Musical Musings for Israel's Birthday

Well, I felt I had to write something in connection with Israel's 64th birthday, so this is what came out.  It's the first blog post I've placed on the new The Times of Israel site. Any comments on this post will be welcome.  [Part of it follows.]

In honor of Israel’s 64th birthday, I decided to create a new genre – musical stream of consciousness.  As Hebrew University philosophy professor Meir Buzaglo recently noted, music is “the soul of the nation.” ...
.... back to the summer of 1970, in the midst of the War of Attrition between Israel and Egypt, the most popular song that year was Shir Lashalom (Song for Peace), lyrics by Ya’acov Rotblitt who lost a leg in 1967 during the Six Day War, and music by Ya’ir Rosenbloom (להקת הנחל – שיר לשלום‎ – YouTube).  The most powerful anti-war song ever written in Israel, it was sung by Lehakat Hanachal (singing troupe of the army’s Fighting Pioneering Youth unit associated with the kibbutz movement):

He whose candle has gone out/and has been buried in the dust/bitter tears won’t waken him/or bring him back again/ so sing a song of peace/don’t whisper a prayer/sing a song of peace/with a great loud shout!….

The song infuriated another former member of Kibbutz Mishmar Hanegev.  General Rahavam Ze’evi, nicknamed Ghandi because of his dark complexion and not because of his politics, was one of the Israelis who turned right after the Six Day

Examining 'Original Sins' for Yom Ha'atzmaut

Benny Morris' Righteous Victims (a history through 2001) is perhaps the most comprehensive and fair-minded book yet written on the Arab-Israeli conflict. I don't agree with the author's post-2001 assertion that the Palestinians resist making peace out of religious bigotry against the very idea of a Jewish state, but this book (written before he reached this conclusion) is very thorough and balanced. Still, its encyclopedic scope may be too detailed and tedious for many readers.

The following is a review article I wrote on a livelier book by Meron Benvenisti; it was published in approximately this form in the Nov. 2001 issue of Jewish Currents magazine. Benvenisti, a former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, became embittered by events and moved to the opposite conclusion to Morris, but he is also very factual and makes no apology for having been born as a Jew in pre-State Palestine. His book is emotionally wrenching and vivid. My understanding is that Benvenisti has become even more exasperated and caustic in his criticisms of Israel in the ensuing years. My own views fall in between what Morris and Benvenisti believe today.  Here's what I wrote in 2001:

Iconic photo of Holocaust survivors reaching Haifa

"Original Sins Revisited"
SACRED LANDSCAPE: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948 by Meron Benvenisti. University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 2000, 366 pages, indexed.

Meron Benvenisti writes both analytically and personally. As a boy during the time of the British Mandate, he would accompany his father, a cartographer for the Jewish Agency, on his travels to map the countryside; his father was especially engaged in work to Hebraicize as many place names as possible. His son drew from these trips an initial appreciation for the Arab landscape of pre-state Palestine which has matured over the decades of conflict into this poignant reflection on a deliberately destroyed society.

My dialogue with Isi (a conservative commentator)

Isi Liebler was prominent in the Australian Jewish community and a contender for leadership in the World Jewish Congress who made Aliya a number of years ago.  He writes a column for The Jerusalem Post and blogs with a generally pro-Netanyahu point of view.  I met him almost exactly two years ago as a panelist on Shalom TV. 

Isi Liebler

In my opinion, he is often unfair and excessive in his criticisms of the Palestinians and of voices on the left within Israel and among Jews in the Diaspora, including J Street.  But he paid me the compliment of saying that I reminded him of an "old Labor Zionist," a positive reference in his eyes and mine.  We occasionally spar on email when I react to a column or blog post he's written.


With his permission, I'm repeating an exchange we had last week, when I replied to his posting of "Intellectuals and the Left" (his reply begins with the comments he inserted in yellow below):

Isi,
This is from a recent blog post [of Partners for Progressive Israel]. Why do you suppose Netanyahu ties himself to expanding settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank rather than forging an agreement with Abbas based on the principles laid out here?

