Mondoweiss Online Newsletter

NOVANEWS

• State Dep’t official’s ‘Are you Jewish?’ question to US citizen keeps rattling Foggy Bottom
• Jewish org’s letter warns Presbyterians divestment from occupation ‘taps into our deepest fears’
• The political context of the arrests in Jenin
• Lobby smeared Pascrell as ‘Islamist fellow traveler’ for signing Gaza letter– and lobby lost
• ‘NYT’ soft pedals the racism and hate in Tel Aviv anti-African protests
• A debate about the two-state-solution with Norman Finkelstein
• Resisting Counter-Revolution: Egypt’s elections under military rule
• Israel’s reliance on US has turned it into a ‘global pariah’
• Alameda County drops Palestinian cultural day following pressure from Pamela Geller
• Israelis arrest Palestinian theater’s artistic director at 3 a.m.

State Dep’t official’s ‘Are you Jewish?’ question to US citizen keeps rattling Foggy Bottom

Jun 06, 2012

Philip Weiss and Adam Horowitz

Video from today’s daily press briefing at the State Department. The portion from the transcript below begins around the 9:30 mark.

The deportation of Sandra Tamari at Ben Gurion airport and the American embassy’s response to her case — “Are you Jewish?” — continues to be a news story.  The Associated Press’s Matt Lee brings it up with the State Department spokesperson every day. “Let me get the facts,” says he. Yes, let him get the facts.

Here is Tamari’s recollection of the call from the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv. She provided it to us today.

Chris Kane [from the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv] was contacted by the organizers of my delegation visit about my detention, and given a delegation leader’s cell phone number.  He phoned at about 6 pm.  I had landed at 3:30 pm and was with the delegation leader in the waiting room at the airport.

CK:  Hello.  I got your number from _____.  You are being questioned by the Israeli authorities, I understand.

ST:  They are threatening to deny me entry and to deport me.

CK:  Are you Jewish?

ST: No

CK:  Have you been in contact with the Israeli government or military in the past?

ST:  No

CK:  Have you been here before?

ST:  Yes, several times. I am a Palestinian with family in the West Bank.

CK:  Oh, you have family in the West Bank.  Then there is nothing I can do to help you.  In fact, if I interceded on your behalf, it will hurt your case with the Israelis.

ST:  I don’t understand.  You are saying you can’t speak with them.  You have no influence.  They are demanding to access my gmail account.

CK:  If they have your gmail address, they can get in without your password.

ST:  What do you mean?  How?

CK:  They’re good!

ST:  This is crazy.  You mean you know about these requests to access emails and you have no problem with it.

CK:  It is in our travel warning.  They won’t harm you.  You will be sent home on the next flight out.I hope I have been of good service to you.

ST:  Frankly, you have done nothing for me.

CK:  Well at least you can say I did it kindly.

Here’s the relevant warning, also dug up by Tamari. Note that it says nothing about going into your email.

Security-related delays are not unusual for travelers carrying audio-visual or data storage/processing equipment, and some have had their laptop computers and other electronic equipment confiscated at Ben Gurion Airport. While most items are returned prior to the traveler’s departure, some equipment has been retained by the authorities for lengthy periods and has reportedly been damaged, destroyed, lost or never returned. U.S. citizens who have had personal property damaged due to security procedures at Ben Gurion may contact the Commissioner for Public Complaints at the airport for redress by fax to 972-3-9752387. In such circumstances, travelers should have no expectation of privacy for any data stored on such devices.

Today, Lee pressed the State Department’s Mark Toner on Tamari’s experience (video above):

QUESTION: More on Israel. Yesterday you said you were aware that the Privacy Act waiver had been signed by Ms. Tamari. I’m wondering if you can tell us exactly what the State Department or the Embassy’s version of the conversation was, whether in fact that she was told that they couldn’t help her because she wasn’t Jewish.

MR. TONER: And actually I’m not sure if we’ve released – we should have; I apologize if we haven’t already released the Taken Question on this. But we can confirm that an official from U.S. Embassy Tel Aviv spoke via telephone with this individual to check on her safety and welfare while she was detained at Ben Gurion Airport. We remain in contact with local authorities until a decision was made regarding her entry into Israel. And of course, decisions about entry are the purview of the Israeli Government.

QUESTION: Did this person ask her if she was Jewish?

