Archive for the 'Brad' Category

The Missing

Published by
Brad Brooks-Rubin
July 11, 2007 in Personal Reflections, The Settlements and Brad. 7 Comments

Probably the best way to start this is with a short bit of accidental wisdom from my older son. I should also probably stop there, too, but since it works so well with my thoughts on my recent trip to Hebron, that I thought I would add the two together. It has been quite hard for me to think about what to say about the essential elimination of life in the Old City of Hebron, or how to say it. Luckily I can always count on the brilliance of a 2.5 year old to help me out of a jam.

We have been trying to teach Eli a bit of Hebrew, or at least get him comfortable with it (he can actually count all the way to arba-im (40) quickly and without a mistake). One of the books we have been reading with him over time is a Hebrew translation of Shel Silverstein’s classic “The Missing Piece.” We always read the Hebrew first, then explain what it means in English, trying to instill at least a few words. But he knows the title primarily in English (it’s a mouthful in Hebrew).

Then, the other day, his class at the YMCA had their end of the year party. So we decided this would be a good occasion to break out a t-shirt of his that we picked up at home awhile back; it’s a red children’s shirt that simply has “Peace,” “Shalom” (in Hebrew) and “Salaam” (in Arabic) on it.

When I put the shirt on him, he looked down and saw the writing.

“What does the shirt say, Papa?”

“‘Peace’, Eli. It says ‘peace’ in English, Hebrew and Arabic.”

“Oh.” Pause. “Like ‘The Missing Piece’?”

I laugh. I then shake my head at how ingenious this is. Then I realize he is still waiting for an answer. “Well, not like the piece missing from the circle in the book. This peace means when people don’t fight with each other. But it’s kind of like the piece in the book, because this kind of peace is also missing.”

“Oh. That peace on my shirt is also missing?”

“Sadly, it is.”

By this time, he was more interested in the Lego blocks he had built into a small column and called his “saxophone,” which he then started to play, so that was that. But it was one of those moments with your kids that you never forget.

And, as I said, it helped me focus on a lot that has been on my mind. Of course, in any place in the world, it’s still a cute story and probably one that any parent would be proud to retell. But here, it comes with so much more.

Because, at any point in time, it’s important not just to know that peace is missing, but why it’s missing. And that changes over time, and is always somewhat different depending on whether you are talking about political/governmental peace or person-to-person/societal peace. Although the former type is what we spend far too much time talking about, it is the latter that really counts, in my mind.

And that peace, the peace between people, is missing because when you are in Israel, the Palestinians are missing. Almost entirely.

And when you’re in Palestine (Eastern Palestine, anyway), although Israel is everywhere – in the form of Jewish-only settlements, Jewish-only roads, the Army, the Air Force and the Wall — and although Israeli soldiers and settlers are all around, the Israeli people with whom the Palestinians must make peace are also missing.

I have remarked on this in other posts from here, but nowhere was this more evident than in Hebron. The Old City of Hebron, the area of the once vibrant souq/casbah, is, quite simply, gone. Military orders, settler violence, settler expansionism, soldiers changing policies from day to day, decimation of the Palestinian economy. Put them all together and you have what I saw in Hebron – shops welded shut, houses empty, streets barren, markets looted, bushes and vines growing in the middle of once-busy streets. (The activists I went with even had pictures from 1999 to prove it, but my memories from being in these bustling areas in 1997 and 1998 were pretty vivid).

(If you want more info, there’s a lot out there. But Meretz USA has a good archive of recent articles and some background pieces at its “Hebron Watch” page. But if you want the full story in one place, look no further than this, as-usual incredible report from B’tselem from this past May.)

I wandered around much of the day taking pictures of essentially the same thing: missing-ness and emptiness. Empty streets. Empty sidewalks. Empty shops (except for those which have been confiscated by settlers to use as new apartments). As B’tselem called it so aptly, it is a ghost town.

Or, at least, a town of Palestinian ghosts, as they exist only in memory. The number of settlers in the city itself is still small (approximately 600 or so, but it gets much larger if you include the ever-expanding Kiryat Arba and other area settlements), but not only are their numbers and their efforts to confiscate Palestinian property increasing, they are ever-present through graffiti that defiles probably 50% of the now-closed shops.

Graffiti like:

“There are Arabs, there are rats.” (Makes more sense as graffiti in the Hebrew, as it’s a bit of a play on words: “Yesh Aravim, yesh achbarim”)

“Arabs to the gas chambers.”

“Arabs are sand n—ers.” (the one I saw of this is signed by the JDL, or Jewish Defense League)

And perhaps most startling to me was that within a 2-minute walk of graffiti saying “Arabs out” was a sign showing the names of the Jewish congregations in the U.S. that had helped support the Hebron settlements with an ambulance. And who knows what else.

Settlers and right-wing American Jews present. Violently and terribly present. Nearly all Palestinians missing.

Such violence and hatred in a city so holy, within view of the reputed tomb of our ancestors Abraham and Sarah, who kept their tent open on all sides to welcome visitors. What would Abraham and Sarah think of a city that had been closed off to its former Palestinian residents, but done in their names?

I still have chills from hearing the muezzin’s call to prayer from the Machpelah/Tomb of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs, which is now divided into a Jewish holy site and a mosque. What does it mean to hear the call to prayer when there is almost no one who can get there? After all, on one of the main streets that a Muslim could theoretically walk to in order to get to the mosque, I was stopped by a border policeman. And he asked me but one simple question.

“Are you Jewish?”

I hesitated. First because I hadn’t quite understood, or expected, the question. Then I realized what he was asking. And I hesitated again because those few hours had again shaken my beliefs, my understanding of Judaism.

Indeed, I had to answer “yes, I am a Jew” in order to even walk on this road.

