Increasingly, Thoughtful American Jews Are Re-Thinking Zionism
By Allan C. Brownfeld

Rabbi Arik Ascherman, executive director of Rabbis for Human Rights, is forcibly removed by Israeli police during a June 15, 2001 protest near a new illegal settlement in the West Bank (AFP Photo).

THE IDEA THAT the majority of Americans of the Jewish faith support the policies of the government of Israel—an idea repeatedly set forth by generally unrepresentative organizations such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)—is one that is becoming increasingly untenable to support. The evidence is clearly to the contrary.

In January, American rabbis representing the four major streams of Judaism in this country went to the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC on behalf of one of their Israeli peers, a leader in Israel’s human rights movement.

Along with Rabbi Gerold Serotta, who co-chairs Rabbis for Human Rights (RHR) North America, RHR advisory council members Sidney Schwartz, Marc Gopin and Jack Moline brought with them a letter with some 350 signatures by North American rabbis. Other activists delivered a copy to the Israeli Consulate in New York.

According to the Jan. 15 Washington Jewish Week, “The missive called for dismissal of the charges against Rabbi Arik Ascherman, who faces charges of interfering with police for protesting home demolition in Beit Hanina and the village of Issawiyah, north of Jerusalem. Ascherman, 44, is the executive director of Rabbis for Human Rights in Israel...If convicted, the U.S.-born Reform rabbi who now lives in Jerusalem could face three years in jail and fines. But Rabbis for Human Rights is hoping that it will be Israel’s policy of demolishing illegally built Arab homes that will really be on trial.”

Noted the letter delivered by the American rabbis: “These prosecutions will never lead to the kind of Israel we want and desire: a Jewish state that celebrates the prophetic voice which has animated our people for centuries. True democracies protect minority rights, and cherish and listen to their critics, to those who stand with the poor and powerless.”

In the opinion of Rabbi Schwartz, who directs the Washington-based Panim: The Institute for Jewish Leadership and Values, backers of Israel must also stand ready to point out policies that need changing. “The best expressions of our love for Israel,” he argues, “is not only to support her against her enemies, but also to help the society live up to its own aspirations, as stated in the Israeli Declaration of Independence.”

The document delivered to the embassy contends that the destroyed houses posed no security threat to Israel: “None of the people in these homes engaged in violence or harboring terrorists. They were demolished because of a violation of zoning regulations in the context where it is almost impossible for Palestinian families in those parts of the West Bank under Israeli civilian control or in Jerusalem to legally obtain building permits.”

The letter also was signed by, among others, Rabbi David Saperstein, who heads the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, and Scott Sperling of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations.

Rabbi Ascherman and other members of his group expect the trial to take months. The rabbis want to turn the spotlight on Israel’s demolition policy, which they say violates both Palestinian human rights and Jewish ideals. They charge that Israel discriminates by destroying Palestinian homes built without permits while encouraging construction in Jewish neighborhoods in the West Bank near Jerusalem. In addition, they argue, since the l967 Six-Day War, Jerusalem officials have tried to keep the city’s Arab sector at about 28 percent of the population, moving Jews into East Jerusalem and limiting building permits for Palestinians. According to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, 2,500 homes have been demolished in East Jerusalem and the West Bank since l967, leaving l6,000 Palestinians homeless.

In April 2003, an Israeli bulldozer rumbled toward Rabbi Ascherman as he protested a home demolition. Unlike Rachel Corrie, who had been crushed to death the previous month in Gaza, the rabbi was not hurt. Having lost his skullcap in the rubble, however, he said, “I am hoping that someday Palestinians will dig up the kippah and see that Jews in the name of Torah tried to fight this policy.”

The recently published Wrestling with Zion (Grove Press, 2003) assembles for the first time some of the most important writers and thinkers in modern American Jewish life to address the ongoing crisis in the Middle East. It is a book which deserves far more attention than it has received thus far.

The volume’s editors are Tony Kushner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, and Alisa Solomon, who has been covering Israel/Palestine since the l980s for the Village Voice and is professor of English/Journalism at Baruch College of the City University of New York.

