harris) sent a joint letter to Secretary of State Rice on July 27, at the height of the war and after she had worked strenuously to fend off calls for a cease fire at an international emergency meeting on the conflict, in which they wrote:

We particularly applaud your firm position regarding an immediate cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah. While we agree that a cease-fire is a worthy goal, and while we grieve for innocent life lost, we fully share your view that the imposition of an immediate cease-fire would be counterproductive.
…
The war foisted today on Israel is not only about Israel’s security and well-being, but about the larger struggle between those who defend democracy and human dignity and those who are intent on destroying them. What happens today in Lebanon will have far-reaching implications for the future of Lebanon, the Middle East as a whole, and the U.S.-led campaign against global terrorism.

We could not be more proud of our Government for its stance in support of Israel, as our ally defends itself against demonic forces that threaten regional and international peace and security.

So I ask: are they still proud of that stance? Would imposition of a cease fire weeks before it came have been any more of a disaster than the war was? Do they still believe the war was “foisted” on Israel? What have been the implications of “what happened today” for the fight against terrorism?

Most of all, what does this mean for the American Jewish connection to Israel? What do I teach my sons about where they are this summer, what they are seeing, who they are? Should they be a part of the soul-searching that goes on (at least sometimes) in Israel, or the pretending, congratulating, lining-up and bandwagon-ing that goes on here? Should I bring them to the anti-Olmert protests that will likely be ongoing after we arrive, or fear that, if they ever explained to friends here that they went to such an event – with hundreds of thousands of Jewish Israelis — that they would still be deemed traitors to their people and community?

So let me just ask this, for my sake as a father, and for my sons’ sake as very young American Jews: will the mainstream American Jewish leadership form its own Winograd commission? Will they look at their own actions, their own decisions during that time? Will they examine their overall approach to the strategic issues of how to connect American Jews with Israel, of demanding that that connection always equal full support of the Government of Israel? Will they question whether, in some cases, and especially now that we can see that the system in Israel is “deeply flawed,” Israel’s future depends on our being allowed to have our own opinions on Israel’s actions, being allowed to have a real debate in the American Jewish community?

If Israel can begin to engage on this process in its most critical and sensitive of areas, defense and security, can’t we show our support by following suit? By questioning and soul searching, so we can deal with these crises in Israel truly as a Jewish community, rather than through talking points and leaders who claim there is “zero dissent”?

Ultimately, the point of Winograd is to make sure the same failings aren’t repeated next time. And maybe, if the report’s conclusions are followed, they won’t be. But if we imagine, for a moment, that the Israeli government is about to make the same mistakes the next time it goes to war, we should all ask: are we in a position to help them? Not to help them make the same mistakes, not to help them fight no matter what, but to help them learn from the past and progress to a more peaceful future.

Without a Winograd of our own, I fear not.