Now, in the pre-Civil rights era U.S., unless you were participating in an action, the issue of which restaurant or hotel or drinking fountain you used was pre-determined, in some way, by circumstances and factors beyond your immediate control. Whether you were white or “colored” did not really need to be asked.

But, because I was not wearing a kippah or dressed in black and white, the answer was in my hands. And in some way, I reazlied that an answer of “yes, I am a Jew” was an answer of:

“Yes, I believe in segregation and transfer.”

“Yes, I believe I have the right to walk on this street, and the Palestinians who used to live here do not, nor should any other non-Jews.”

“Yes, I equate Judaism with the gun in your hands, with the settlers whom you protect, and with their ideology which you help implement.”

And, mostly because I am not quick enough on my feet (literally or figuratively) and my car was at the other end of this street, I, in fact, answered “yes.” And I am still thinking about everything it meant. And everything I would like it to mean.

But more than anything, I am thinking about the Palestinians I did not see. Those who are missing. In fact, they were also missing from much of the drive to Hebron. I even read in Ha’aretz that the Jewish National Fund, Ministry of Tourism, and Mount Hebron Regional Council are publishing tourist guides that describe the beauty of the region and its attractiveness as a hiking and travel getaway, in no small part because you can now go as a Jew without really having to encounter a Palestinian. The article is worth reading for some of the quotes, but I’ll excerpt this from the article:

In these publications, there is no separation wall, no bypass roads. There are no roadblocks set up next to almost every Palestinian village, limiting the residents’ freedom of movement to the point of feeling suffocated. There are no ridges that have been harmed to make way for settlements that look like fortified and alienated suburbs. There are no cave dwellers who have been banished from their homes on Mount Hebron, and no pupils who cannot go to school because their settler neighbors constantly harass them. No Palestinian communities appear on the map published in the booklet about the Hebron region.
…

The daily Palestinian nightmare gives way and disappears for the benefit of publications that realize the dreams of the Israeli hiker. Now, in addition to the transportation and security infrastructure that allows the Israeli tourist to avoid encountering nearly any Palestinians and only see their communities from afar, there is a marketing and publishing infrastructure. Awaiting the hiker, for the most part, is good food, amazing scenery and spectacular sunrises. The only thing that remains for Israeli hikers is simply to come, to forget all their troubles - and particularly those of the Palestinians.

More and more, Palestinians have simply been removed from the narrative in Israel, from the reality. They are somewhere else, on the other side of a wall, missing. And so too are the Israelis missing from the lives of Palestinians, whose reality grows more and more to be of one where Jews simply exist as Israeli soldiers, as settlers, as the American Jews who send money to support both groups (Friends of the IDF being the military support side).

As political developments evolve in Ramallah and Jerusalem and Gaza, as these discussions between leaders of peoples who do not exist for one another except in the media and in images of the past, I will wonder back to Hebron, wonder back to everything that is missing from this holy place. Palestinians are missing, Judaism is missing, Israelis are missing.

God is missing.

And ultimately, that is why the peace on my son’s t-shirt is missing. But perhaps, one day, like the circle in the Silverstein story, we’ll all find the right piece of peace.

To do that, of course, we have to find each other first.

Chicklets, Psalms, and St. Anne’s Church

Published by
Brad Brooks-Rubin
June 27, 2007 in Personal Reflections, Brad and All Posts. 3 Comments

A few days ago, I found what I think is my new favorite place in all of Jerusalem. The Church of St. Anne in the Old City, next to the Pools of Bethesda (close to Lion’s (or St. Stephen’s) Gate). I had heard great things over the years but never managed to make it. Within 30 minutes, I was a convert (pun only slightly intended). Why would this be my new favorite place?

Because it is, and it inspires, what I have always believed to be the essence of Jerusalem: holiness, awe, uniqueness. A place where the most mundane experience becomes extraordinary solely because it happened to you in Jerusalem.

If you’ve been to St. Anne, you may have an idea of what I mean. Built in the 12th century, it’s a church renowned for its near-perfect acoustics. As such, people and groups from around the world come there not just to visit and look around and marvel at something so old, but to sing. Like they never have before. Because it’s Jerusalem.

It’s extraordinary, really: one group walks in, sits in the front pews. Then, with hardly a word, they start singing. Ave Maria. Amazing Grace. Or whatever hymn or song moves their group the most. They sing and sing, then stop, get up, walk down to see the tomb (or at least what some believe to be the tomb) of Anne (Mary’s mother) and location of Mary’s birth. In the meantime, another group takes their place in the pews and sings their own hearts and souls out. Maybe someone has a guitar, but no one needs a microphone, and mostly there are just human voices, inspired from the depths of their beliefs, whatever those may be.

I watched four groups in a row do this the other day, while my baby boy looked up at me in amazement and joy. (The down side is all of the singing makes for quite a distraction from his bottle). And while he was looking at me so intently, I wondered why.

Why would people from around the world (two of the groups I saw were American, one was Italian, and the other from somewhere in Eastern Europe; a Japanese group was on its way in when I left) come here to sing like this?

Why? Because the church is renowned for acoustics? Maybe. But there are plenty of places in the world with good acoustics; I think more so because it’s Jerusalem. It’s a city that inspires – at least the idea of the city inspires – people to believe a little bit more than they do anywhere else. Maybe because they think God, whichever version of God, can hear them a little more clearly here. Maybe because they feel inspired by the examples set by those who have come before, feel that they’ll start to hear and heed the words of Jesus a bit more when they walk on some of the same stones that he did.

Maybe because there is a little Jerusalem syndrome in all of us – a moment where all of us feel that we can be just a bit more than we are anywhere else. That we can leave real or normal life for a moment and be, well, holy. That we can indeed save this world that needs saving so badly.

Maybe because Psalm 122 still rings true for all of us.