Uri Avnery on Grass (so to speak): Cool it, everybody

Günter Grass

In his April 12th piece, "Günter the Terrible,"  the hoary leader of the radical Israeli peace group, Gush Shalom, takes the emotionality out of the acclaimed German writer's provocative poem regarding Israel, even as he disagrees with most of it:

.... Grass has done the unthinkable: he has openly criticized the State of Israel! And he's a German!!!

Uri Avnery

The reaction was automatic. He was at once branded as an anti-Semite. Not just a run-of-the mill anti-Semite, but as a crypto-Nazi, who could easily have served as a henchman of Adolf Eichmann! This was shown by the fact that at age 17, near the end of World War II, he was recruited to the Waffen-SS like tens of thousands of others and then – oddly enough – kept the fact hidden for many years. ...
Israeli and German politicians and commentators vied with each other in cursing the writer, with the Germans easily trumping the Israelis. ...

Will Abbas Dissolve Palestinian Authority?

PA Pres. Abbas

Will Palestinian Pres. Mahmoud Abbas take Yossi Beilin's advice to dissolve the PA?  An official letter from Abbas to Prime Minister Netanyahu seemed to hint at that possibility, but Abbas reportedly denies it.  The letter itself speaks well for Abbas' intention to forge a true peace with Israel.  For example:

Our historic Peace Proposal is still waiting for an answer from Israel.
• We agreed to establish the State of Palestine on only 22% of the territory of historical Palestine-on all the Palestinian Territory occupied by Israel in 1967.
• The establishment of independent Palestinian State that can live side-by-side with the State of Israel in peace and security on the borders of 1967 with mutually agreed swaps equal in size and value.
• Security will be guaranteed by a third party accepted by both, to be deployed on the Palestinian side.
• A just and agreed resolution for the refugees’ problem as specified in the Arab Peace Initiative.
• Jerusalem will serve as a capital of two States. East Jerusalem capital of Palestine. West Jerusalem capital of Israel. Jerusalem as an open city can be the symbol of peace.

Thanks to J Street's daily email "News Roundup," we can follow this story as it unfolds:

Impact of Holocaust on generations of Israelis

Ha'Aretz article on opinion survey: "Nearly half of Israelis fear Holocaust could happen again."

Jews disembark at Auschwitz

About 40 percent of all Israelis believe the Holocaust could happen again, and 43 percent are reportedly concerned the State of Israel is in danger of being destroyed, according to a poll conducted by Tel-Hai Academic College [in the Galilee].
.... The poll surveyed adults between 18 and 85, as well as 12th-grade high school students who had taken school trips to Holocaust sites in Poland. When respondents were asked to what extent they felt their lives and the lives of their family members were in danger, 55 percent rated the risk as low or non-existent. About 12 percent said they thought they were at great risk, and 31 percent rated the risk as

My disagreement with Deborah Lipstadt

Prof. Deborah Lipstadt

Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) falls on the evening of April 18 this year.  Back on March 15, I wrote a Tikkun blog post that became the subject of an op-ed in The Jerusalem Post, April 2, "Taking the politics out of Holocaust history" by Rafael Medoff, a historian who founded and heads the David S. Wyman Center for Holocaust Studies. My Tikkun post began as follows: 

On March 6th, the renowned Holocaust historian Deborah E. Lipstadt lectured at Manhattan’s famed Temple Emanu-El. She spoke with obvious erudition and considerable charm on a difficult subject: “On America, The Holocaust, And Playing the Blame Game.” ...

Prof. Lipstadt readily stipulates that the US administration should have done more to let in Jewish refugees, especially during the 1930s, but she warns against judging Franklin D. Roosevelt and the American Jewish community of that time too harshly from the moral standpoint and knowledge of events that we came to have in the post-war years; she characterizes such an imposition of present standards on past eras as a fallacy called “presentism.” She also criticized those in the pro-FDR “defensive school”–including Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., William vanden Heuvel and Lucy Dawidowicz–who indignantly countered that the US did all it could to save Jews during the ’30s and ’40s.

