Showing posts with label Lawrence Davidson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lawrence Davidson. Show all posts

Getting Past The Issue Of Being Jewish

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 - An Analysis by Professor Lawrence Davidson


Part I - Is Being Jewish the Real Issue?

On 5 March 2015 the New York Times (NYT) carried a front page story about a second-year student at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) named Rachel Beyda. Ms. Beyda, who is Jewish, was seeking appointment as a member on the university’s Judicial Board - a student committee that considers judicial questions in reference to the activities of student government. 

As the story goes, Ms. Beyda’s application was originally rejected because a majority of the board felt that her association with organizations such as Hillel, a group thatuncritically supports Israel’s apartheid-style culture and maintains anti-democratic rules and procedures of its own, would represent a conflict of interest and result in possible bias on her part. Given the tension on many campuses, including UCLA, between those who support and oppose Israeli policies and behavior - tensions which occasionally result in student organizations being disciplined - it was not an unreasonable assumption. Unfortunately, the student board members who questioned Ms. Beyda’s affiliations made it appear that their concerns flowed from her religion and ethnicity.  

Then “at the prodding of a faculty adviser … who pointed out that belonging to Jewish organizations was not a conflict of interest, the students [on the board] revisited the issue and unanimously put her [Beyda] on the board.” 

Of course, the story does not end there. According to theNYT, the episode has “set off an anguished discussion of how Jews are treated” and served to “spotlight what appears to be a surge of hostile sentiment directed against Jews on many campuses in the country, often a byproduct of animosity toward the policies of Israel.”

The Los Angeles-area Zionists have had a field day blowing the incident out of all proportions. For instance, Rabbi Aaron Lerner, “the incoming executive director of the Hillel chapter at U.C.L.A.” told the NYT, “we don’t like to wave the flag of anti-Semitism, but this is different. This is bigotry. This is discriminating against someone because of their identity.” At least on one point Lerner is wrong. Hillel does “wave the flag of anti-Semitism.” After all, Hillel maintains that “Israel is a core element of Jewish life and the gateway to Jewish identity.” The organization follows the Zionist line that those who strongly oppose Israel, oppose the Jews and Judaism per se. 

Lerner’s charge of “bigotry” is harder to evaluate without seeing the recorded video of the board meeting (which has been removed from YouTube.) However, in a letter to the campus newspaper, the students who originally voted against Ms. Beyda apologized for the tack they had taken in their questioning of her. 

The NYT goes on to air the opinions of Rabbi John L. Rosove, senior rabbi of Temple Israel of Hollywood, who called the board incident “insidious”;  Avinoam Baral, the president of student council, who said the board was unfairly suggesting Beyda might have “divided loyalties”; and Natalie Charney, student president of the UCLA chapter of Hillel who complained that this was all the result of an “overall climate of targeting Israel” that has led to the “targeting of Jewish students.” Well, no one can accuse the New York Times of putting forth a balanced interpretation of events.

Part II - What is the Real Issue?

There is certainly something upsetting about this incident. It might very well be that the recent acrimonious struggle that resulted in the UCLA student government endorsing the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel set the scene for a less than sensitive approach to Ms. Beyda's application to the Judicial Board. Nonetheless, the incident and its repercussions tell us that those who oppose Israeli behavior have to be careful not to fall into the Zionist trap of assuming, or even inferring, that Israel is identical with the Jewish people and that individual Jews cannot do other than support the Zionist state. This is simply not true. 

It seems to me that the mistake the board members made was to focus on Ms. Beyda’s membership in “Jewish” organizations. We can infer that from the faculty adviser’s intervention as described above. If those objecting to her application had thought the issue through, they would have realized that the real problem is not membership in organizations that are Jewish, but rather membership in organizations that support institutional racism and oppression. Focusing on the latter points allows one to get past the issue of being Jewish. After all, there should be a problem if an applicant belonged to any such organization, be it Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, communist, or even pseudo-democratic. 

In the United States we may be approaching a tipping point in the struggle against Zionist racism and Israeli oppression. As such it is extremely important that those involved in this struggle express their feelings in a way that clearly maintains a separation between what is objected to and Jews generally. The struggle is against racism, discrimination, oppression, occupation and illegal colonization because they are evils no matter who perpetrates them. The Israeli case has to be prioritized because Israel and its Zionist allies have bought and bullied our own government and political parties in a corrupting manner. 

Expressed in this way, anyone who applied for the UCLA Judicial Board, regardless of religion or ethnicity, might properly be asked about their attitude toward such issues.


Lawrence Davidson




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Why We Need the International Criminal Court - An Analysis

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This is the first of two analyses on the International Criminal Court. The second one will consider the Palestinian appeal to the Court. 

Part I - The Need for Rules and Laws

Americans consider themselves citizens of “the Land of the Free” with a tradition of rugged individualism that still provides mythical fodder for organizations such as the Tea Party and the National Rifle Association. People associated with such organizations (and their numbers are in the millions) also exhibit a deep suspicion of government. They believe that the politicians they elect should, as one-time Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater put it, “aim not to pass laws, but to repeal them.” They believe that the fewer rules and laws there are (except those promoting their own peculiar brand of morality), the greater is the citizen’s freedom. 