MR. TONER: Well, I don’t have an answer for you on that. What is very clear is that we would never deny assistance to any American citizen, regardless of their religious or ethnic background.

QUESTION: According to her account, the conversation, which is pretty much a verbatim transcript, he did ask, “Are you Jewish?” She said, “No.” Then she – then he asked, “Have you been here before?” She said, “Yes. Several times. I’m Palestinian. I have family in the West Bank,” to which he replied – and I won’t use his name, but I have it – “Oh, you have family in the West Bank. Then there’s nothing I can do to help you. If in fact I interceded on your behalf it would hurt your case with the Israelis.”

Is that correct? Is it that U.S. intervention on behalf of one of its citizens would actually hurt the case with Israel, a democratic ally?

MR. TONER: Again, I don’t have a transcript of the conversation. I don’t know where you were able to obtain one from.

QUESTION: From her.

MR. TONER: Again, this is a little bit of a —

QUESTION: I’m not trying to —

MR. TONER: — he said, she said. All I can say is that we —

QUESTION: Well, it may be. I want to know, regardless of that, is it correct that if you are a – that the position of the Embassy or the consular officers at the Embassy is that if you are a Palestinian with family in the West Bank and not Jewish that there’s nothing that they can do to help you. The actual verbatim words of the conversation I’m not —

MR. TONER: Verbatim words of what? A transcript that she presented or she produced?

QUESTION: Well, but —

MR. TONER: Again —

QUESTION: — is it correct that there is nothing that you can or nothing that the Embassy can do to help someone —

MR. TONER: That’s not correct.

QUESTION: That is not correct. Okay.

MR. TONER: We certainly stand to – we stand ready to support any American citizen, regardless of their religious or ethnic background.

QUESTION: Okay, okay. And then she says that she told them that they were trying to get into her email account – which goes to a different part of this story – on her laptop. He said that if they have your Gmail address, then they can get into your – they can get into the account anyway. She says, “How can they do that?” He says, “Well, they’re very good at this kind of thing.” And he says that they – that the Embassy is aware that the Israelis go in and check people’s email account – emails on their laptops. She says that she can’t understand why you don’t have a problem. He implies it’s in our Travel Warning.
Okay. Now, it’s not in the Travel Warning. The Travel Warning says that people who are carrying laptops or other audio-visual equipment could – have had these items confiscated. But there’s nothing in the Travel Warning – because I just read it now – that says that people might go into your computer and then demand access to your private email account. So I’m wondering, was I looking at an outdated Travel Warning, or is this just wrong?

MR. TONER: I don’t believe so. I think that’s accurate. But again, I’m not going to speak to a transcript of a conversation that’s unofficial at best.

QUESTION: Okay, well, it’s not so much the actual words that were said. I just want to know whether or not – and you answered the question – it is policy not to help someone —

MR. TONER: That is not our policy.

QUESTION: And also, if you are aware that they’re going into people’s emails, do you plan – would that be something that one – that you would —

MR. TONER: Again, I’d have to speak with our Consular Affairs, but I’m not aware that that’s reflected in our current Travel Warning. It’s not, I don’t think.

QUESTION: No, it isn’t, but I’m wondering if it would be now because this has become an issue quite separate from —

MR. TONER: It’s a hypothetical. I would assume we’d look at it.

Yesterday, Lee had a similar exchange with  Toner:

QUESTION: Have you managed to find out what happened with this woman from St. Louis? Was she told by the Embassy that they couldn’t help her because —

MR. TONER: Right.

QUESTION: — she wasn’t Jewish?

MR. TONER: Matt, I tried to get more information on that. I should have – I don’t have it in time for this briefing. My understanding, as I said, is that she did contact the Embassy and the Embassy did provide her with support. But I’m not aware of the exact exchange that she had with the Embassy personnel, so I’ll try to get you details on that.

QUESTION: Well —

MR. TONER: I appreciate I should have had it today. I don’t.

QUESTION: And so you do know that she has signed the Privacy Act waiver?

MR. TONER: I do know that and I have duly noted that —

QUESTION: No, but not just for me —

MR. TONER: And I have duly noted that to our friends in the Consular Affairs Bureau.

QUESTION: Okay. So specifically my question then is about that conversation —

MR. TONER: Yeah.