What got Dr. Medoff's notice was the following passage:

Lipstadt believes that it’s not by accident that the critics of FDR and the American Jewish establishment during the Nazi era emerged after Menachem Begin’s Likud broke the Laborite monopoly on power in Israel, with its electoral victories in 1977 and in the 1980s. But since the first such book was written by Arthur D. Morse in 1967 (“While Six Million Died”), I don’t necessarily see a cause & effect here. I also don’t see how an ideological backlash to Labor’s decades in power would explain the biting examination by the non-Jewish American historian David S. Wyman (e.g., “The Abandonment of the Jews”). All in all, I think that Wyman and some other critics of FDR and the organized Jewish community (such as the activists of the Bergson Group) may be closer to the mark.

It remains to be seen that this will take on the "David vs. Goliath feel" that Medoff perceives in my disagreement with Prof. Lipstadt, a giant in the field of Holocaust-related scholarship. I rather hope it doesn't.  But insofar as I can tell, Lipstadt is mistaken to see the hand of Zionist factionalism in

Shavit: 'Gunter Grass & the mute left'

Genia, my friend who called me a self-hating Jew, sent me this article by Ari Shavit,  who writes for Ha'Aretz.  I am sending this out because I agree with Shavit's plaint that he heard no response from Peace Now or Meretz,  and worse that he fears that this is an indication that leading intellectuals in the West, liberals and progressives, are having a hard time defending Israel.  I do think that Gunter Grass' poem was insensitive to the genuine fear that Israelis feel upon hearing Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, deny the Holocaust and threaten the "Zionist entity" with destruction.  

Hey there, if that doesn't push the button of a traumatized people, I don't know what else would.  Most of all, Shavit is correct to call attention to the crisis progressives are experiencing--that it is getting difficult to defend Israel.--Lilly

Here is a shortened version of Shavit's column:

Gunter Grass .... is saying more or less the following: ... Israel's nuclear capability is endangering world peace; the fact that my people murdered the Jews in 1942 does not justify the Jews having nuclear weapons in 2012.

Strenger to Beinart: Neither 1 state nor 2

In Carlo Strenger's April 9 post in The Huffington Post, the Tel Aviv University professor of psychology and frequent news commentator finds more of a basis for agreement with Sari Nusseibeh than Peter Beinart.  Whether right or wrong about the policy consequences, he puts his finger on the change in perception wrought by the Second Intifada and the years of violence coming out of the Gaza Strip since the Hamas takeover.  

I fear that Strenger is correct that most Israelis are now too traumatized to take the plunge toward a two-state solution, but he's vague about the alternative.  Just as he and all of us liberal Zionists find it hard to conceive of a unitary Israeli-Palestinian state as workable, his invocation of a possible confederation in his concluding paragraph seems fraught with difficulties. Nevertheless, I take this as the beginning of an honest quest, by a profound and humane thinker, for a better answer:

Dear Peter Beinart. ... you and I share a set of basic values: ethical universalism and a firm belief that the lesson of Jewish history and Jewish suffering is that only an uncompromising defense of human rights for everybody, anywhere, can prevent the type of horrors that the Jewish people went through.

Furthermore, I share your feeling that Obama.... reflects Jewish-progressive ethical universalism in his identity, his worldview and in his modus operandi. I also agree with you that the chasm between Obama and Netanyahu ... is about two utterly different conceptions of history in general and Jewish history in particular. Obama believes in creating win-win situations; Netanyahu believes that only power will make good

.... 

But pitching Obama against Netanyahu creates the wrong impression that the current situation is a showdown between two personalities, whereas it reflects the mindset of Israel's mainstream, including the moderate left. Most Israelis don't like the occupation. ... two thirds would leave the West Bank tomorrow if they thought they would get peace in return. But the combination of the second intifada and the shelling of Southern Israel has made Israelis unwilling to take further risks for peace. They think that Palestinians cannot be trusted to maintain the safety of Israel, particularly since Hamas continues to be officially committed to Israel's destruction.



New Kadima Head Tilts Left — Is Mofaz for Real?