It takes just a little bit of historical knowledge to know that this attitude is dangerous nonsense. The fact is you cannot have a stable and safe human environment without rules and laws. That is one reason why they have always existed in one form or another at multiple levels of human society, in the family, the classroom, private clubs, the town, the state, the country, and so forth. In fact, human history can be read as the expansion of enforceable rules or laws from smaller to larger groupings. Wider circles obeying the same set of hopefully humane rules.

It is also a historical fact that the larger and more developed a society becomes, the more rules and laws it accumulates. This tendency, which has become analogous with “big government,” seems to drive right-wingers crazy. And indeed, some of these regulations might well be superfluous (generating “red tape”), but others are not. In fact, it is well thought out rules and laws that hold societies together - countering, though not always adequately, the centrifugal forces of economic greed, special interest selfishness, and the callousness of citizens who would turn their backs on societal needs so as to avoid paying taxes. 

It is my guess that most of us, worldwide, know what good rules or laws look like. In part they reflect the sort of rights and restrictions enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, various Geneva Conventions, the Charter of the United Nations and similar documents agreed to by peoples of many cultures. When these are taken seriously as models for enforceable law, they have the potential to both rein in the anarchists and prevent draconian behavior by the powerful and influential.


Part II - Who Is Above the Law?

The adage that no one should be above the law is of particular importance here. The problem is that there are innumerable cases where some individual or group holds sufficient political power to defy the rule of law. This situation, which almost always leads to an abuse of power, can arise both domestically and internationally. In the context of domestic national affairs we call such people dictators or tyrants, or amoral CEOs of companies that allegedly are “too big to fail.” These folks are easily identified but, short of revolution, less easily brought to account. Then there are the crimes committed under the guise of foreign policy and directed against people of other countries. In such cases the average citizen of the offending nation either does not know what is happening or is made to believe that crimes are not crimes, but rather actions in defense of alleged national interests.These highly placed leaders presuming to be above the law are sometimes harder to identify and even less likely to be held accountable.



It is to address this problem of the accountability that the ICC was established in 2002 by a multilateral treaty known as the Rome Statute. According to its own rules, the Court operates only when national courts will not or cannot prosecute an individual suspected of heinous crimes such as genocide, crimes against humanity, or other war crimes. Also, in order for the Court to have jurisdiction, crimes must have taken place within the territory of one or more of the 123 states that have ratified the Statute. 

A number of important countries such as India, China and Saudi Arabia, have refused to sign on to the Rome Statute. Others, like the United States and Israel, have signed but never ratified the treaty and, subsequently, announced that they do not recognize the jurisdiction of the ICC. 

That does not mean suspected criminals from non-ratifying nations are completely beyond the court’s jurisdiction. If a ratifying state claims that nationals of a non-ratifying state have committed crimes within its territory, the Court can investigate and, if warranted, indict the accused party. But then one comes up against the problem of enforcement. How do you arrest the indicted person if he is Henry Kissinger, George W. Bush or any number of Israeli military and civilian leaders, all of whom may well warrant the Court’s attention.

This issue has not yet been fully confronted because, until very recently, no one has actually brought the crimes of individuals representing large and powerful states, or their allies, to the attention of the Court. As a result the ICC’s list of prosecutions is notably lopsided. To date, all those indicted by the court have come from small nations without great power allies, and lacking influence within international institutions like the United Nations. Indeed, many of these prosecutions are against citizens of so-called failed states. 

However, this is about to change due to the decision of the Palestinian National Authority to join the ICC. This has resulted in an ICC preliminary investigation of Israeli war crimes during the 2014 invasion of the Gaza Strip.

Part IV - Conclusion

How this investigation plays out will be a real test of ICC effectiveness. At this stage of our collective political history, how serious are we about creating a common set of rules allowing the investigation and punishment of serious crimes committed not just by leaders of small and weak states, but also by those who lead strong and influential nations? In other words, since law is one of the foundations of civilization, shouldn't we make sure that no one stands above it.


Lawrence Davidson







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An Analysis of The Peace Process Hustle

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Part I - Intractable Process

An intractable process, one that never seems to resolve itself, is either no process at all or a fraudulent one contrived to hide an ulterior motive. The so-called Israeli-Palestinian (at one time the Israeli-Arab) “peace process,” now in its sixth decade (counting from 1948) or fourth decade (counting from 1967) is, and probably always has been, just such a fraud.


One might object and say that the Oslo Accords (1993) were part of this process and they were not fraudulent. In my opinion that is a doubtful assumption. The talks were carried on in secret by officials who, at least on the Israeli side, never had an equitable peace in mind. Their goal was a political modification of the occupied territories that would free Israel from its legal obligations as occupiers of Palestinian territory and facilitate the pacification of the Palestinians and their resistance organizations. The Israeli side seemed to have believed that negotiating the return of Yasser Arafat and Fatah to the West Bank would provide them a partner in this process - not a peace process, but a pacification process.