QUESTION: — that exchange, if she was told that and if that is now a practice of the Embassy to tell people if it —

MR. TONER: Again —

QUESTION: — to ask people what their religion is, and regardless of what it is, to tell them that based on that —

MR. TONER: I’m certain it’s not —

QUESTION: — based on just their religion —

MR. TONER: I’m certain it’s not, but let me get —

QUESTION: Well, she’s —

MR. TONER: Let me get the facts. Let me get the facts before —

QUESTION: — she’s saying —

MR. TONER: Okay. Thank you. I appreciate it.

 

Jewish org’s letter warns Presbyterians divestment from occupation ‘taps into our deepest fears’

Jun 06, 2012

Philip Weiss

Things are heating up in anticipation of the Presbyterian Church’s 220th general conference at the end of the month, at which the U.S. church will debate divesting from three companies that do business in the occupation. Two letters follow. The first is from the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. It is a “letter in hope” that says that the conflict has hurt both sides. The second is a great response from Lynn Gottlieb. First the JCPA one:

Dear Friends,

We, the undersigned tens of thousands of American Jews and supporters of peace in the Middle East join 1300 rabbis from throughout our country to reach out in hope to our Presbyterian friends and neighbors. We have close relationships, deeply treasured and shaped over many years. We are partners on many social issues including fostering peace between Israelis and Palestinians. We ask you to stand shoulder to shoulder with us in rejecting the counterproductive proposal to selectively divest from certain companies whose products are used by Israel. We feel honored in our hope by the Methodist General Assembly which, after much forethought and debate, decided to oppose such divestment by a 2-1 margin.

These are our feelings. Any place in which a single human being suffers, we all suffer. We know that your concern for the Palestinian people, some of whom are your Christian sisters and brothers, comes from a deep commitment to the alleviation of human pain. There is suffering enough in the land of our common inheritance on both sides of the conflict. A just solution demands peace and security for Israelis and Palestinians. We share goals of a just and lasting peace, an end to affliction, a two-state solution, and the protection of the dignity and security of all in the Holy Land. We must marshal our efforts together to bring about this peace.

We understand and respect your calling to invest in a morally responsible manner. A policy of divestment to pressure Israel, however, runs counter to these goals. Such a one-sided approach damages the relationship between Jews and Christians that has been nurtured for decades. It promotes a lopsided assessment of the causes of and solutions to the conflict, disregarding the complex history and geopolitics. Furthermore, it shamefully paints Israel as a pariah nation, solely responsible for frustrating peace.

For Jews, the use of economic leverages against the Jewish state is fraught with inescapable associations. They resonate in the Jewish consciousness with historic boycotts against Jewish companies and the State of Israel. They are experienced by Jews as part of a pattern of singling out Jews for attack. To determine and continue policies that knowingly tap into the deepest fears and pain of another is, in our tradition, a serious failure of relationship.

Divestment, and the specious Apartheid terminology that frequently accompanies it, polarizes people and communities so that the policy of divestment, and not peace, becomes the central issue. Divestment will undermine the ability of many Israelis to imagine peace. Decades of terrorism and rejection have left Israelis feeling threatened and isolated. Many of the major proponents of divestment do not support Israel’s right to exist – thus deepening this fear. Divestment as a policy is more likely to encourage those with more extreme aims than to foster reconciliation. Simply put, the bitter debate over divestment drowns out the real conversation about how to end the conflict.

At a time when politics in general have become so divisive, here and abroad, our efforts should be aimed toward reconciliation. Together and independently, Christians, Jews, and Muslims must give the parties to the conflict the confidence they need to move toward peace. There are many meaningful coexistence programs that are necessary to foster a generation of Israelis and Palestinians that will work and live side-by-side – moving past the teaching of hate and the resort to violence. As leaders of the Jewish and Protestant communities we need to deepen our understandings of the multiple narratives in the region.

We recognize the urgency of these efforts and the frustration on all sides with achieving our lofty goals. Our collective voices can play an instrumental role, working with the American government and others, to help Israeli, Palestinian, and other Middle Eastern leaders to prevent violence and attacks on civilians, support Palestinian state-building and economic development, promote positive investment opportunities, provide humanitarian aid through appropriate channels, protect existing agreements between Israel and the Palestinian Authority and, most importantly, encourage a resumption of negotiations among the parties toward a two-state agreement that will help bring about peace, which is at the core of our traditions. We recommit to such efforts, independent of any other matter.