The following is from Ethan Bronner's April 7 NY Times profile of the newly elected head of Kadima, still the largest party in the Knesset: 

WHEN Shaul Mofaz took over as head of the opposition in Israel this week — having defeated Tzipi Livni to lead the Kadima Party — it was seen as further evidence of the country’s rightward shift. ... Mr. Mofaz was dismissed by many as ... a hawk who would try to join the governing Likud coalition.  So it was surprising to ... hear him detail an agenda more typically associated with the left.
He said Mr. Netanyahu’s focus on Iran’s nuclear program had distracted attention from ... making peace with the Palestinians, ending settlement building in much of the West Bank and reducing the country’s socioeconomic inequality. Let President Obama handle Iran, he said. We can trust him.
“I intend to replace Netanyahu,” Mr. Mofaz, 63, said .... “I will not join his government.”
Then: “The greatest threat to the state of Israel is not nuclear Iran,” but that Israel might one day cease to be a Jewish state, because it would have as many Palestinians as Jews. “So it is in Israel’s interest that a Palestinian state be created.”

Beilin to Abbas: End 'farce' of PA

Yossi Beilin, leader of the Meretz party from 2003 to 2008, was a protege of Shimon Peres and a prime-mover of the Oslo peace process during the Rabin-Peres government of 1992-'96.  I recall, in particular, a news photo of a still youthful-looking Beilin on a diplomatic mission to Oman or some other moderate Arab state in the Persian Gulf region, making significant progress in getting Israel integrated into the Middle East.

Before things went very wrong for reasons beyond his control, Beilin was forging the path toward the "New Middle East," a phrase coined by Peres that, sadly, became vulnerable to ridicule.  One other promising Beilin effort that tragically came to naught was his potential ground-breaking agreement in principle with Mahmoud Abbas, on the eve of Yitzhak Rabin's assassination. My understanding is that this included the concept that the thickly-populated settlement blocs near Jerusalem and Tel Aviv could be retained by Israel if the new Palestinian state-to-be is compensated with Israeli territory in exchange.  

The following is a summary, from last Friday's daily J St. News Roundup, of Beilin's article at the website of Foreign Policy magazine, "Dear Abu Mazen: End This Farce":

Yossi Beilin has an open letter in Foreign Policy to President Abbas, urging him to dismantle the Palestinian Authority; he writes, “Please don't let this be the way you end your political mission -- a mission that seeks to achieve Palestinian independence without the use of violence.

Chag Sameah -- Happy Passover!

As we sit with families and friends for the Passover Seder, we rightly celebrate the liberation of the Jewish people.  "Liberation" means the legendary emergence from slavery in Egypt, of course, but also the story of the Jewish people's national liberation, which led to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.

In the wake of centuries of persecution suffered by the Jewish people, Israel's establishment was in keeping with the first of Rabbi Hillel's great ethical guidelines - "If I am not for myself, who will be for me?"  But, however important, the many aspects of statehood - territory, a flag, a currency, a government, an army - do little to answer Hillel's inseparable follow-up question,  "And if I am only for myself, then what am I?"

For progressive Zionists, Passover is a time when we are challenged to reconcile the tension in Hillel's dualism: We celebrate national liberation as a Jewish success story, even as we realize today that Israel's creation was also a Naqba, a catastrophe, for others. 

Report on 'Zionist BDS' at J St. Conference

From http://www.ashleyebates.com

Although she does not really share our progressive Zionist perspective, Ashley Bates, the assistant editor of Tikkun, writes interestingly on the boycott issue and its settlements-only "Zionist BDS" version (mentioning Partners' position and a statement by Zehava Galon, the new head of the Meretz party): "The Makings of a Center-Left Alliance For Israeli Settlement Boycotts?" This links to our original statement of Feb. 15, 2011 to "Buy Israel - Don't Buy Settlements (They're not the Same)."

She staffed a Tikkun literature table near our own at the J St. conference and noted in her article that, "Partners for Progressive Israel (formerly Meretz USA) gave away hundreds of flyers calling for a targeted boycott of the settlements." Toward the end of her article, she wrote:

Zehava Galon, a member of the Knesset and the chairwoman of the progressive Meretz party, said in a plenary session at the J Street conference that she boycotts the settlements in her own purchases. She also expressed her hope that settlement boycott campaigns could play a role in getting Israelis themselves to consider the economic cost of the Occupation. “There is a welfare state—it’s in the settlements,” she said. “Putting the question of boycotting settlements on the table is important in order to talk about the price we are paying for having the settlements for more than forty years.”