A Song of Ascents; of David. I rejoiced when they said unto me: ‘Let us go unto the house of HaShem.’
Our feet are standing within thy gates, O Jerusalem;
Jerusalem, that art builded as a city that is compact together;
Whither the tribes went up, even the tribes of HaShem, as a testimony unto Israel, to give thanks unto the name of HaShem.
For there were set thrones for judgment, the thrones of the house of David.
Pray for the peace of Jerusalem; may they prosper that love thee.
Peace be within thy walls, and prosperity within thy palaces.
For my brethren and companions’ sakes, I will now say: ‘Peace be within thee.’
For the sake of the house of HaShem our G-d I will seek thy good.

I think we all pray – and sing — for the peace of Jerusalem, for peace within its walls because we believe that if there is peace here, then peace should reign everywhere. Conversely, the further from peace is Jerusalem, the further we are all from peace, from holiness, from ourselves. So we come here from all over to be a part of the city for a moment, to sing as loud as we can, in the hope that someone will hear.

It is all of this that is on my mind when I pull up to a traffic light in East Jerusalem, whether down the hill from the Regency near Hebrew U. or close to the A-Ram check point, and face 2-4 Palestinian kids trying to sell Chicklets or rub a cloth on my windshield for a few shekels. A few shekels I never seem to have on me, or that I sometimes admit to not wanting to give over. The kids are usually there, most hours of the day and night. Not in school. In need of new clothes, new shoes. Probably needing some nourishment.

Of course, you see kids like this, kids in need of money, of a future, in so many cities. But this is Jerusalem – it just doesn’t feel right. Kids like these shouldn’t exist here. They, too, should be singing, believing, becoming, just like those of us who stop through Jerusalem in the course of our lives. Those of who are privileged enough not to be born into their world – divided by walls, separated by their religion and ethnicity, discussed rhetorically by so many but understood practically by so few. They live here – so close, yet so far away from what Jerusalem is. And yet they are also its future.

The words of Psalm 122, the songs of St. Anne, and these ideas are also on my mind when I pull up to the light near the Malha Mall, near our new place. There, at least in the evenings, you will find Haredi men selling various items, most notably copies of Tehilim, the Book of Psalms.

(I thought I saw one of them selling bean pies and copies of the Final Call, a la members of the Nation of Islam, but then I realized I was daydreaming. Quite an image, though, if you think about it.)

Do they sell these items because, like the Palestinian kids across town, they and their families desperately need the money, need something to build hope for the future with? Maybe. I admit I haven’t asked. But they certainly look a lot less in need.

Perhaps, rather than them being in need, they stand on this corner because they believe the rest of us to be in need. They realize that too many of us have missed the words of Psalm 122, and so many others, reminding us of the glories of the city whose streets we drivers honk and crawl and gesticulate our way through all day and night. Perhaps they understand the glory of this city and want to remind those of us too busy with normal life that we are not in a normal city.

We are in Jerusalem: you don’t need gum, you need God.

A few weeks back in Haaretz, Sayed Kashua took a break from his normal weekly writing and published an interview with Hillel Cohen, author of the new book “The Market Square Is Empty: The Rise and Fall of Arab Jerusalem, 1967-2007.” It’s a fascinating interview (especially to hear how Cohen spent years on his own roaming East Jerusalem and the Territories, learning from the streets), but this is what stuck out for me:

…official Israel can celebrate united Jerusalem’s fourth decade more comfortably than ever. What’s left of the future capital of the Palestinian state are heaps of ruins, a political phantom; a surrounded city, encircled by settlements and isolated from the rest of the West Bank, a city that had already been dying for 15 years before the separation fence came to finish it off.

Cohen speaks of how Jerusalem has become more theoretical, more spiritual for Palestinians, yet with the reality of Jerusalem existing as a capital, or even as a truly functioning and integrated part of Palestinian society, ever further away.

One need only look at the two sides of Jerusalem to see how true this is – Palestinian kids selling Chicklets and Orthodox Jews selling Psalms. The luxury to sell Psalms, to peddle food for the soul, for the heart, for Jerusalem is one that only half of this city has. That half has come much closer to realizing its own dreams, its own notions of what Jerusalem might be. Even if they are sharp divisions about the scope of religious influence, religious interpretation, or religious identification, there is no question that those are questions that do not require one to sell Chicklets to try to survive.

And while much of Palestinian Jerusalem is not at all impoverished, and indeed includes some of the wealthiest anywhere in Palestinian society, the truth is that their part of this city is “ruins.” Not just because their kids must sell Chicklets, but because the evolution of this city – its settlements, its walls, its permitting authorities - - has left them with a Jerusalem address, but not a Jerusalem reality or a Jerusalem dream.

That reality, that dream may only exist in the voices of the faithful at the Church of St. Anne. Those voices, no matter how ignorant to the realities of the people around them, still contain the essence of that dream that is so necessary for the future. And it is one that I hope everyone gets to hear some day: the dream of Jerusalem.

Choice and Life

Published by
Brad Brooks-Rubin
June 19, 2007 in Personal Reflections, Peace Process, Brad and All Posts. 3 Comments

Reading Secretary of State Rice’s remarks yesterday about the situation in Palestine brought to mind a few questions and thoughts about “choice” and “life” in Eastern and Western Palestine and Israel. Here is what she had to say about the issue:

A fundamental choice confronts the Palestinians, and all people in the Middle East, more clearly now, than ever. It is a choice between violent extremism on the one hand and tolerance and responsibility on the other. Hamas has made its choice. It has sought to attempt to extinguish democratic debate with violence and to impose its extremist agenda on the Palestinian people in Gaza. Now, responsible Palestinians are making their choice and it is the duty of the international community to support those Palestinians who wish to build a better life and a future of peace.

Aside from the fact that this sounds a whole lot like the quote I posted from the American Jewish Committee’s statement from last week, I am somewhat amazed to hear that the Palestinians are confronted with a choice, at least as of right now. No doubt the Secretary knows far more than I do about what’s happening on the ground, but from where I sit, behind (in front of?) the Wall, I am hard-pressed to comprehend this “choice” that so clearly faces Palestinians on June 19, 2007.

