MONDOWEISS ONLINE NEWSLETTER

Tuesday night, Sacramento-area activists Donna and Darlene Wallach spoke about their experiences working with the Free Gaza Movement at an event organized by Sacramento Area Peace Action. They traveled to Gaza by boat as part of FGM’s first voyage in 2008, and stayed for several months while they worked with other international activists to re-establish International Solidarity Movement in Gaza.
With ISM, they accompanied Palestinian fishermen and farmers, and documented the violence they encountered while trying to go about their daily lives. They spoke about impact of the continued siege of Gaza, specifically pointing out how painful it is for people who need to leave for medical care or as students.
Donna and Darlene also briefly reported on the Free Gaza Movement’s upcoming Freedom Flotilla. In late May, cargo and passenger ships from several countries will convene in the Mediterranean and then sail to Gaza. They pointed out that while the first voyage was a strong statement of solidarity, the current one will bring in significantly more goods like building material and books.
About twenty-five people attended the event, filling the small room where it was held. Several people I spoke to were fairly new to learning about these issues. Another had been involved in anti-apartheid activism since the struggle against South African apartheid, and saw clear parallels from his experience. As would be inevitable given what Donna and Darlene described witnessing, there was sadness and anger in the room, but hope as well.
I’m grateful I heard Donna and Darlene speak about their experiences, and also glad that I had the chance to be in a room full of people who wanted to hear what they had to say. I drove to Sacramento from Reno to hear them speak. I know that attitudes about Palestine and Israel are changing rapidly, with every day bringing people together in dialogue who refused to listen to each other five months or five years ago.
This is a cause for hope, but sometimes it’s hard for those of us in more conservative, rural areas to connect to that hope…enough so that driving four hours round trip seems like a good idea every once in a while. However, I’d prefer to be able to frequently attend events like the one last night in my own community. As an activist in a smaller, relatively conservative city, I look to Sacramento Area Peace Action’s work as an example. Today, I’ll drive four hours to hear activists speak in Sacramento. Tomorrow, I hope we can organize similar events in cities that don’t have a reputation for activism.
Madeline K. Mundt lives in Reno, Nevada, where she is helping to start a group of people who are concerned about justice and peace in Palestine and Israel.

Ezra Klein has an interesting note about Walt and Mearsheimer. He reports that Jon Chait of the New Republic started writing about Israel because of Walt and Mearsheimer, he was so angry about them; and Klein says he also was drawn into the topic by Walt and Mearsheimer, the Chait-ian reaction against them, which he regarded as “fearful tribalism.” Talk about the power of ideas.
I’m in Klein’s camp. I started writing this blog in March 2006 just before W&M published their incredible paper. I’d finally decided to write about Israel (after avoiding the topic all my life) because of a comment a relative made to me in 2003: “What do you think about this war [Iraq]?
I demonstrated against the Vietnam War, but my Jewish newspaper says this war could be good for Israel.” I was shocked and disturbed by the comment. But it was Walt and Mearsheimer who gave me courage. Their bombshell paper echoed the political truth of my relative’s statement. Walt and Mearsheimer said that the neocons, the braintrust for George Bush’s disastrous war, were motivated by Zionism. I remember the day Scott McConnell emailed the paper to me, he had gotten it from Mike Desch that morning, in Texas. The shock of recognition went round the world.
The reaction was vicious. “In Dark Times Blame the Jews,” the Forward wrote at the time, a disgraceful headline. Yivo Institute held a panel to denounce the authors as anti-Semites. 
Chait was defensive but Klein is not defensive. And Klein will win. Some day there will be an open conversation inside the Jewish community about the Jewish role in the Iraq war, specifically, ultra-Zionists’ role in selling a policy of permanent war in the Arab world as an American interest. Peter Beinart just further opened the door to this conversation by making it clear that his politics are fueled by Zionism, Beinart who pushed the Iraq war as “the good fight”–a book in whose index the words Israel and Palestine did not appear.
Agree with them or not, Walt and Mearsheimer’s book changed the discourse. They blew the bridge. They opened up a space where no one said you could go. Two realists, they spoke feelingly about the Nakba and the humiliations of the occupation–which all the liberals like Beinart and Ken Pollack and Lawrence Kaplan and Paul Berman had dismissed out of hand.
When their book came out in 2007, I compared it to Silent Spring and Unsafe at Any Speed, and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. I think that was an understatement.

The U.S. House of Representatives just voted 410-4 to authorize delivering an extra $205 million of our taxpayer dollars to Israel – on top of the $3 billion in military assistance already in the pipeline for FY2011. H.R.5327, the United States-Israel Missile Defense Cooperation and Support Act, was introduced just two days ago, after the Obama Administration notified Israel that it would support the authorization and appropriation of funds for Israel to purchase ten batteries of the “Iron Dome” missile defense system.
Barbara Lee, Lynn Woolsey, and nearly all the other “progressives” voted for the bill. (The complete roll call results are here.) The only “No” votes came from John Conyers, Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul, and Pete Stark. Kucinich and Paul have pretty consistently opposed aid to Israel, but Conyers’ vote is a pleasant surprise, as he has only rarely dared to stand up to the Israel lobby. Stark, the least prominent of the four, is a moderately liberal Democrat who represents the southeastern part of the San Francisco Bay Area.
According to Wikipedia, he is the first, and so far only, openly atheist member of Congress. Though he hasn’t often spoken out about the Middle East, he was among the 54 reps who signed the letter to Obama in January calling for an end to the siege of Gaza. And he, like Lee, was feted at the Democratic Party function last week in Castro Valley where some of us demonstrated to demand an end to aid for Israel – we were focused on Lee, but perhaps we had some effect on Stark?
The bill specifically authorizes funding for “Iron Dome,” a high-tech system that’s supposed to defend against Katyusha rockets (fired by Hezbollah into northern Israel in 2006) and the Qassam projectiles Palestinian resistance forces in Gaza lob over the wall toward Sderot and adjacent areas. Israel has been working on the system for years, but Haaretz reported last week that “The Israel Defense Forces ducked away from funding the project with its budget, explaining that offensive readiness was a higher priority, and the Defense Ministry has been looking for other budgetary avenues.” With Obama and Congress stepping into the breach, the IDF will now be free to devote all its resources to “offensive readiness.”
The U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation has an action alert with useful talking points about the new bill here.

And don’t start me on the horrors hidden in halva with fruit and nuts! Chocolate endangers life and limb, but at least Israel’s greatest minds found a way of neutralizing the deadly potential of diapers and baby wipes, even if it took several  years to achieve.

Hello Peter Beinart,
You say: ” ….I’m not even [asking Israel] to allow full, equal citizenship to Arab Israelis.”
I think it would be very safe to say that most of the young Sheikh Jarrah activists, whose struggle you have praised, will be your political foes too (based on some knowledge I have about my friends).
Sincerely,
Ofer Neiman
Jerusalem