[WCUSP] Fwd: New book: US Jews' Role Re: Is-Pal Peace

[Odile Hugonot Haber]

It's well worth noting the growing progressive Jewish voice in the US
exemplified in this piece.  It's anti neo-con, anti-militarism, and
recognizing the failure of "parents and grandparents" to see reality
of the dispossession of Palestinians from their own land, and calling
for new policies. l've highlighted lines I'd forgotten that are in
Israel's declaration of independence.  a.r.


Plotting the Middle Path to Israeli-Palestinian Peace
 The Role of American Jews
 By Diane Balser

This chapter appears in Righteous Indignation: A Jewish Call for
Justice, Edited by Rabbi Or N. Rose, Jo Ellen Green Kaiser and Margie
Klein, Jewish Lights Publishing, Woodstock, VT, 2008.
 Excerpted with Permission.

In the groundbreaking new book, Righteous Indignation: A Jewish Call
for Justice, leading rabbis, intellectuals, and activists explore the
relationship between Judaism and social justice.  Significantly, the
book contains an entire section dedicated to exploring the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including a chapter (excerpted below) by
Brit Tzedek's Interim Executive Director and former National Advocacy
Chair, Diane Balser.

For many years, resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been
left out of the conversation on Jewish social justice. This anthology
is a declaration that Israeli-Palestinian peace activism deserves a
place in the emerging social justice movement within our community.
Brit Tzedek is cosponsoring several book launch events and strongly
recommends this landmark work.
 ________________________________

Many American Jews have long been in the vanguard of progressive
politics in the United States. The traditional Jewish impulse toward
social justice -  rooted in our texts, manifested in our political and
social history, and shaped by the great questions of the modern day -
has compelled American Jews to the forefront of the contemporary
world's definitive struggles, a modern response to the imperative to
work toward tikkun olam, repair of a broken world. The establishment
of unions, the civil rights movement, the fight for women's rights -
each of these chapters in American history found Jews
disproportionately leading the battle and persevering in the face of
enormous difficulty.

For at least the first two decades of Israel's existence, support for
the Jewish State was considered part and parcel of the progressive
Jewish agenda. Zionism was one of many national liberation movements
to come to international attention in the wake of World War II, its
ethical and egalitarian aspirations - to become, as its first Prime
Minister David Ben Gurion described,  "a light unto nations" -
enshrined in Israel's Declaration of Independence:


The State of Israel will be open for Jewish immigration and for the
Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the
country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on
freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it
will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all
its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will
guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and
culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it
will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United
Nations.


As we supported the rights of others to self-determination, many
progressives within the American Jewish community were proud and happy
to support the national liberation of our own people.

Of course, there was a potentially perilous naiveté involved in this
support, in that most American Jews, along with most of the Western
world, failed to understand the level of suffering and sheer
disenfranchisement that the establishment of Israel meant for the
Palestinian people. The oft' repeated Zionist adage "a land without a
people for a people without a land" captured the imagination of so
many of our parents and grandparents in their quest for sanctuary, but
now resonates tinnily for we who have seen a very different reality
borne out. While some recognized early on the serious implications for
Israel's future of the massive displacement of Palestinians following
the 1948 war, for many this understanding dawned slowly, only in the
post-Six Day War world, as Israel's occupation of the West Bank and
Gaza Strip increasingly took root. Without wishing to deny the right
of the Jewish people to its own state, many of us came to comprehend
the cost this state has entailed for another people. Particularly
since the first Palestinian intifada began in December 1987, many
American Jews have begun to try to bring their attachment to their own
people's national project in line with the understanding that
Palestinian rights must not be denied.

The question of Israel's place on a progressive agenda is further
complicated by the complex nature of Israel's relationship with the
United States. Largely by virtue of its reliance on the United States
for foreign aid and particularly military aid, as well as for
diplomatic cover in an often hostile international environment, Israel
has become, at least publicly, the standard bearer for the
increasingly troubled and troubling American policies in the Middle
East.

The effort to put pro-Israel activism back on the progressive agenda
will require us to formulate, organize, and put forward a third
political and cultural path for supporting Israel, independent of the
right wing/neo-conservative US foreign policy agendas, and stepping
clear of left wing denial that Jews need a homeland. It will comprise
an understanding of the importance of a Jewish homeland to meet both
the needs of Jewish survival and demands of broader justice, as well
as an understanding of the urgent necessity of such a state to ally
itself with a Palestinian state along its border, with which it lives
at peace.

In this chapter, I will argue that a progressive Jewish movement must
reclaim and reframe the sometimes forgotten progressive ideals that
were essential to the establishment of the State of Israel, both as
the central path to ensuring Jewish survival, and as the core of our
fight for international social justice - a struggle that reflects the
most basic of Jewish ethics.

Our own struggle as progressive American Jews - to cultivate a
collective agenda-driven identity that is at once independent and
closely interconnected to and engaged in the world around it - would
then fittingly mirror our aspirations for Israel as a peaceful and
secure Jewish homeland that is both integrated in and integral in the
Middle East and the international community as a whole.  Isolation
from other peoples - particularly oppressed peoples - has historically
been key to the vulnerability of Jews throughout the world and in
Israel in particular.  The vision of an Israel of the future is one
that lives in cooperation with its Arab neighbors, not a militarized,
isolated ghetto in the middle of a hostile Arab world. By cultivating
a strong Jewish presence in Israel and the United States that lives in
a multi-cultural, multi-national world, we will create a political
home for those in the progressive movement who would advance the
principle of two states for two people, and help progressive Jews
develop greater confidence in their Jewish identity, from which to
reach out to potential allies among Muslims, Arabs, African Americans
and all peoples of color.