Yet quite honestly, were American Christian denominations to indict only Jews and Israel for the conflict with the Palestinians, they would justify the violence perpetrated against Israeli civilians – including children – as the unfortunate result of Israel’s unilateral guilt. In other words, Israeli victims would be responsible for their own suffering. Frankly, such a representation is anything but an expression of friendship and common purpose, and it would replace the closeness and comfort the Jewish community feels in existing relationships with distance, distrust, and disappointment.

The Scriptures that bind us reveal that G-d created all of us in the divine image – human dignity and equality is a core value of Jewish and Christian traditions. Further, our traditions call upon us to be peacemakers. In Hebrew, the word Shalom doesn’t just mean “peace” but wholeness and completeness. Peace comes about by our labors to complete the work of creation. We must work towards the day when every human is granted the dignity, security, and beneficence that is the promise of the created universe.

After the letter was circulated by Rachel Eryn Kalish, Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb responded:

Dear Eryn,

I appreciate your peace-making work, but I cannot sign this letter opposing PCUSA’s effort to make selective divestment official church policy. I have written many statements detailing my support for selective divestment and BDS. You can find them on the JVP and F.O.R. websites.

Eryn, your letter, like the letter signed by 1200 rabbis, is deeply flawed in its rationale. Palestinians and not Jews are the targets of systematic violence by Israel. This is what your letter fails to grasp or acknowledge: the systematic violence of Israel’s military occupation is driving the conflict.

It is naive to think that any serious struggle against systematic state violence and military occupation can be won by instituting co-existence projects alone. First of all, such projects are limited by the structural problems that occupation imposes on the entire population of Palestine such as the lack of freedom of movement, the inability to export and the system of permits to name a few. Secondly, people who are victims of systematic violence have the right to determine their own methods of resistance. Gandhian methods of conflict transformation embrace both noncooperation and constructive peace building. Palestinians are engaged in both, as are Presbyterians in relationship to the conflict. Selective divestment is a form of noncooperation that targets the system of occupation. Palestinians have chosen this method of nonviolent struggle. It’s a no brainer.

Most Jews and Christians are not willing to go to Palestine to personally resist Israeli policies of land confiscation, home demolition, destruction of trees and property, military invasion, denial of freedom of movement, administrative detention or the arrest of children through nonviolent protest. Most Jews and Christians do not travel to Israel to work for an end to the blockade of Gaza and are not shot when they try to harvest their wheat or fish in the sea. Gazans have 6 hours of electricity a day which means there is virtually no refridgeration. Are you suggesting that humanitarian aid is a solution to Israel’s policy of occupation? Occupation is a form of structural violence. One side has access to water, the other side does not due to occupation policy. If you advocate a project to dig wells, for instance, you will be severely limited by the inability of Palestinians to dig a deep enough well to access water, even if you pay for the pump. This is what selective divestment addresses: the structural violence of occupation. Selective divestment places pressure on companies doing business with Israel to advocate for change or stop doing business.

As someone who lived through the Civil Rights Movement in America, I learned that it was noncooperation in the form of direct action, such as the Montgomery bus boycott, that provided the real push for change. White people who rode the Freedom Bus, joined in voter registration, walked for desegregation and joined the African American community in jail helped end the violent system of legalized segregation. One only has to read the letter MLK wrote to dissenting clergy while he sat in the Birmingham jail to understand this point. At the time, working for peace and justice meant that white people who wanted to be allies to the effort of ending segregation had to be willing to sit in jail. Struggling together in this way was an authentic act of love. Today, supporting selective divestment is an act of love and faith and hope. It is not an act that offends me or makes me feel unjustly targeted as a Jew. The opposite. Selective divestment is a form of nonviolent direct action that is aligned with my values as a person committed to Jewish nonviolence and the way I understand my tradition. One should not profit from anything produced through violent means. If your retirement fund is made fatter because you have money invested in Caterpillar, you should divest. Not to do so is violating Jewish law. Why can’t you invest in peace and divest in violence at the same time?

Those of us in the Jewish community who believe in co-existence respectfully disagree with the idea that selective divestment is harmful to Jewish Christian relationships. My experience is totally different. The divestment work Jews, Muslims and Christians do together across religious, cultural and racial boundaries has strengthened our relationships, not weakened them. I applaud the PCUSA in their effort to institute a policy of selective divestment.