“The founding of the state of Israel required the dispossession of an indigenous group, the Palestinians,” Kushner and Solomon write. “This is unignorable reality, obscured by but not dissolved in pre-existing and subsequent claims made by, or acts of inhumanity committed by, both sides, long before and long after Israel’s formal declaration as a state. Tracking through a forest of competing identities and histories of persecution and oppression, one must adhere to this simple fact or else one’s moral compass loses its true north and ceases to function.”

In recent days, Kushner and Solomon note, there has been “...a dangerous illusion...that the Jewish-American community speaks with a single voice, expressing universal, uncritical support for the policies of the Sharon government. A widespread but relatively recent conflation of Judaism and Jewish identity with Israel and Israeli nationalist identity has done a grave disservice to the heterogeneity of Jewish thought, to the centuries-old Jewish tradition of lively dispute and rigorous, unapologetic skeptical inquiry. As a consequence of this artificial flattening and deadening of discourse, enforced by rage and even violence, the vital connection between Jewish culture and the struggle for social and economic justice is coming apart. And, of course, because American foreign policy has a tidal effect on the politics of the region, the Jewish-American community can play a pivotal role in the pursuit of a just and lasting peace. We hope this book will help liberate American voices of negotiation for the end of the occupation, for justice for the Palestinians, for peace and security for both nations.”

Among the essays included in Wrestling With Zion is a talk given as the Second Annual Holocaust Lecture at the Center for American and Jewish Studies and the George W. Truett seminary at Baylor University on April 8, 2002 by Sara Roy, senior research scholar at Harvard University’s Center for Middle East Studies, and the daughter of Holocaust survivors.

“As with the Holocaust,” Roy declared, “I tried to remember my very first encounter with the occupation. One of my earliest encounters involved a group of Israeli soldiers, an old Palestinian man, and his donkey. Standing on a street with some Palestinian friends, I noticed an elderly Palestinian walking down the street, leading his donkey. A small child no more than three or four years old, clearly his grandson, was with him. Some Israeli soldiers standing nearby went up to the old man and stopped him. One soldier ambled over to the donkey and pried open its mouth. ‘Old man,’ he asked, ‘why are your donkey’s teeth so yellow? Why aren’t they white? Don’t you brush your donkey’s teeth?’ The old Palestinian was mortified, the little boy visibly upset. The soldier repeated his question, yelling this time, while other soldiers laughed. The child began to cry and the old man just stood there silently, humiliated. The scene repeated itself while a crowd gathered. The soldier then ordered the old man to stand behind the donkey and demanded that he kiss the animal’s behind. At first, the old man refused but as the soldier screamed at him and his grandson became hysterical, he bent down and did it. The soldiers laughed and walked away. They had achieved their goal: to humiliate him and those around him. We all stood there in silence, ashamed to look at each other, hearing nothing but the uncontrollable sobs of the little boy. The old man did not move for what seemed like a very long time. He just stood there, demeaned and destroyed.”

Stunned Disbelief
Recalled Roy: “I stood there too, in stunned disbelief. I immediately thought of the stories my parents had told me of how Jews had been treated by the Nazis in the l930s, before the ghettos and death camps, of how Jews would be forced to clean sidewalks with toothbrushes and have their beards cut off in public. What happened to the old man was absolutely equivalant in principle, intent and impact: to humiliate and dehumanize. In this instance, there was no difference between the German soldier and the Israeli one. Throughout the summer of l985, I saw similar incidents: young Palestinian men being forced by Israeli soldiers to bark like dogs on their hands and knees or dance in the streets...In this critical respect my first encounter with the occupation was the same as my first encounter with the Holocaust, with the number on my father’s arm. It spoke the same message: the denial of one’s humanity.”