First there are the Palestinians in Gaza (or maybe we just don’t consider them Palestinians anymore?). What choices do they have? Some would like to leave, perhaps they would like to choose “tolerance and responsibility.” But if they can get through Hamas checkpoints and arrests, Israel won’t let them leave. They’re stuck. Now the Israeli government won’t even let in Magen David Adom ambulances into the Erez crossing area, for fear of infiltration. So I have trouble seeing the choice there.

They could choose to try to sneak into Egypt, as a few hundred have chosen to. But again, even if they can get in to Egypt, I’m not so sure that’s a destination brimming with “tolerance and responsibility” or where they can find “a better life and a future of peace.”

Should they take to the streets? Well, if they do so with guns, they’ll likely be labeled terrorists. Or, even if supported nominally by the West, they will likely end up where Fatah has: running for their lives. And if they choose to stand up and take to the streets without guns, they’ll likely face the wrath of Hamas and its “violent extremism.” And since the international community is leaving Hamas to its own devices, without any kind of negotiations or interaction other than basic aid, there will hardly be much leverage should more such carnage happen.

Or should they simply sit back and wait? Well, if they simply do what they can to survive physically and economically to make sure they and their families live until tomorrow, then we will probably label them as Hamas sympathizers because they stayed in Gaza and did not rise up.

In the end, not a lot of real choices. Next there are the Palestinians in the West Bank. Sure, the aid is coming, the tax revenues are finally flowing, and the support seems steadfast.

But, of course, that’s support for Fayyad and Abbas and, apparently, for Fatah, not necessarily the people. Now, Fayyad has managed over the years to maintain a solid record and profile, so I can understand the move in his direction. But this is quite clearly a Fatah and Abbas-led government.

Yet it is Fatah, after all, that was deemed so corrupt that the Palestinian people so overwhelmingly voted for Hamas, despite most not agreeing with its ideology. And in spite of millions of dollars of aid from the U.S. directly to Fatah to help it try to win those elections. As the Washington Post editorialized – in a piece appropriately called “Hamas’s Choice” – after the elections:

Many Palestinians who voted for Hamas don’t support the Islamists’ fundamentalist agenda: Polls show that large majorities want an end to violence and a resumption of peace talks with Israel. Wednesday’s vote was not an embrace of extremism, but — as President Bush suggested yesterday — a rejection of the corrupt and incompetent clique of leaders left behind by Yasser Arafat. Since Arafat’s death more than a year ago, his Fatah movement had been unable to reform itself or control its violent elements, despite the good intentions of Mr. Abbas. Now, perhaps, a new generation of secular leaders will be able to purge Fatah and prepare to offer Palestinians a better alternative, while crooks and armed thugs are cut from the government’s payroll.

But here we are again: Fayyad is new, but this is still Fatah and Fatah is still led by Abbas. Can we really be sure there will be no corruption? That the government will actually work for the people?

And although the Palestinian people, both in Gaza and the West Bank, so clearly did not choose them in the open and fairly-contested elections in 2006, they are now supposed to choose them? Now that…what? Now that they have been routed in Gaza but held on and propped up in the West Bank?

I don’t necessarily believe Abbas to be the problem, but how can he be seen as the only “choice” for a “better life and a future of peace,” two things he clearly has not brought to the Palestinian people, even when he was in complete control?

What if the Palestinians in the West Bank want to choose someone else now, some party other than Fatah, because, unlike the Bush Administration apparently, their memories go back before January 2006? Will they be allowed? Will this be a choice they can make? Can they choose Marwan Barghouthi?

What if they wait six months or a year, and nothing much has changed? Or are they allowed to “choose” only if it means choosing the one choice we might approve of?

What if Palestinians in the West Bank would like to choose a “better life and a future of peace” that involves, say, being able to get to school or work on a road of their choice? Or getting to school or work at all? Or trying to find work in and enter Israel? Or pray at al-Aqsa? If they would like to live a future of peace and “tolerance and responsibility” on land not surrounded by settlements and the IDF? How about if they would like to build a larger home on land adjacent to their house, but for which their only title document may date from the Ottoman era? Can they choose to build and not have their home demolished?

What say you, Madame Secretary, can they make those choices? Will you stand so clearly behind them then as you do when it is Hamas on the other side? Will you stand with the Palestinians when the choices are a little harder to make, to implement? When they involve pushing Israel a bit more than you have chosen to so far? Will you support their choices then?

Now, I do not mean to imply the Palestinians have no choices to make, or have not had choices to make over the past decades of Occupation and Oslo. Surely they have, and in so many cases, some Palestinians have made terrible choices that have resulted in only more pain and tragedy for them and for so many Israelis.

But perhaps it’s time for the Administration, for Israel, for the American Jewish community, for the West to own up to their own choices here. To stand behind the Palestinians, to support the choices that they believe will lead to this future of peace the Secretary speaks of. Not just asking them to choose the choices that Israel would choose for them. Call that whatever you want, but do not call it choice.

No matter what you believe about how or why we got here, no matter whose choices or mistakes or ideology you would place blame on, I pray that we all realize these choices are not really for the Palestinians to make alone. They are for all of us to make.

Two final notes – one from the Palestinian author Raja Shehadeh and one from Moses (quite a duo). Shehadeh, as many of you will know, has written several must-read books on the situation here, both from legal and personal perspectives. One of his older memoirs is entitled “The Third Way.” As he explains about halfway down in this piece, the title is actually based on a saying from Treblinka:

Raja himself demonstrated in choosing the title of his book, The Third Way: A Journal of Life in the West Bank. On the back cover, the origin of the phrase “the third way” is explained: “From the wisdom of the Treblinka concentration camp: ‘Faced with two alternatives-always choose the third.’ Between mute submission and blind hate-I choose the third way. I am Samid [the steadfast].