May we love each other on the way toward ending occupation and establishing good relations. I pray that a sustainable peace comes quickly in our day.

Respectfully,

Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb

The political context of the arrests in Jenin

Jun 06, 2012

Annie Robbins

Last week Haaretz reported that Palestinian Authority President Abbas and Hamas chief Khaled Meshal would meet this week to finalize the formation of their government. Also, the chairman of the PA’s Central Election Commission visited Gaza to set up a ‘technocractic government’ to oversee the upcoming election.

Today ‘s Reuters reports the PA’s appointed Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has been stepping up arrests in Jenin (something we reported last month):

Reuters:

The crackdown, led by elite presidential guards and the counter-terrorism unit, is seen as a determined bid by the Western-backed PA to regain control of the impoverished area and smash local networks that challenge its power.

Is seen? By whom?

The PA, with the Fatah party at its core, has advanced its monopoly on force in the West Bank after years of purges and scraps with rival factions – …Despite lacking a formal state or a mandate from the ballot box, the PA considers the security sweep in Jenin as a template for cementing its authority throughout the West Bank.

“This is an ongoing security effort and not a campaign with a start and finish. It will encompass every district so that citizens can live in safety and security,” Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad told Reuters.

Ongoing ‘security’ effort with no start or finish? That rings a bell. Many of those arrested do not know why they have been detained.

Jenin’s Freedom Theatre Director Zakaria Zubeidi was picked up again. He’s being held at the PA’s central jail Jericho prison for “unspecified crimes”:

“Jericho has become like Guantanamo,” groaned Zakaria’s brother Abed….“The idea of being sent there is being used to terrify us…..“People come in here all the time with their car windows smashed by (Israeli) settlers. The Authority doesn’t defend its people from the attacks, but directs its policy of force at us.”

The obvious question: Is Fayyad doing Israel’s bidding on the eve of elections under the guise of ‘security’?

Lobby smeared Pascrell as ‘Islamist fellow traveler’ for signing Gaza letter– and lobby lost

Jun 06, 2012

Philip Weiss

MJ Rosenberg says that AIPAC and other Israel lobbyists supported Congressman Steve Rothman against Congressman Bill Pascrell in the newly combined 9th District of New Jersey– in some measure because he signed a letter to ease the blockade of Gaza– and lost overwhelmingly in the Democratic primary last night. Full post here. Excerpt:

Here is AIPAC telling the voters in New Jersey who to support. It is from the New Jersey Jewish Standard and it went out, in one form or another, to every Jewish voter in the district.

Josh Block, a former [and current] longtime spokesman for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, said that Rothman’s “record of pro-Israel leadership is second to none, and in this particular race the differences couldn’t be clearer.”

Block accused Pascrell of having “actually sided against American support for Israel’s right to defend herself against weapons smuggling and attacks by terrorists.” He pointed to Pascrell’s signing of a January 2010 letter to Obama criticizing the Israeli and Egyptian blockade of Gaza. The letter, signed by 54  House members, called on the president to press for the easing of the blockade to improve conditions for Palestinian civilians.

Then Steve Emerson, the rightist Islamophobe who formerly worked at AIPAC, put out a long vicious hit piece on Pascrell depicting the Roman Catholic Pascrell as an “Islamist Fellow Traveler.” Follow the link if you want to read it. It is too vile for me to spread by quoting it.

Rothman embraced the lobby onslaught, doing everything he could to make the primary a referendum on Israel, Islam, Muslims, etc.  But then James Zogby of the Arab American Institute, a Christian Lebanese-American and a strong supporter (like Pascrell) of Israeli-Palestinian peace came in to work with the district’s Arab-American population and help the local people organize  for Pascrell. The issue wasn’t Israel; it was Rothman’s Arab and Muslim-baiting which offended Arab-Americans as much as Jews would be offended by an openly anti-Semitic candidate.

Few expected Pascell to withstand the onslaught with AIPAC directing PACs and individual donors to save their hero, Rothman.

But then yesterday it all blew up in AIPAC’s face. Pascrell won (in essentially Rothman’s old district) with 60% of the vote. Rothman announced his premature retirement from politics while the AIPAC crowd nursed its wounds. 

To be clear, Bill Pascrell did not win because of the Israel issue. He himself is pro-Israel, just not anti-Arab. He won because of his Get Out The Vote campaign, hustling from door to door and ads like this.  And because he is an effective and strong progressive from a district that appreciates that.