Young Israeli protest leaders visit NYC

Stav Shaffir

After attending the J St. conference in Washington, DC, two prominent leaders of Israel's social protest movement made the rounds of New York, hosted by a number of liberal Zionist groups and Jewish institutions.  I caught Stav Shaffir (26) and Yonatan Levi (27) at a lunch meeting, on March 29, co-hosted by the Labor-Zionist affiliate Ameinu, ARZA (the Association of Reform Zionists of America) and the American Zionist Movement.

Stav and Yonatan are attractive and articulate young journalists, with a good command of English and a profound understanding of their country, whose politics they are attempting to change profoundly. Yet they emphasize that they are Zionists and patriotic Israelis.  In reporting for the NY Jewish Week on their March 30 press conference at the Manhattan offices of the New Israel Fund, Doug Chandler observed the following:

[Stav Shaffir's] grandparents came to Israel from Poland, Lithuania and Iraq to pursue the Zionist dream, she continued, and it’s now that very dream — the job of “building a real home” for the Jewish people — that her movement is seeking to reclaim. “We think the Zionist dream is a much bigger one than how the people on the extreme right picture it,” Shaffir said, adding that her movement could be called “Occupy Zionism.”

Shaffir with Yonatan Levi

As they explain it, the roots of their movement are in cottage cheese---or rather the successful consumer boycott last June that forced the price of cottage cheese to come down.  For the first time in a long while, Israelis felt empowered to collectively attempt to improve their lives and their society.  Hundreds of thousands of them rallied to 120 tent encampments which sprang up throughout the country, from the Lebanon border to Eilat, and to the weekly demonstrations, and almost daily committee and community meetings.  Twenty tent camps were set up by Arab Israelis, and one by the Ethiopian immigrant community---who all became convinced that they too had a stake in joining with their fellow citizens in this effort.  (The fact that Israelis of widely different background don't get to know each other, and live very separate lives, is also a concern that the movement seeks to remedy.)

Digitalization of Einstein Papers Underlines his Zionism

It was announced in late March that The Hebrew University in Jerusalem is scanning and posting more than 80,000 documents from the University's Einstein Archives and the Einstein Papers Project at Caltech.  This digitalization of Albert Einstein's papers at the website of The Hebrew University reminds us of his support for the creation of Israel---despite the gross misreading of his bi-nationalist, left-wing Zionism as "anti-Zionism" by biographer Fred Jerome.    In fact, Einstein's first visit to the United States was also his first public activity as a Zionist: a fundraising tour for The Hebrew University. 
 

Jennifer Rubin vs. J Street

Opponents of J Street who purport to be pro-Israel, are so intent on attacking this liberal pro-Israel/pro-peace group that they even crow about the fact that the peace process for a two-state solution is stalled--surely a sad circumstance that is not in Israel's interest.  One frequent email critic of ours sent me this Washington Post blog post, "The demise of the left’s favorite not-pro-Israel group," by that paper''s "Right Turn" conservative blogger, Jennifer Rubin, who does exactly this, as well as promoting a counter-factual claim of J St.'s "demise." 

My response was the following:

In four years, J St. has grown by leaps & bounds, including its PAC that expends several million dollars on behalf of Congressional candidates, a large and growing national youth organization (J St. U) and a grassroots membership arm with about 40 chapters nationwide and several thousand activists.  Maybe Jennifer Rubin sees this as a failing organization, but where's the evidence?

Of course, it doesn't compete with the strength and size of AIPAC, which has had a head-start of how many decades?  March 24-26 marked J Street's third national conference; attendance went from 1500 its first year, to 2,000 last time, and now 2500.  At any rate, J St. does not define itself as the anti-AIPAC, and it's become more accepted within the pro-Israel tent than ever.  Jennifer Rubin is correct that