It did not take long for the Palestinians to see through this gambit, and relations with the Israelis soon returned to the tense and sometimes violent status quo ante. It was only after Arafat’s suspicious death in 2004 that the Israelis finally got a Palestinian “leader,” in the person of Mahmoud Abbas, who would cooperate with them in this process of pacification. Organized resistance then became the pursuit of those in Gaza who persist in calling the “peace process” a fraud. They are correct.


Part II - “Detached from Reality” 


The present Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and some of his ministers have, of late, hinted at the truth. Netanyahu recently told the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, that criticism of his government’s expansion of Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem (which are illegal under international law), whether it comes from the U.S. government or Jewish groups such as J Street and Peace Now, are “words detached from reality” and “foster false statements [of hope] from the Palestinians,” therefore delaying the coming of “peace.” 


Likewise, Israel’s ambassador in Washington, Ron Dermer, has accused Palestinian “president” Abbas, the very man who helps Israel pacify the West Bank population, of “promoting hatred of Jews.” Why? Because Abbas has complained at the United Nations and other world forums of Israel’s unwillingness to bring the “peace process” to a conclusion that he and his Palestine National Council could accept. Abbas, who lost the last Palestinian free election (held in 2006) to Hamas, but with U.S. and Israeli support has usurped the office of Palestinian president, is actually a nearly perfect “peace partner” for the Israelis. The amount of compromise he asks for from the Israeli side in exchange for coming to terms isembarrassingly minimal. However, Netanyahu’s government refuses the Palestinians any compromise at all because, for these Zionists, the “peace process” is a facade whose only value lies in its very fraudulence. Its only value is as a cover for the process of territorial absorption. 


Thus, it is probably justified to conclude that a good number of Israelis (and certainly a vast majority of their leadership) are not interested in peace, and probably have never been, unless you define peace as total Palestinian surrender. More accurately, they are interested in expansion and control of all of Palestine from the Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea. After six decades of a “peace process” going nowhere, anyone who does not understand this is deluding themselves. 


Part III - Self-Delusion


Just who are those deluding themselves? Many of them are diaspora Jews who are, whether they understand it or not, caught in a contradiction: they are at once committed to Zionism’s ideological goal of a secure Jewish state in Palestine, but nonetheless are, at this moment of maximum Israeli power, calling for ideological compromise. Some of these people are members of Zionist groups in the U.S. such as Peace Now and J Street. Both organizations want continuing peace negotiations with the Palestinians looking toward achieving some variation of the two-state solution. J Street is apparently upset with Netanyahu’s determination to continue the colonization process “in every part of Judea and Samaria” (the West Bank) as well as East Jerusalem because to do so “erects one obstacle to peace after another.”


Unfortunately, the history of official Zionist behavior is on the side of Netanyahu. All the evidence indicates that Zionism and its leaders have been committed to the conquest of all of historic Palestine at least since 1918. In that year Chaim Weizmann submitted a map of the proposed Jewish national home to the Peace Conference that settled matters after World War I. It represented a maximalist program that has been incrementally realized first in 1948 and then 1967. Nowhere in the Zionist program has there ever been room for voluntary retreat. That is why Prime Minister Netanyahu describes those who criticize his colonization efforts as “detached from reality.”


Part IV - Conclusion


Netanyahu and his ilk, however, tend to ignore the fact that there are multiple realities operating here. Certainly, one should not forget the Palestinian reality, particularly that of Gaza, and Israeli culpability in its creation and maintenance. On the Zionist side there now exists at least two realities. One is certainly that of Prime Minister Netanyahu - the reality of the Zionist ideologue with Israeli power backing it up. But then there is the other Zionist  reality - that of Israel’s increasing isolation, not only diplomatic and cultural, but also, over time, economic. The latter reality scares many diaspora Jews to the point where they are willing to compromise maximalist ideological goals. 


The Zionists in power are as yet impervious to this fear. However, if the reality of economic and cultural isolation ever overtakes that of Israeli power, then the number of compromisers will rapidly grow, and the zealots such as Netanyahu will find themselves alone in a Masada-like fortress of their own making. 


Lawrence Davidson



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The Question of State Legitimacy

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Part I - State Legitimacy and Human Rights
 
 
The traditional criterion for state legitimacy was very simple. If a state and its government could hold and govern territory, it was legitimate, at least in the eyes of other governments. The form of government and its behavior did not matter in this definition - Stalin’s USSR, Mussolini‘s Italy, Hitler’s Germany - these regimes held territory and ruled as surely as did the ones in Britain, France and the United States. And, in each other’s official eyes, one state was as legitimate as the other.
 
 
This outlook began to change in 1945. Just before and then during World War II, fascist behavior in general and Nazi behavior in particular was so shocking that many post-war governments became convinced that state legitimacy required well-defined codes of national behavior enshrined in international law.
 
Therefore, right after the war, human rights became a recognized standard by which to judge states and their governments. This new standard, which was implied in the Nuremberg trials, was soon articulated in such documents as the International Declaration of Human Rights and endorsed by the United Nations. It was simultaneously reinforced by a worldwide process of decolonization that focused the international community on issues of human rights, particularly as they touched on the practice of racism and apartheid.
 