Nonetheless, this race was the first time that the lobby went head to head with an organized Arab-American community and its friends (notably in the non-AIPAC, non-Orthodox, Jewish community) and got that head handed to it.

‘NYT’ soft pedals the racism and hate in Tel Aviv anti-African protests

Jun 06, 2012

Adam Horowitz

A Tel Aviv rally demanding the expulsion of all non-Jewish African people verbally and physically attacks an Ethiopian Jewish Israeli man after he asks the protestors to clarify who it is they are calling for to be expelled from the country. (Video: Shot and edited by David Sheen)

Isabel Kershner has filed the first New York Times report on the wave of anti-African protests and violence that has continued in Israel over the past few weeks. She doesn’t seem to capture what is shown above:

The issue has become an explosive one in Israel. Many African migrants have settled in poor areas of south Tel Aviv and in the southern border town of Eilat, and have met increasing resentment.

Residents of south Tel Aviv complain of rising crime in migrant areas, and have staged noisy demonstrations, egged on by right-wing politicians and activists. At a demonstration in the Shapira Quarter last week, rightists handed out leaflets offering self-defense courses, and protesters chanted, “The people want the Sudanese deported,” holding placards with slogans like, “This is not racism, this is survival.”

Some stores run by African migrants were damaged and looted last month.

“It was better in Sudan,” said Ibrahim Abdullah, 25, an asylum seeker who was idling on the grass in a south Tel Aviv park last week. Mr. Abdullah said that he worked now and again in building, but that he had no money and relied on handouts for food.

Israel’s interior minister, Eli Yishai of the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party, was quoted on Friday as saying that “the infiltrators, along with the Palestinians, will quickly bring us to the end of the Zionist dream.” Noting that Israel had its own health and welfare issues, he said, “We don’t need to import more problems from Africa.”

“Most of those people arriving here are Muslims who think the country doesn’t belong to us, the white man,” Mr. Yishai said in an interview with the newspaper Maariv.

Even so, there has been emotional debate here about the obligations of a country like Israel, largely founded by refugees. While opponents of the African influx say they worry about Israel’s future as a state with a Jewish majority, other Israelis have volunteered to help the asylum seekers and say that Israel, of all places, should show compassion toward those fleeing hardship.

A debate about the two-state-solution with Norman Finkelstein

Jun 06, 2012

Philip Weiss

Norman Finkelstein Gaza City June 2009

Last month I wrote to Norman Finkelstein offering to debate the chapter dealing with the Israel lobby theory of Walt and Mearsheimer in his new book, Knowing Too Much: Why the American Jewish Romance with Israel is Coming to an End. He wrote back to say that’s just one section, and the book has much larger aims, why not discuss them? I agreed, and our email dialogue of the last two weeks follows. Note that this dialogue preceded Finkelstein’s appearance on Democracy Now! Monday. 

Norman Finkelstein: My new book is the fruit of three decades of scholarly reflection on the Israel-Palestine conflict and also of being an active participant in the solidarity movement. (I first got involved on June 6, 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon.) It is also the result of perhaps five years of intensive research, and three comprehensive rewrites of the manuscript. An honest reader would, I think, conclude that my book is the substantive version of the “Beinart thesis,” which, as it happens, I articulated in multiple venues long before Beinart came along. You might recall the conversation we had on the bus in Gaza after the 2008-9 Israeli invasion where I laid out my thesis that liberal American Jews were distancing themselves from Israel, and you expressed deep skepticism.

We are now at a crossroads in the conflict. I truly believe it is possible—not certain, not even probable, but still possible—that we can achieve a reasonable settlement within the two-state framework. But achieving this goal will require a maximum of political clarity and a vastly reduced amount of sloganeering.

Weiss: Here is where we differ. A historic compromise has been vitiated. Even David Shulmanin the New York Review of Books understands this. And the crossroads we face is explaining to Americans that one regime exists between the river and the sea, and the trick is to make it a democracy. Unlike you, I believe, I would have been a bourgeois in the 1850s, and a Lincoln Republican; I would have been for a two-state solution that allowed slavery to persist in the south and vanish in time. Those historic compromises were also vitiated in the space of a few years; and lo and behold some Americans grew impatient and quoted the words, All people are created equal. As Palestinians are impatient today, and who can blame them. There is no equality under the Israeli regime. There has been none since it was founded.