For his part, Moses, at the end of Deuteronomy, while ending his leadership of the Jewish people, announces a second covenant of sorts with the people. That is, the first covenant under Moses’ leadership took place at Sinai, but Abravanel teaches us that this covenant was only with those souls present at Sinai. But as the people stood ready to enter the Land, a second covenant – binding on the souls of all those present and all future generations – is initiated.

And within that covenant, we read the following verses in Deuteronomy 30:

15 See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil,

16 in that I command thee this day to love HaShem thy G-d, to walk in His ways, and to keep His commandments and His statutes and His ordinances; then thou shalt live and multiply, and HaShem thy G-d shall bless thee in the land whither thou goest in to possess it.

17 But if thy heart turn away, and thou wilt not hear, but shalt be drawn away, and worship other gods, and serve them;

18 I declare unto you this day, that ye shall surely perish; ye shall not prolong your days upon the land, whither thou passest over the Jordan to go in to possess it.

19 I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before thee life and death, the blessing and the curse; therefore choose life, that thou mayest live, thou and thy seed;

On the Shabbat following 9/11, I gave a d’var torah on this passage and those around it (you can see most of the text excerpted on the Shalom Center’s website here). And I essentially suggested there that we should, perhaps in a sort of post-9/11 covenant, read the end of this passage to say not just “choose life” for you and your seed, but for you and all seeds to live.

So, since it did not exactly play out that way post-9/11, let me ask this again, post-Gaza. Let us not see only two choices, involving two failed options, innumerable failed leaders, tragically failed realities. Let us use this moment, all of us, to be like Shehahdeh, to choose neither submission nor hate, but to be steadfast: steadfast in our pursuit of what Moses commanded, to choose life.

Choose all life: Israeli, Palestinian, American, Iraqi, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and those of every seed on earth.

One Occupation at a Time

Published by
Brad Brooks-Rubin
June 6, 2007 in Personal Reflections, Brad and All Posts. 10 Comments

Here it is: the 40th anniversary of the 1967 War, of the Occupation, of so much changing in Israel, Palestine, the Middle East, the world. Overwhelming, actually. And to be here, to drive to the Dead Sea and see the sprawling insanity of the Ma’aleh Adumim settlement, to get a bit closer to the Wall, to feel again so distant from what is so close, well, it is hard to do much but shake your head and feel overwhelmed at the permanent feeling of it all, at the difficulty of believing this will, or can, ever really “end.”

(For what it’s worth, of the newspaper articles I have read in the past few days, I would recommend most highly Akiva Eldar’s piece “Living the Lives of Others” in Monday’s Ha’aretz.)

But as I was reflecting on the Eldar piece, on what Israel and Palestine might have been had 1966 not led to 1967, I came upon another article, a smaller article, if you will. About a very important issue to those it impacts but one that probably doesn’t even make the Top 1,000 in issues in Israel and Palestine these days.

The article is about the fact that only one of Israel’s banks will set up shop in the Bedouin town of Rahat, in southern Israel. Despite the fact that 40,000 people live in the town, and 10,000 more in the surrounding area, only Mercantile-Discount has opened a branch. The other major banks have been asked to open there as well, but have either said the residents should go to the closest town that has one (upwards of 35km away) or use the Internet (which most people in the town either don’t have the equipment to access, or the understanding of what to do when they get on).

Economic disparity, big business leaving out second class citizens, avoiding poor areas — this is nothing new. But the saddest part of this story to me is actually not mentioned in the article. That is, the Bedouin didn’t just end up here, poor and bank-less in Rahat. The Israeli government forced the Bedouin to live in these towns in the first place. Starting in the 1970s, following a policy of simply not “recognizing” their villages as even existing and thus not providing services of any kind – even a mailing address, which is hard to conceive of as being a service provided by the state, but it is — the State of Israel decided to create seven concentration towns. In these towns, the State imagined the Bedouin population could simply give up their culture and livelihood and undergo some level of Israel-ification.

(Unrecognized villages is a fascinating and difficult topic – you can get some background here and here, as well as read about Adalah’s many efforts to fight this policy in court here)

Needless to say, Israel-ification has been a painful and difficult process for the Bedouin. They lag behind just about every other group in Israeli society, in just about every social and development category. And clearly banks and other businesses know this. Even the Eged bus company, which controls public transportation throughout the country, has an essentially overt policy of discriminating against the Bedouin (and Israeli Arabs, as a whole). Whereas buses run frequently into and throughout neighboring towns (not to mention settlements in the West Bank), they either avoid Bedouin towns altogether, or when they do go to these towns, they stop only at one point on the outskirts of town, and only once or twice throughout the day. Despite the insistence of overwhelming majorities of people in these towns that they would use – that they need — banking and bus services, the companies stay away.

(For some comparison to the plight of the Bedouins in Rahat, you can read a fascinating/disturbing piece by a settler concerned about decreasing service to his settlement and how it indicates signs of the “next expulsion” here.)

So there’s the cruel irony – the State forces the Bedouin to leave their traditional lives in order to have them live in towns the State will “recognize.” Then, although they get an address and running water and electricity, the State still does not insure that the now-recognized towns will have services anywhere commensurate with other Israelis, either in Israel or the West Bank.

Separate. Unequal. Perhaps the Bedouin and Israeli Arabs are not subject to the conditions and oppression of The Occupation, but strikes me that this is occupation of another kind.

All this got me thinking about, well, home. And how similar these services and inequality issues are to issues in my real home of DC. As with Bedouin banking, these are also not issues that any of the presidential candidates will be debating any time soon, that even make the Top 10,000 issues in the U.S. today.