Most importantly, this process led growing segments of civil society to support human rights law as a standard by which to judge state legitimacy. In one case, pressure from civil society worldwide was applied on apartheid South Africa throughout the 1970s and 1980s with sufficient force to help change not only the nature of that country’s government, but its national culture and therefore the character of the state itself. By 1994 South Africa was no longer an apartheid state.
 
Part II - The New Attack on Human Rights
 
Recently things have not gone so well. There has been a tendency for the lessons learned about the importance of human rights to fade with time, particularly from the institutional memories of state bureaucracies. The proclivity of all state apparatuses to behave in a Machiavellian way has reasserted itself, particularly in the foreign policies of Western democratic states and their subsequent alliances with all manner of horrid right-wing dictatorships the world over. This complicity with oppressive regimes produced inevitable anti-Western sentiment culminating in the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. Subsequently the United States declared a “war on terror,” and this effort seems to excuse everything from indefinite detention and torture to assassination.
 
To accommodate this revival of amoral statecraft, there is now an effort to rewrite international law in a way that restricts or eliminates the human rights standard of behavior for state legitimacy. The end game here is to get the international community to recognize as “legal” actions by certain great powers and their allies that include the intrusion into the territory of other states and peoples in order to change governments, control populations, capture or kill wanted individuals, and destroy installations and other property. This is carried out by various means ranging from invasion, enforced apartheid regulations and assassination. At the forefront of this effort are the policies and actions of the United States and its prime ally, Israel.
 
Part III - Rationalizations
 
How is this effort to override international human rights law rationalized? Essentially, what the governments of the United States and Israel - as well as their neoconservative and Zionist supporters - say is that all of their enemies can be classified as terrorists, and because terrorists do not adhere to the standards set by international law, they (the U.S. and Israel) are forced to adopt wartime measures in combating these enemies. The cornerstone of this approach is the practice of “extraterritorial targeted killing.” Just listen to the well-known Zionist lawyer Alan M. Dershowitz, who has proclaimed that “at the moment our legal system is playing catch-up with military technology.” What he finds “imperative” is that drone attacks and the like be made legal by, for instance, allowing someone in the government to obtain a warrant that allows an assassination (and its “collateral damage”) to take place. Dershowitz is referring to the U.S. government but, the precedent having been set, his scenario for “legal” murder could be adopted by any government - certainly the Israelis have elevated “targeted killing” to a high art.
 
There is nothing in international law that substantiates this position, and it certainly violates core tenets of international human rights law as well as aspects of the Geneva Conventions. Nor can this behavior be passed off as part of a “just war,” for it fails to meet several accepted qualifications for such a venture as comparative justice and last resort. Nonetheless, an array of criminal practices have been put into practice under the assumption that “if you do something long enough, it becomes accepted standard practice.” In other words, in Washington and Tel Aviv, the hope is that what starts out as a corruption of the law eventually becomes the law.
 
Part IV - Standing Up for the International Law
 
There is now a struggle going on that will determine both the viability of international human rights law and the role of civil society in defining state legitimacy. Should states that adopt practices such as “extraterritorial targeted killing” or adhere to the racist practices of apartheid continue to be regarded as legitimate, or should they be seen as criminal “rogue states” by virtue of their violation of international human rights law? In this struggle those who stand in support of human rights should not be underestimated. They are serious, numerous, worldwide in scope, and well organized. But, they are not governments, they are elements of the general population: they are civil society.
 
This contest may have still greater implications. It may really come down to the fate of the rule of law itself. If we allow international law, and particularly international human rights law, to be marginalized or even done away with, we will return to same international conditions that destroyed the League of Nations, facilitated the rise of the fascists, Nazis and Stalinists, and allowed for the prolonged existence of apartheid South Africa. In each case the lack of effective international human rights law helped lead to a drastic deterioration in the domestic rule of law in countries like Italy, Germany, Russia and South Africa. And, today we can see signs of deterioration of the rule of law in countries such as Israel and, to a lesser but still real extent, the United States.
 
There is a lot at stake here and we can be thankful that even as the majority of people blithely go about their daily affairs, a growing minority has become aware of what their governments are doing and its implications for everyone’s future. We should be thankful and supportive - actively supportive.


Lawrence Davidson
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Zionism and the Educational Elites

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Part I - The Zionists Have a Problem

Due to Israel’s brutal racism and repeated attacks on Palestinian civilians, it is losing popular support internationally. As this happens, the Zionists appear to be intensifying pressure on societal and political elites, particularly in the U.S. and other Western states, to maintain policies that support and protect Israel’s criminal behavior. Their vehicle for achieving this goal has always been financial gifts and donations to elite individuals and institutions. These gifts and donations help grease the wheels, so to speak, of the systems of power through which the elites operate, and create a monetary dependency on, among others, Zionist donors. It also creates an obligation to respond to these donor’s needs. The result is a growing disconnect between evolving popular attitudes toward Israel and the static positions held and actions taken by the elites.  