The error here, on the part of American leaders and maybe you too, is the belief that somehow the failure of the peace process between 1994 and 2012 represents some form of treading water before we really swim. But 18 years is a very long time historically; it blights more than a generation; Arabs took Obama at his word when he went to Cairo and said that the settlements must end.

When the historic compromises of 1830 and 1850 were flouted in the 1850s, there were real results. People became impatient and within six years there was war. And my belief that the intractable question in Israel/Palestine is also likely to be resolved by “verry much bloodshed”—as the revolutionary egalitarian John Brown put it, a person I am sure I would have opposed at the time—is why I support BDS. It is a peaceful process.

Finkelstein: Our disagreements are three-fold: historical, political, and material.

A. There never has been a peace process, but rather an annexation process that used the “peace process” as a facade. The record is quite clear that the Israelis never envisaged a full withdrawal from the occupied Palestinian territory and the emergence of a truly independent Palestinian state. Rabin explicitly said this in the Knesset just before his death in 1995. (I run through the record on pp. 232-237 of Knowing Too Much.) Interestingly, even the International Crisis Group, which is generally strong on facts, but feeble (if not awful) on analysis, and which has championed the “peace process” since its inception, comes close to conceding these facts. (See its latest report, “The Emperor Has No Clothes.”) The Palestinian leadership under Arafat signed onto the “peace process” at Oslo because it was headed towards oblivion (bankruptcy) after backing the wrong horse in the First Gulf War. In return for being rescued by Washington and Tel Aviv, the Palestinian leadership agreed to act as Israel’s subcontractors in the occupied Palestinian territory. (Former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami, in Scars of War, Wounds of Peace, is very frank on this point.) It is therefore analytically incorrect to draw any inferences for the prospects of a two-state settlement from a process that, from the outset, was never intended to achieve a two-state settlement. The only possibility for creating a real peace process, and not the sham of the past 20 years, is to mobilize the Palestinians’ most potent asset—i.e., the population itself—in a nonviolent grassroots struggle along the lines of the first intifada. The succession of practical victories won by the Palestinian hunger strikers (with relatively little concrete support from the Palestinian population) again demonstrated the efficacy of this strategy.

B. The question then becomes, if and when such a grassroots movement takes flight, what will be its goal? Here I think the answer is practical-political, not abstract-moral. Even an invigorated grassroots movement cannot possibly succeed unless it wins the backing of international public opinion, both popular and governmental. In the absence of such broad public support, Israel will have carte blanche to crush Palestinian resistance, however nonviolent. If the mass movement to end Apartheid in South Africa won international support, it’s because the international community had already embraced democratization—i.e., internalself-determination—as the appropriate goal in the South African context. When the Bantustans declared “independence” in the mid-1970s (first Transkei, then Ciskei, Bophuthatswana, and Venda), the international community overwhelmingly voted (in the case of Transkei, 134-0; the U.S. abstained) to declare these entities null and void under international law. But the identical overwhelming majority of UN member States has repeatedly voted to support a two-state settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict (167-7 in the last General Assembly vote). It’s easy to proclaim abstract-moral solutions when you lack the obligations of power, but each time a Palestinian leadership has reached a position of official responsibility (first the P.L.O. in 1974 when Arafat spoke at the UN, then Hamas in 2006, when it won the parliamentary elections), it had to revise its political program from a “one-state” to a “two-state” settlement, because otherwise it could not function on the international stage. Many self-described radicals have called this “selling-out,” I call it accommodating intractable—at any rate, in the here and now—political exigencies.

C. But is a two-state settlement materially feasible? Here, I think one has to look closely at the facts on the ground. In my opinion, the Palestinians have presented reasonable proposals for resolving the borders/settlements issue—a 1.9% land swap that leaves 300,000 of the illegal Jewish settlers in situ, without encroaching on the future Palestinian state’s territorial contiguity. But these proposals can only be properly assessed if one is attentive to the facts, and doesn’t fabricate preposterous numbers (such as David Samel’s figure of “600,000-750,000” illegal Jewish settlers posted on your web site) in order to “prove” the impossibility of a two-state settlement. I acknowledge the difficulties of resolving the refugee question within the two-state framework, but I do think a body modeled on a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (which, recall, had to confront,in the case of Guatemala, the perpetrators not of ethnic cleansing but of genocide), and composed of respected and authoritative figures (such as Jimmy Carter and Desmond Tutu), and after allowing all sides to air their grievances and reservations, can come up with a reasonable proposal.