But consider that, in all of Ward 7 of DC, home to over 70,000 people, there is only one sit-down, full-service restaurant. One: Denny’s. Every other place to eat is counter or take-out service. Ward 7 may be distant and neglected in the capital city, a place where few tourists ever go, but it is insane to me that there is only one restaurant. Surely other restaurants would have business if they opened.

And then there is the long-standing issue of the lack of grocery stores in Ward 8, across the river and also home to 70,000 people. The last one closed in 1998; a Giant is slated to open in October 2007, years after the residents were promised they would have a new one. But still – just 1 for 70,000 residents, spread over an entire ward? Is that at all sufficient, let alone equal?

Thinking about the Bedouin banking and busing issues while listening to the news recount the history of 1967, of the conditions of the Occupation felt a bit like reading these stories about conditions in Wards 7 and 8 in DC while thinking about when the U.S. occupation and war in Iraq will end.

So here’s my thought. And again, nothing altogether new – issues of social activism and consciousness, like socially responsible investing and consumer boycotts, have been around for awhile, and there are tons of resources out there to help guide you. But they’re still limited in their reach, and knowledge that these issues even exist is also so limited. How many anti-Occupation activists, let alone the general public, are aware of Bedouin or Israeli Arab issues?

Maybe what we need to do to expand their reach is label all of these social problems “occupations.” (Small “o,” though – there is still only one “Occupation” with a capital “O.”) Perhaps there is not an army or another state occupying Rahat or the poorer areas of DC, but what is occupying them is lack of general awareness, neglect, inequality, separation. And these should be as much on our minds as the major O/occupations of our time, because they can be solved.

No matter how many blog entries we write, how much money we give to activist groups, how many or how loud our protests, the Separation Wall cannot come down tomorrow. Settlements like Ma’aleh Adumim cannot be evacuated and disengaged from without unimaginable effort and cost. Similarly, the troops cannot leave Iraq tomorrow without similar cost (both financial and human).

So when things like the Occupation of Palestine or Iraq seem so overwhelming, perhaps all of these issues need to be labeled occupations. Not just from a “what can I do” perspective, but also a policy perspective, as well. If legislators and executive branches and businesses understand that inequality and neglect and discrimination are occupations in their own right, as well, then perhaps they can be convinced to act, to change. Yesterday, following this article, I drove a bit out of my way to go to a Bank Discount ATM, as a bit of a reward for their being in Rahat. I plan to let them know I did this, to thank them – and to let the other banks know I plan to avoid their services as much as possible. I hope to continue this practice more when I get home – going to Giant over Safeway.

And one by one, we can end some of these occupations. And as these “smaller” (I use this term lightly and in the framework of national contexts – for the people in Wards 7 and 8 and in Rahat, their lack of services are likely much “larger” than conditions in Nablus or Baghdad) occupations end, perhaps their approach to the larger Occupations can change, too.

Sound naïve again? Probably. But, as always, I have to ask whether the current approach is any less so. Is it more naïve to think that we can convince the Israeli and US governments to end their Occupations (and support of each other’s) by simply demanding they end than to try to convince them to change perspective by making them see what other, more local occupations look like? Then hoping that those realizations can make them see what the larger Occupations really mean. And why they are so destructive, not just of the occupied, but also of the occupier. Just saying it won’t end anything, and we can’t end the Occupations through protests alone. We have to demonstrate and prove to them what it really means.

When I first read Tom Friedman’s recent article about his belief in the graduating class of college students and their ability to change things, I scoffed a bit. The new generation seems so shallow, so uninvolved, to so many of us. But, as Friedman says, they are active – just a bit more quietly, a bit more locally. They won’t replicate the 1960s, but then again, the 1960s are over, so maybe that’s okay.

Maybe they understand more than even I have that to end the Occupation, you have to go one occupation at a time.

It Was Supposed to Be Different Here

Published by
Brad Brooks-Rubin
May 30, 2007 in Personal Reflections and Brad. 3 Comments

It was supposed to be different here, wasn’t it? Different for the better, that is?

After several days of thinking about Steffi’s comment to my last post in which she references “good Germans;” reading Gideon Levy’s story in Haaretz about Ronnie Kasrils, South African Minister of Intelligence Services, and his views that the Occupation is worse in many respects than apartheid in South Africa; reading just the title to Ze’ev Schiff’s piece in Friday’s paper: “If that’s how they act in Gaza;” and topping it off with Roger Cohen’s piece in the Sunday Times, “Israel and the Price of Blindness,” I realized what has been bugging me for these past few weeks (despite my admitted enjoyment of ignorance and detachment, or as Andrew might rightly put it, my personal disengagement), really the past 10 years, since I first experienced life in the West Bank.

Of course, this point has been made innumerable times on this site and so many others, and by so many other people far more articulate and knowledgeable than me. And so I apologize in advance for repeating it, for ranting without much of a point or new thought or new idea. But the message still has not been heard by everyone, for some reason. In fact, it seems sometimes that it’s hardly been heard by anyone. Given how little I seem to do about it anymore, I guess you could say even me, much of the time.

So perhaps I just feel the need to say it again, if only to wake myself up from my first few weeks of personal disengagement. The point is simply this: it was supposed to be different here.

Here in Jerusalem in 2007, we weren’t supposed to be reading in the weekly magazine about why the Occupation is worse than apartheid. And even if we disagree, we weren’t supposed to have arguments honed as to why the Occupation is not worse than apartheid. Apartheid wasn’t supposed to be part of the vocabulary, the ability to fashion technical arguments to the contrary not part of the national identity.

In 2007, we weren’t supposed to be asking American Jews to go on a first date with a 60-year-old Israel, but then be afraid of what they might learn on that date (such as, for example, the country you’re on a date with is the parent of a 40-year-old Occupation). There were not supposed to be skeletons in the closet here, literally or figuratively. The terms “Israeli policies” and “Holocaust” were not supposed to be even conceivably uttered in the same breath. Of course, as Steffi says, what’s happening here does not compare to what happened in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. But as I have said many times before, the mere notion that anyone has to even think for a second about whether there could be a comparison – that alone should be enough to change things here. And to cause pain to every Jew everywhere.