American Zionist leaders are aware of this gap and they take it seriously. However, they have a problem in that open debate and the offering of evidence can no longer win the argument for their side. In short, the Zionists don’t have a monopoly anymore on the story of how Israel came to be and Palestine came not to be. And without that monopoly the imperialist origins and ongoing racist nature of Israel are can no longer be concealed. 

Part II - Donor Blackmail

If you cannot win by debate, how do you combat the growing popular suspicion of Israeli and Zionist actions? You do it by pressuring the donor-dependent elite leadership of institutions, such as universities and colleges, to suppress and punish those who criticize Israel. That such action, if carried forth in public institutions the U.S., would be a violation of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution does not bother the Zionists at all. Their standard of rights is that practiced in the discriminatory environment of Israel and not the ideal established by the United States constitution.  

A good example of American Zionists subtly urging what is in fact unconstitutional behavior can be seen in a letter sent by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an aggressive Zionist organization, to top administrators at several U.S. universities and colleges.  

The letter purports to offer “information and recommendations about how to respond to conflicts that may arise on your campus due to the recent conflict in Gaza.” It goes on to accuse those critical of Israel of “stifling dialogue … refusing to work with pro-Israel and Jewish student groups” and pressuring educational institutions to “engage in ‘Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions’ activities.” The letter goes on to warn that 23 September 2014 will be a day of “action on college campuses” by such groups critical of Israel as American Muslims for Palestine. 

It is interesting that the letter seeks to turn the tables on pro-Palestine groups by labeling them as the ones that seek to limit freedom of speech by advocating the boycott of Israel. On the one hand, this is a misinterpretation of the tactical rules of the boycott (which principally targets Israeli institutions rather than individuals) and, on the other, it fails to mention that Israel is a country thatsystematically undermines the civil rights of the Palestinians. The ADL letter also ignores the fact that Zionist organizations on U.S. campuses (Hillel, for example) actively try to suppress dialogue and debate when it comes to Israel. The letter goes on to accuse those who stand against Israel of “attempting to harass and intimidate Jewish and other students.”  Actually, there have indeed been minor instances of such behavior on both sides of what is, after all, a very heated issue. However, when it comes to modeling the suppression of rights, it should be noted that Israel has turned harassment and punishment of Palestinians and their few Jewish Israeli supporters into a high art. 

The ADL letter concludes with an invitation that seeks to strengthen the dependency of academic administrative elites on this highly biased Zionist organization. It states, “As one of the country’s premier civil rights organizations, ADL has decades of experience in helping administrators and students on campus respond to bigotry and intergroup strife. We would be happy to discuss the challenges many campuses face today and to assist your efforts to ensure your campus remains a place where all viewpoints can be discussed.” So said the spider to the fly.

The ADL might have been a “premier civil rights organization” in 1913, when it was founded, but soon after 1967 it went the way of most major American Jewish organizations by becoming a mouthpiece for the uncritical defense of Israel. To this end it has confused opposition to Israel and its behavior with anti-Semitism and, in doing so, has lost any ability to objectively know what civil rights means within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. 

Part III - Tragic Consequences

So why would a highly placed academic administrator such as Chancellor Linda Katehi, of the University of California, Davis,accept this missive from the ADL and distribute it to all her vice chancellors, deans and, significantly, the head of the UC Davis police department? Because, unlike her student constituency, which is evolving an accurate view and critique of Israel, she is stuck in the world of elites dominated by donors and ideologues who have always been pro-Israel. In other words, her world remains static while the world outside her clique is changing. 

It is because of the continuing vulnerability of higher education’s administrative elites to donor blackmail that we continue to witness the tragic and unjust treatment of scholars and teachers who have taken a public stand against Israel. An editorial in the Los Angeles Times describes the negative institutional consequences: 

“For any university, but especially a public institution … the encroachment of donor pressure on the administration is a harbinger of the destruction of academic freedom. Wealthy donors are able to step in and exert strong influence because public funding sources, such as the state legislature, have systematically withdrawn support for public universities. They seldom have an interest in independent, objective academic study; they're interested in advancing their own notions of how the world works or should work - in ideology, not ideas.”

Donor blackmail is the last front line for the Zionists as they continue to suffer defeats in the battle for public opinion. Unfortunately, their activities on this front have resulted the erosion of academic freedom and the ruination of dozens careers. As Stephen Lendman has observed, American Zionists have collectively taken on the role of a modern-day Joe McCarthy now attempting to purge higher education of those critical of Israel. In so doing they join the ranks of other dubious pressure groups such as those who would purge the teaching of evolution from the classrooms and censor books in our libraries. And, in the case of the operatives at the ADL, they go about this corrupting process while proclaiming themselves a “premier civil rights organization.” Well, you know the old saying: actions speak louder than words. 

Lawrence Davidson

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Deconstructing the Zionist View of Gaza's Horror

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Part I - David Harris and the American Jewish Congress


For reasons unknown I have ended up on the list-serve of the American Jewish Congress. This means I receive messages sent out by its executive director, David Harris. Sometimes I even read them.  