In another contribution, New York University professor Douglas Rushkoff, author of the book Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism, makes the point that, “At the very least, we must consider the possibility that Israel is not the ultimate realization of Jewish ideals, but a temporary surrender of those ideals to the greater necessities of survival in a world plagued by angry religious states with cruel and murderous ethnocentric policies. In a sense, the real Jewish nation—at least in principle if not its most recent deeds—is the United States, which was founded on more consistently Jewish ideals than Israel itself. Unintentionally, the Arabs are right when they paint America as a great Zionist conspiracy. It is the true, if troubled, experiment in religious freedom and secular self-rule initiated by Moses so many years ago. If I had to pick a flag that best represented the spirit and law of my Torah, it’d be the [American] flag.”

What has become clear to many American Jews who seek peace in the Middle East is that, without U.S. leadership moving the peace process forward, success is unlikely, if not impossible.

Henry Siegman, senior fellow and director of the U.S./Middle East Project of the Council on Foreign Relations, who served as executive director of the American Jewish Congress from l978 to l994, argues that, “In the real world, Sharon’s government will never offer an alternative to its policy of ever-escalating revenge killings. It is therefore the U.S. that should declare its vigorous support for such an alternative. To be sure, the U.S. cannot make Israeli policy. But if the U.S. is clear about what it believes is the right and necessary thing to do, Israel will eventually do it. When U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower declared, without equivocation, that the l956 invasion of Egypt by Israel, Great Britain and France was wrong and needed to be reversed, all three countries pulled out promptly.”

In Siegman’s view, “A great power, particularly one that has become the world’s only great power, does not need to send planes and troops to make its point. It is time for Washington to deal with the fundamentals of the conflict, and not to avoid them by focusing instead on so-called ‘confidence-building’ strategies; that is a cop out. The only way to build confidence is to give Palestinians reasons to believe they can achieve their goal without resorting to violence. This requires far more than the U.S. entertaining a ‘vision’ of a ‘State of Palestine’ in an indeterminate future. Without an explicit and credible non-violent alternative that would lead to statehood, the very term ‘confidence-building’ is quite meaningless. What is it we expect Palestinians to have confidence in? Sharon’s goodwill?...Israel’s insistence on a continuation of measures that have bred only increased terrorism in the past, in the belief that more of the same will somehow yield different results, is madness. The last thing the U.S. should be doing is encouraging such madness.”

A similar view is expressed in a new book, The Fate of Zionism (HarperSanFrancisco, 2003) by Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, Bronfman Visiting Professor of Humanities at New York University and professor emeritus of religion at Dartmouth College.

Rabbi Hertzberg, a former president of the American Jewish Policy Foundation and the American Jewish Congress and a vice-president of the World Jewish Congress, writes: “I am persuaded after 50 years of involvement in the problems of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, that the hope that the two parties can find ways of settling the quarrel between them is a myth that needs to be retired. They never have been able to, not from the very beginning. Other powers have always brokered the arrangement that have stopped hostilities.”

U.S. aid, Hertzberg believes, can and should be used as a way to move Israel toward peace: “We can force a reduction of violence on both sides. A first principle of economics is that money is fungible. The U.S. finances about $4 billion a year, on average, of Israel’s national budget. The continuing effort to support and increase settlements in the West Bank and Gaza costs at least a billion dollars a year. The money spent outright as subvention of the settlements was estimated most recently, in the year 2001, as amounting to some $400 million a year, but there is also the cost of defending these settlements and of absolving them and their inhabitants of much of Israeli taxation. An American government that resolved to stop the settlements would not need to keep sending the secretary of state and other emissaries again and again to Jerusalem...We could prove it by deducting the total cost of the settlements each year from America’s annual allocation to Israel.”

If Washington pursued such a course, Hertzberg writes, “No doubt there would be an outcry among the right-wing supporters of Israel who want to realize the ultra-nationalist vision of the undivided land of Israel. But an American government that would have the courage to force an end of settlement activity would find far greater support in the Jewish community both in Israel and in America than many people in Washington imagine...In the Jewish world as a whole, the forcing of an end of almost all of the settlements is an appealing idea. It is much more popular than it appears to be in the statements by the pro-Israel lobbying establishments in America...”

As the presidential campaign approaches, which Jewish voices will be heard? A strong case can be made for the proposition that those outside the Jewish establishment really represent the real majority opinion among American Jews. It is time that their influence equaled their numbers.

Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.


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