In 2007, we should not be reading articles that describe Palestinians as “they” in such dehumanizing terms as Schiff’s piece does, hearkening back to the pre-civil rights era U.S. But in fact, as we consider a 60-year-old Israel, we have to consider it in precisely those pre-civil rights terms. That is, the impact of disengagement and detachment are simply the equivalent of one of the most derided rulings in U.S. judicial history: Plessy v. Ferguson. I plan to write more on this in the future, but for now, I’ll ask everyone to consider simply that both inside Israel, and between Israelis and Palestinians, in 2007, Plessy’s notion of “separate but equal” would, in fact, be something of a dream, rather than a nightmare. As of now, all there is is “separate.” For all of the talk about the splendor of Israeli democracy, consider that, vis-à-vis “the other,” it has so long to go to even ascend to one of the worst moments in the history of American democracy.

The separation is so pervasive as to make even the tiniest moments when it’s absent seem like earth-shattering occasions. It should not have felt so odd on Shavuot to see observant Jews in talitot walking through the Muslim Quarter of the Old City. But it did. Just as my wife and I should not have had to wonder aloud whether Palestinian families ever came to the Jerusalem Zoo (we encountered a handful of such families, I think, in a very crowded zoo – and all in one specific part of the zoo). But we did.

I should not feel like going into my son’s daycare at the Jerusalem Y is like entering some land of pre-apple Eden. But being in a place where Palestinian and Jewish children play, learn, eat, celebrate, and cry together feels like walking on to a movie set or a fairy tale. It feels that way because outside there are posters calling for “Chumat Magen 2” in Gaza. Chumat Magen being “Operation Defensive Shield” that caused so much devastation and destruction in Jenin and elsewhere in 2002 (in response, of course, to a wave of suicide bombings, including the horrific attack in Netanya during Pesach). Is this really what is needed to calm things in Gaza? More destruction? If only the people who put up those signs knew what was happening inside the Y.

No matter whose fault you think it is, no matter how right or wrong you think Israel is in this situation, no matter how little or much you think the Palestinians should have in a settlement — I don’t think anyone can possibly believe that this is how it’s supposed to be here. That if you had told Ben Gurion in 1947, just before the state would come into being, what Israel would be in 2007, he would have leaned back and said, “That’s exactly what I hope for.”

Perhaps it’s trite in a post like this to quote Buber. Just like it often seems trite to quote Martin Luther King Jr. when talking about race relations in the U.S. But in both cases, until their dreams are realized, we have few other choices. For his part, Buber more than most understood why it was supposed to be different here, that the goal of Zionism should have been the fulfillment of this land’s divine promise, not simply to be a nation like any other. Sadly, today, we have the latter.

Some thoughts from Buber:

We speak of a “national concept,” when a people makes its unity, spiritual coherence, historical character, traditions, origins and evolution, destiny and vocation the objects of its conscious life and the motive power behind its actions. In this sense, the Zion concept of the Jewish people can be called a national concept. But its essential quality lies precisely in that which differentiates it from all other national concepts.
…

This land was at no time in the history of Israel simply the property of the people; it was always at the same time a challenge to make of it what God intended to have made of it.
Thus, from the very beginning, the unique association between this people and this land was characterized by what was to be, by the intention that was to be realized.
…

The idea of Zion is rooted in deeper regions of the earth and rises into loftier regions of the air, and neither its deep roots nor its lofty heights, neither its memory of the past nor its ideal for the future, both of the selfsame texture, may be repudiated. If Israel renounces the mystery, it renounces the heart of reality itself. National forms without the eternal purpose from which they have arisen signify the end of Israel’s specific fruitfulness.

Renunciation of the mystery means renunciation of the reality of the land. As I got waved through an impromptu police checkpoint set up in East Jerusalem today, where only my and other cars with Hebrew written on the sides were allowed to pass without question, I realized the renunciation is near complete. Amid such a blatant exhibition of absolute power (albeit minor, in comparison to those unleashed in the West Bank), as Cohen so cogently called it last weekend, we must realize that Israel has repudiated its roots and renounced its mystery. And replaced it with pure power.

So what? Was this supposed to be a utopia, where Jew and Arab lived peacefully for eternity? Maybe not, but it was supposed to be different than this – the source of our redemption was not supposed to also be the source of others’ (and, ours too, in some ways) destruction. But, now, it is.

So what do we do? Is it Israel’s fault, anyway? Is Israel the one that has to change everything? Look around, after all – how could it be different here? Am I so naive as to think it could really be any other way?

Well, from here, you get to myriad other questions and debates, many of which leave you hungry for personal disengagement again because they are too hard, too frustrating, too demoralizing, too familiar. And, as I wrote a couple weeks ago, there is so much else here to grasp on to that makes you believe things really are okay.

But no matter what our answers to the above questions, no matter what we do or do not do each day to change things, no matter how long this tragedy continues to unfold, no matter how many good and positive things may come from this place, we have to always come back to a single notion, all of us, regardless of our politics: it should be different here.

Perhaps, as Buber says, this is a great challenge. But that is as it was intended. This land was supposed to be the realization, not only of a people’s dream and promise, but of God’s.

But, in Jerusalem in 2007, it isn’t.

“We’re at War! Are You Doing All You Can?”

Published by
Brad Brooks-Rubin
May 20, 2007 in Personal Reflections and Brad. 10 Comments

“We’re at War! Are you doing all you can?” As I walked into my new office for the first time in 2005, there he was: a pointing, glowering, eerily focused Uncle Sam, asking me about my commitment to the “War!” It stopped me in my tracks. Not because I necessarily opposed it’s being there, but because of how out of place the sign seemed, the sentiment seemed. That is, in my daily experience in Washington, working within shouting distance of the White House, I realized this was about the only direct reminder I had in my field of vision that our country is indeed fighting a war.