On 18 July 2014 I got just such a missive explaining that “too many in the international community fail to grasp the stark realities” Israel faces and its “severely limited policy options.” To set everyone straight Harris wrote an op-ed in the Boston Globe (also dated 18 July), a copy of which came along with his mailing.


Since the horror in Gaza continues unabated and Harris’s letter can be taken as representative of the American Zionist point of view, I decided that it was appropriate for me to deconstruct his op-ed for my own blog and list-serve. One should note that a similar contesting of Israeli rationalizations, dealing with somewhat different points, appears in a 25 July 2014 online article, entitled “Five Israeli Talking Points on Gaza - Debunked,”  from theNation magazine. 


Before looking at the op-ed we should note that Mr. Harris lives in a very tightly defined world. It is a world defined by a set of unquestioned assumptions which are prescribed by a thoroughly assimilated ideology. That ideology is, of course Zionism, the a priori assumption of which is the right of Israel to exist as a Zionist state, that is an exclusively Jewish state. Unfortunately, there are many negative consequences coming from this assumption and one major one is this: you cannot create a state for one group alone in the midst of a large population of other, non-group people, without creating a discriminatory environment. Statehood requires the institutionalizing of that environment through laws that create superior and inferior populations based on who is or is not in the favored group that the state is designed to serve. This will almost inevitably lead to segregation, extreme economic disparities and, quite possibly, ethnic cleansing. This is exactly the result of putting the claim of Israel’s right to exist as a Zionist state into practice. The flip-side of this process is a piece of reality (not another assumption) that is nonetheless not allowed for in Mr. Harris’s world, and that is the discriminated population’s legitimate right to resist. 


Part II - David Harris’s Op-Ed


Here are the main points put forth the Boston Globe Op-ed:  


A) Harris starts by laying all blame for the ongoing death and destruction in Gaza on Hamas. He calls the present round of fighting, “the latest Hamas-triggered war.” Is this accurate?  Actually the accusation is based on the unsubstantiated assertion of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s that Hamas ordered the kidnapping and murder of three teenagers from an illegal settlement in June. This event was the trigger - the foreground context - for the present confrontation. No independent credible evidence has been offered for Netanyahu’s accusation. Nonetheless, what followed was widespread  arrests on the West Bank by Israel, carried out in a near-random fashion, as well as increased pressure on Gaza. Hamas responded to both these actions with renewed rocket attacks. The confrontation escalated from there.


The background to all of this is also worth noting. It was put best by the  astute and honest Jewish critic, M. J. Rosenberg. While condemning the rocket attacks from Gaza, he notes that “It is Israel which has kept Gaza under blockade since 2006 when it decided it would not accept the result of a free and fair election that put Hamas in power. A blockade is an act of war and Israel has, by that definition, been at war with Gaza for almost a decade, a war it waged through its incessant punishment of innocent civilians. Did Netanyahu think Hamas would simply accept  that forever?” None of these facts are mentioned in Mr. Harris’s op-ed.


B) Harris goes on to lament that “the hope for an early end [to the present fighting] was dashed when an Egyptian-brokered cease-fire proposal was accepted by Israel, but was met by Hamas by a barrage of rockets aimed at the Jewish state.” How accurate is this? It certainly is not the whole story.


The military dictatorship that now passes for a government in Egypt is an ally of Israel. What was put forth as a ceasefire offer was a plan conjured up by Egypt in consultation with Israel, and possibly the U.S., and then presented to Hamas as a take-it-or-leave-it affair. Hamas was never consulted, nor were there any benefits for Hamas and the people of Gaza in the offer other than a temporary halt in the slaughter being carried out by Israel. Here is what the renowned Amira Hass, one of the few objective Israeli reporters, put it: “the offer “is not meant to bring progress and change to the people of Gaza, but to marginalize them [Hamas] as a political movement.”  


Hamas itself had offered a ceasefire plan on July 14. It offered a ten-year truce in exchange for the lifting of the eight-year-old blockade - the one that constitutes an Israeli act of war and has turned Gaza into a huge open-air prison. Again, this ceasefire offer was not mentioned by Mr. Harris in his op-ed even though he must certainly be aware of it. Nor did the Western media that covered the one-sided Egyptian ceasefire offer pay much attention to the Hamas proposal, even though it would have given Israel a long-term respite from rocket attacks. Nor did anyone seem to remember that Hamas had made a similar offer back in 2008. Both then and now the Hamas offers were, to borrow words from Mr. Harris, “met by a barrage of rockets” fired from Israeli jets and tanks.


C) Harris asserts that the present “reality” leads Israeli leaders to conclude that what they face in Gaza is “an adversary determined to at all costs to wage war, won’t change its outlook, [and] seeks to maximize murder and mayhem, and that this adversary must therefore be answered with a strong, unambiguous response.”  This is a rather bizarre assertion. From the Palestinian perspective (to which Mr. Harris will give no credence), this is an exact description of Israeli attitudes and policies. Could Mr. Harris be projecting the behavior of those he champions onto those he despises?


