Friday, Jul 4, 2008
Heartsick over the bloodshed in Israel, liberal American Jews are so far paralyzed by a conflict in which Palestinians are aggressors as well as victims.
Oct 3, 2000 | When American Jews worshipped together last weekend, they heard the familiar sounds of Rosh Hashanah -- the shofar being blown to herald the New Year, rabbis sermonizing on the theme of repentance, friends kvetching about the price of High Holy Days tickets at their synagogue. What relatively few heard was a forceful voice responding to the outbreak of fighting in Israel and the Palestinian territories.
By Monday, its fifth day, the violence had killed at least 51 people and wounded more than 1,300. Naturally it has taken American Jews time to grasp the rapid escalation of violence, and yes, organized reaction requires some amount of planning. Yet the comparative public silence might best be understood as the sound of confoundment, at least for the vast number of American Jews who have supported the peace process in however passive and distant a way.
The minority that has long opposed the land-for-peace principle and mistrusted Yasir Arafat as a negotiating partner -- about one-third of American Jewry in most polls -- has of course been quicker to react. They found grim confirmation of their caution in the bloody battle. Because this right wing is the most mobilized segment of American Jewry on matters of Israel, it promises to be the first to make its case resoundingly heard.
For the rest, however, the turmoil presents enough moral complexity, enough rival claims on the conscience, to induce a kind of paralysis. Neither the lockstep support of Israel during its four wars, nor the principled dissent from its policies during the Lebanon invasion and the Intifada, readily apply to a cycle of killing and destruction that began with a provocative visit to the Temple Mount by the right-wing politician Ariel Sharon, but has been tolerated if not orchestrated by Arafat.
The heartbreaking signal image of the conflict -- one many American Jews saw in their newspapers or on television before attending services on the second day of Rosh Hashanah -- was of a 12-year-old Palestinian boy, Rami al-Dirreh, cowering for cover behind his father before being shot fatally in a crossfire. Just like the horrifying images of Elian Gonzalez being seized by federal agents last April, the awful photos and videos of his death don't telegraph the full complexity of the story. This second Intifada is being fought not only by teenagers with rocks, but by Palestinian soldiers with assault rifles, and it is being waged not just in the distant alleys of Gaza but the Arab villages and religious sites of Israel proper.
Even without such emotional confusion, the liberal mainstream of American Jewry often fails to act on its professed feelings for Israel, whatever they are. When polls ask simply whether American Jews support Israel, naturally almost all of them say they do; except for anti-Zionists like Norman Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky, from most Jews any other answer smacks of treason. Yet in concrete ways such as visits to Israel, Hebrew fluency or children studying in Israel, the non-Orthodox 90 percent of American Jewry show a much weaker attachment to the Jewish state than do their more religious, and more politically conservative, brethren.
Similarly -- with the exception of such individuals as Leonard Fein and Letty Cottin Pogrebin and such groups as the New Israel Fund and Americans for Peace Now -- the silent majority that supports a negotiated settlement has expressed its hopes mostly in an inactive, wishful sort of way. While the New Israel Fund raised $9 million in 1993, the optimistic year when Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin shook hands at the White House to conclude the first Oslo pact, a single right-wing philanthropist named Irving Moskowitz has poured twice as much into Jewish residences and yeshivas in Arab neighborhoods and the occupied territories.
Get Salon in your mailbox!