I have now gone from Washington to Jerusalem. If you asked many people in the world what the two most vital conflicts are to determining whether our future is a stable or volatile one, they would likely say Iraq and Palestine. So here I have traveled between the two capitals arguably most directly involved in creating – and ultimately ending — these conflicts that may well determine the future of the world.

And walking around the streets of either one, you would have no clue.

Unless you really look and think about it, it’s hard to imagine as you stroll down Pennsylvania Avenue or Jaffa St. that either country’s young men and women are fighting a war. Or that, here in Israel, a town is being bombarded daily from Gaza. Never mind that, within mere miles of the incredible zoo my wife and I took our kids to over the weekend, Gaza is descending even further into chaos and the West Bank continues to suffer under an ever more constricting and stifling occupation.

I wish I had a pointed anecdote or moment to demonstrate this phenomenon. But that’s just it – there’s nothing. No comments in shops, no arguments, hard to even catch anyone reading the paper intently as you drink a kafeh hafuch in a café. Sayed Kashua captures the phenomenon pretty aptly in his column this week, describing a conversation of his own when entering a café the morning after Jerusalem Day last week.

“What’s eating you, so early in the morning?” he asked as he went about his work, snipping open sacks of milk, turning on a machine, refilling the containers of ground coffee.

“It’s nothing, I’m just a little stuck. And this whole thing in Gaza is killing me. Did you see Channel 10 yesterday?”

“What really bugged me yesterday wasn’t Gaza, but my own people, who stood in Sacher Park waving yellow flags and hailing Caesar,” he demonstrated by clenching his fist and holding his arm straight out. “How, how is it that they don’t get it …?” He shook his head in annoyance. The door opened and his expression instantly changed, as he said: “Hello, ma’am. How are you this morning?”

People may well be angry or bothered by what is happening in Gaza, or Iraq, or the insensitivity or outright hypocrisy of their own people in responding to these crises, but, well, then they have to get on with serving the next customer. Or getting their next cup of coffee themselves.

And, in no small way, I am a proto-typical example of this. In DC, I am too busy with work and family and activities to go out of my way to think about Iraq; most of the time, I barely listen to the news from Iraq on the radio or TV. Here, I’m a bit busier with kids than work, but still trying to do some of the latter, too, not to mention travel a bit and catch up with old friends. If we don’t have to know that war is happening, that people are suffering elsewhere, why should we? If we’re within the society that is not the locus of the fighting, what is the proper level of attention to pay, of concern to show, of distraction to feel?

In neither place is this notion of detachment new. I remember when in Israel and Palestine in 1997 and 1998 that I would often have to hear from friends and family back home that something of note had happened in Nablus or Gaza. The same has been true this time. Off I go each day on my rounds, and I wait to hear in emails from friends or on CNN that I should probably be experiencing something other than an enjoyable, comfortable spring day (although this weekend was a bit more like summer, and earlier in the week more like winter, with a torrential downpour).

And in DC, well, once you leave the airport, there is literally nothing that would force you to ever know there was a war or two that our soldiers had any part of (unless you come into my office building to see that Uncle Sam sign, of course). People in much of D.C. generally don’t know what’s going on two neighborhoods away in their own city, let alone half a world away.

Of course, in the U.S., and particularly in the American Jewish community, we like to believe that people in Israel live with this over-arching sense of terror every day, that they are more keenly aware of what is happening in their own country and in Palestine. And, no doubt they are, in some way, at least, as Andrew points out, those who serve in the Palestinian Territories. And there are certainly the reminders of those killed in various terrorist attacks that you pass on the street, or the special security guards sitting out front of many restaurants or shops to check your bags. But more than that?

How many times did we hear after 9/11 that “now we Americans know what Israelis go through every day”? I used to scoff when I heard that, for a lot of reasons, but perhaps, in a way different than I think this statement was intended, it really is true.

Perhaps what it means is that now we know what it was like to go about our daily business with a bit more vulnerability, even fear, in the back of our minds. But be sure that we still go about that business. Or maybe now we understand a bit more about what it means to have a government that acts more of its own calculation, taking actions counter to civil liberties and human rights under the rubric of security, a word that has been a trump card in Israel for decades. (I wrote about this subject last year for the Israeli civil rights group Adalah – you can see that article here.)

As I have written here before, I don’t think much changed for the average American’s daily life after 9/11. At this point, not much changes for an Israeli’s daily life when Gaza falls apart or an Israeli town gets shelled because it doesn’t have to. Maybe it should, maybe we expect it to, but as one friend and long-time social activist here has described it, the previously critical social fabric of Israel is coming apart quickly in the 21st century. Hence, no protests (as many predicted, the post-Winograd protest came and went, without seeming to stake a real hold), no introspection, no demands. (Shlomo Ben-Ami had an interesting article over the weekend that, oddly enough, seemed to blame investigative committees, a la Winograd, for a lack of real democratic action in Israel — perhaps more on that later in the summer). No level of concern that we may have come to expect from Israel and Israelis.

I guess now the question is have we become more like the Israelis post 9/11, or have they become more like us?

Used to be, at various times, that that question of Uncle Sam’s meant something to both Americans and Israelis – are we really doing all we can for our men and women soldiers? Now, seems we do all we can to forget. I am no different, of course, and am not sure I will be any time soon (although my perspective here will likely change in the coming days, when we move over to East Jerusalem). But I wonder what will – or could – change in our societies in 2007 to make it different?

Any ideas?

A Winograd of Our Own

Published by
Brad Brooks-Rubin
April 30, 2007 in Personal Reflections and Brad. 3 Comments

(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.

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