D) Mr. Harris goes on: “It is important to remember that it [the present “murder and mayhem”] did not have to be this way.” What does he mean? He proceeds to lay out a “what might have been” story that goes as follows:  “In 2005 Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon unilaterally withdrew all settlers and soldiers from Gaza, giving this narrow strip of land its first chance in history … to exercise sovereignty. That could have become the springboard for a new start, perhaps the beginning of a Singapore on the Mediterranean. But within two years Hamas … seized power. Rather than Gaza’s construction the goal became Israel’s destruction.” 


Does Harris really believe this? It certainly has no relation to how Palestinians experiencedthe event. From their perspective his story is at best a decontextualized invention. What he does not tell us is that Ariel Sharon was (according to David Ben Gurion) a consistent liar and (according to major human rights organizations) a serial war criminal. His motives for pulling out the settlers out of Gaza had nothing to do with the future prosperity of the Palestinians, whom he despised and wished ultimately to be killed or expelled, and it certainly did not offer Gaza “sovereignty.” The withdrawal of the settlers signaled two strategies on Sharon’s part: a concentration of Israeli settlement efforts on the West Bank, and creating the conditions for the blockade that now makes Gaza nothing short of a ghetto-like prison camp. It should be kept in mind - if possible even in Mr. Harris’ mind - that the strangulation of Gaza began before the election of Hamas to power in 2008.


E) Finally, David Harris concludes his op-ed by insisting that Israel is a democratic society that plays by civilized rules while its adversaries are uncivilized, undemocratic and play by no such rules. He tells us that “this can be difficult for some outside the region to grasp. It runs so contrary to how we live our daily lives, much less how, when necessary, we wage war as democratic nations.” Again, Harris has slipped into invention and fantasy. Israel is a full democratic society only for its Jewish citizens. For non-Jews it is not a democracy, but rather akin to an apartheid society.  And, as to the waging of war,democratic nations wage war in barbaric fashion and do not hesitate to act as terrorists too. Hamas and the other Palestinian fighting groups, even at their most bloody, are pale reflections of the armies that have slaughtered millions of Vietnamese, Iraqis, and Afghanis, and those that destroyed the peaceful society that once lived in Palestine.  


Part III - David Harris’s Shrinking World


David Harris lives in a peculiarly narrow world.  And, it is significant that Israeli behavior is causing the number of people who share that world to decline. Unfortunately, their number still includes some very powerful people, as witnessed by the U.S. Senate’s most recentunanimous vote to support Israel’s barbarism in Gaza. Then again, most of these senators only precariously held to the Zionist cause through a process of political bribery. The truth is that outside Israel, Washington, D.C. and various other Zionist strongholds, David Harris’s worldview is crumbling. And, as the numbers of those who share his viewpoint shrinks, other counter-groups, such as the boycott Israel movement, grow in number. Sooner or later a tipping point will be reached and then things will change and probably do so rapidly. On that day what will David Harris do? Blame it all on anti-Semitism? Take residence at the top of Masada? Or grudgingly seek to make his peace with the Palestinians?


Lawrence Davidson
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The Periodic Slaughter of Palestinians

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To the Israeli government, the periodic slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza is called “mowing the grass,” a chore that frequently needs repeating. But this violence is wearing on the world’s conscience, including moral objections from more and more Jews, observes Lawrence Davidson.

