ISRAEL AND THE JEWISH EXPERIENCE

A local book club (all white, middle class gentiles), is
reading Jimmy Carter's insightful and informative
Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, which inevitably deals
with long time and serious and somewhat baffling
abuse of Palestinians by Israelis. (It goes both ways,
but Israelis are militarily dominant, and in charge.)
I came home from a discussion of this, and turned to
an article entitled "Seven Pillars of Jewish Denial,"
found in Vol. 17, No. 5, of Tikkun, a magazine where
"you get an emancipatory spirituality, a progressive
Jewish voice, the most in-depth perspective on the
Israeli peace movement, and a politics of meaning,"
according to Michael Lerner, the editor. It's an excellent
magazine, and delivers all that and more.

The author of this article is Kim Chernin. She writes
(in part): "I am thinking about American Jews,
wondering why so many of us have trouble being
critical of Israel. I faced the difficulty myself when I
first went to Israel in 1971. I was an ardent Zionist,
intending to spend my life on a kibbutz in the Galilee
and to become an Israeli citizen. Back home, before
leaving, I argued almost daily with my mother, an
extreme left wing radical, about the Jews' right to a
homeland in our historical and therefore inalienable
setting. However, once established on my kibbutz on
the Lebanese border, I began to notice things that
disrupted my complacency.

We used to ride down to our orchards on kibbutz
trucks with Arab workers from the neighboring
villages and were occasionally invited to visit. We
liked sitting on a rug on a dirt floor, eating food
cooked over an open fire, drinking water from the
village well. Above all we loved the kerosene lamps
that were lit and set in a half circle around us as it
grew dark. But walking home it occurred to me that
our kibbutz had running water, electricity, modern
stoves. Our neighbors were gracious, generous, and
friendly, although I had learned by then that the land
the kibbutz occupied had once belonged to them. We
were living on land that was theirs, under material
conditions they could not hope to equal. I found this
troubling.

The path from this troubled awareness to my later
ability to be critical of Israel has been long and complex.
Over the years I have spoken with other Jews who have
traveled this same path, and to many more who haven't.
In each of us I have detected mental obstacles that make
it hard, sometimes impossible, for us to see what is there
before our eyes. Our inability to engage in critical thought
about our troubled homeland is entangled by crucial
questions about Jewish identity. Why do American Jews
find it difficult to be critical of Israel? Here, set out in
linear form, are seven obstacles to a Jew's ability to be
critical of Israel.

Seven Obstacles

1. A conviction that Jews are always in danger, always have
been, and therefore are in danger now.
Which leads to:
2. The insistence that a criticism is an attack and will lead
to our destruction.
Which is rooted in:
3. The supposition that any negativity towards Jews (or
Israel) is a sign of anti-Semitism and will (again,
inevitably) lead to our destruction.
Which is enhanced by:
4. Survivor's guilt.
Which contains within itself:
5. A hidden belief that we can change the past.
Which holds:
6. An even more hidden belief that a significant
amount of suffering confers the right of violence.
Which finally brings us to:
7. The conviction that our beliefs, our ideology,
(or theology), matter more than the lives of other
human beings."

Ms. Chernin spends a couple of pages explaining
and enlarging on these "obstacles." If yo have an
interest in that, I encourage you to track down the
article and read it in its entirety. Suffice it for my
purposes here to skip along to the author's further
comments on Obstacle 6. Suffering, Violence:
"The Israeli army that defends our homeland behaves
brutally, uses torture, fires upon innocent civilians.
What justifies the behaviour of this army? We call it
self defense but this is, I suggest, only the surface
justification. Further down, tucked carefully away in
our collective psyche, we find a sense of entitlement
about our violence. Our historic suffering as a people
entitles us to the violence of our current behaviour.
Our violence is not horrendous and cruel like the
violence of other people, but is a justified, sacred
violence, a holy war. Of course we would not want to
know this about ourselves -- it would make us too
much like the perceived enemy whose violence
against us we are deploring. When the suicide
bomber blows up a hotel full of Passover celebrants,
we see clearly that this is an instance of hateful,
unjustifiable violence. (And it is, it is.) When we
destroy a refugee camp of impoverished Palestinians,
this, in our eyes, is a violence purified by our history
of persecution. (And it is not, it is not.) We are
puzzled that much of the world doesn't see our
situation in the same way."

The writer goes on to say: "I think many of us hold this
view of purified Jewish violence without being aware of
it. Though we rarely admit it, the Torah is full of ancient
stories marked by tribal violence done in the name of
Jehovah." After talking about Elijah, and his slaying of
the prophets of Baal, she writes: "In a similar vein: We
celebrate the military victories of Joshua. But do we
really take in what they involved? 'Joshua, and all Israel
with him, went on up from Elon to Hebron. They
attacked it, took it and struck it with the edge of the
sword, with its king, all the places belonging to it and
every living creature in it (my italics, Josh. 10:37).' I have
yet to hear a rabbi help us imagine this event in which
women and children, the very young and the very old, are
put to the sword. . . I can't count the number of times I
read the story of Joshua as a tale of our people coming
into their rightful possession of their promised land
without stopping to say to myself, 'but this is a history
of rape, plunder, slaughter, invasion and destruction of
other peoples.' As such, it bears an uncomfortably close
resemblance to the behaviour of Israeli settlers and the
Israeli army of today, a behviour we also cannot see for
what it is."

I will plan to return this topic at a later date with:
Obstacle 7. Ideology vs. Living People. It's a long one
that merits its own space.

jgoodwin004@centurytel.net