By Lawrence Davidson

As the Israelis once more inflict collective punishment in Gaza (a tactic which happens to constitute a war crime), it is time to consider the mind-set behind their repeated violent and sadistic behavior. One way to do so is to listen to the rationalizations they use, also repeatedly, to justify their actions.
Among the many rationalizations offered by Israeli leaders for their violent behavior is the assertion that the Arabs, and Palestinians in particular, “only understand force.” If you do not use force against them they interpret its absence as a sign of weakness and this only encourages them to stand against the Zionist state.
This notion that the Arabs only understand force is one of the holdover stereotypes of a mostly, but obviously not completely, bygone age of imperialism.When it comes to the Israelis, this persistent myth about the need to employ force against the Arabs is mixed up with their own post-Holocaust determination to “never again” react to a threat passively. They believe that sort of reaction is what killed millions of European Jews, and so it is no longer psychologically acceptable.
The core problem with these lines of thought is that they are seriously misleading – both in terms of Arab/Palestinian perceptions and European Jewish behavior.
Since coming into existence in 1948, Israel has attacked Palestinian individuals and infrastructure thousands of times. Israeli conventional wisdom would claim that this has been done in self-defense and to dissuade the Palestinians from future attacks.
The self-defense rationale is misleading because Israelis have, from the beginning, been acting offensively: most of what is now Israel and the Occupied Territories was taken violently and then ethnically cleansed of most of its Arab inhabitants with the ongoing goal of setting up a religiously exclusive state. Palestinian violence has always been a reaction to Israeli aggression.
The argument that harsh retaliation against Palestinian acts of resistance would dissuade them from further resistance (that is, the Palestinians “only understand force”) proved long ago to be false. It has never worked, and yet too many Israelis have clung tenaciously to this lie (a small minority, such as the Israeli journalist Gordon Levy, know the lie for what it is and bravely keep proclaiming the truth).
Why has the lie persisted so long? Well, there is the old adage that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is a form of insanity, but perhaps that is a bit too superficial for the case at hand.
One reason for Israel’s repetitive violence is that if Israelis admit it is a tactical failure and desist, they might have to negotiate a genuine peace treaty with the Palestinians. Many will immediately say that they have, repeatedly, tried to negotiate while always coming up against Palestinian intransigence.
However, if one takes a close and objective look at these efforts at negotiation, one finds that they are facades or false fronts behind which we find Israeli intransigence. As the liberal Zionist M. J. Rosenberg has pointed out, the Israelis have never negotiated in good faith.
When the Palestinians react to Israel’s bad faith, the Israelis break off negotiations and blame the Palestinians. Israel then returns to its pattern of repetitive violence.
In truth, negotiating in good faith means compromising Israel’s ambition to settle all of the land of Palestine, and that is something the hard-core Zionists will not do. As a consequence it is not the Israelis, but the Palestinians who have lacked a partner who will negotiate responsibly.
Engrained Racism
Another reason for the repetitive violence is that once Israel has raised several generations of citizens to believe that the Palestinians are implacable enemies who “only understand force,” it becomes politically difficult to change the message despite its elemental falseness.
The myth of the impossibility of negotiating with the Palestinians is believed by so many Israelis that if a politician started advocating a genuine compromise, he or she would be marginalized or worse. Remember the fate of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who almost certainly was not operating in wholehearted good faith toward the Palestinians but was assassinated anyway because of the fear that he was moving in that direction.
Finally, there is the connection the Israelis make between giving up their violence and appearing weak. Yet given their overwhelming superiority in weaponry and the fact that its repeated use has destroyed Palestinian society without stopping Palestinian attacks, why be concerned that switching to non-violent tactics, such as good faith negotiating, would signal weakness?
My guess is that the Israelis aren’t really afraid that the Palestinians would interpret things this way. The Israelis are concerned that they themselves would feel that they would be replicating the alleged passivity of European Jews in the face of the Nazi onslaught.
In other words, the Israeli fear of showing weakness is not an attitude that references outside groups. It references only the Israeli concern for their own self-image. It is the fear of seeing themselves as akin to European Jews passively going to the gas chambers that stands as the greatest psychological barrier to an Israeli decision to halt their repetitive violence.
As noted above, this is so despite the fact that their interpretation of European Jewish behavior is historically misleading. For hundreds of years Europe’s Jews faced discrimination and persecution that periodically turned violent. These episodes of violence, known as pogroms, were murderous but short-lived.
The Jewish communities learned that if they kept their heads down and allowed the storm to wash over them, their casualties were less. They learned this not just by being passive, but by comparing such behavior with the consequences of active resistance.
When in the Twentieth Century the Nazis’ anti-Semitism emerged, most of the Jewish leadership interpreted it as yet another episode of pogroms, and they reacted to it in the manner that history had taught them would result in the least harm. Of course, they were wrong. The Nazis were a qualitatively different sort of enemy. But the Jews of Europe only discovered this when it was too late.
Still, there were plenty of episodes of active Jewish resistance ranging from concentration camp revolts to the battle of the Warsaw ghetto. Unfortunately, the Israelis and most other Zionists forget about this history and condemn Europe’s Jews for being shamefully passive in the face of mortal danger.
Thus was born the slogan “never again.” This state of mind also encouraged the Zionists to see the Palestinians, and indeed all Arabs, as latter-day Nazis to be repeatedly vanquished with repetitive violence.
The Future
The Israelis would expel or kill a majority of the Palestinians left in their homeland if the world let them. Israel would do so not only because it would clear the way for Jewish settlement of all of Palestine, but also because it would allow the Israelis to feel psychologically redeemed – redeemed from the allegedly sinful passivity displayed by the victims of the Holocaust.
The consequences of this state of mind are, of course, catastrophic – first and foremost for the Palestinians, who suffer death and destruction for their justified resistance to oppression. The Zionists see them as latter-day Nazis but in truth they resemble the resisters in the Warsaw ghetto. And, if that rings true, then who do the Israelis now resemble?
That point leads us to ask what are the consequences of Israeli behavior for the Jews and Judaism? After all, Israel claims to represent world Jewry. So, the consequences of persecuting the Palestinians have been, are and will continue to be disastrous to the reputation of Jews and Judaism.
In relation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there are now three categories of Jews: a) those who have publicly taken a stand opposing Israel’s behavior; b) those who publicly support Israel’s behavior and its rationalizations; and c) those who stand aside, try to ignore what is going on, and just carry on with their lives.
Whatever the people or situation, this last category is usually the largest. It is also the category that concerns me the most for, unbeknownst to many of these Jews, their wellbeing is being used falsely to justify the policies of a habitually violent state and its racist ambitions.
But there are intimations that this largest group of Jews is becoming conscious of Israel’s crimes and this is a welcome and necessary beginning. The next question is what actions, if any, will consciousness bring?
Lawrence Davidson is a history professor at West Chester University in Pennsylvania. He is the author of Foreign Policy Inc.: Privatizing America’s National Interest;　America’s Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood; and Islamic Fundamentalism.
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