In my opinion, your invocation of Lincoln and the Abolitionists is morally stirring, and I do like to be morally stirred—although my preference is Rosa Luxemburg—but it lacks any historical, political or material grounding. It’s as if I were now to advocate DOP (the Dictatorship of the Proletariat—the abbreviation of my youth back in the day, before BDS came along), and Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution in Palestine. I can’t help but feel, with all due respect, that you are being swept away by the throbbings of your heart and the flutterings of your soul, while blithely ignoring the mundane, un-poetic facts of the situation. If we can coerce a real Israeli withdrawal from the occupied Palestinian territory, and you are there at the rendezvous of victory, I am sure that tears will be streaming down your cheeks, because you will have realized how significant a victory it is, and how hard-won it was.

Weiss: Two quick points, Norman. 600,000 settlers is not that much of an exaggeration of Jeremy Ben Ami’s 550,000 the other night at B’nai Jeshurun. And I’m glad you’re morally stirred. Notice that I am invoking your inheritance, of radical imaginers, as opposed to my bourgeois stick in the mud types. In this case I have joined up with the imaginers, and not because of a daring feeling, but from a sense of American realism.

Finkelstein: The two principal groups monitoring settlement growth are B’Tselem and the Foundation for Middle East Peace. You can check their web sites now (btselem.org/topic/settlements; fmep.org/settlement_info/overview.html). Each puts the figure for the number of settlers at around 500,000. I noticed that Jimmy Carter the other day put it at 525,000 (I assume his staff keeps him up to date). To leap from there to 600,000-750,000 is either ignorant or irresponsible.

A few weeks ago on the plane to and from the UK I read a new edition of Rosa Luxemburg’s letters. You cannot conceive how it swept me away. I was, if only for a fleeting moment, transported back to the high spirits of my youth. Each of her five senses was so refined, and alive. I even made some resolutions after reading her, such as my early morning RLW—Rosa Luxemburg walk—in order to take in the world around me. (Unfortunately, I spend most of my time lost in thought cursing its denizens!) So, I remain an “imaginer,” even if one verging on decrepitude. But I cannot let my imaginings get the better of my moral responsibilities.

People are suffering; isn’t that why we—or, at any rate, I—first got involved in the conflict? It’s also why I can’t leave it behind, even though G-d only knows how sick I am of it, and how I would like to move on finally and do something else, just one other thing, with my life, before I pass into eternity. I noticed in the just-released BBC World Service Poll (May 2012) that Israel’s stock is plummeting everywhere in the world, except here in the US, where it has bounced back a bit. So, so frustrating. But how does it help to advocate political solutions that have zero traction, and zero possibility of gaining traction, among Americans, who will never support a settlement that—whatever euphemism you use and however you articulate it—entails Israel’s disappearance?

Weiss: I am also impatient to be done with this conflict. But I must say that our weariness is an easy one. We lead good lives in the U.S. This is why I listen to the Palestinians. They are the people who have to suffer the occupation.

I believe that the conservative side of you is showing when you allow an establishment consensus to guide your dreams. And it’s unbecoming. Again to go the 1850s frame, I as a bourgeois want-to-be insider, would likely have been for colonization—sending the blacks to a country in Africa where they could be free, because we were afraid they would murder us if we set them free here… You would have said that’s racist, and all people are created equal. But I would have had powerful consensus entirely on my side, or not even entirely. The slave power was regnant in NY and the South. My position would have been the J Street of the time. The lesson is that consensus changes very quickly. People’s ideas actually shift when they recognize the new reality. I made many stupid comments about homosexuality when I was young. Today I’d be ruined if I expressed these ideas, and that’s a good thing.

David Shulman preparing American Jews for the end of the Jewish state in New York Review of Books is informing people about reality. There is only one regime, and realists should work to convert it to equality. American Jewish consensus will dissolve under the force of this logic, if we will only stand up and say, I believe in democracy.

Finkelstein: You confuse and conflate support for a two-state settlement with support for racism. If the two-state settlement really were a racist goal, it would be hard to comprehend why it has been endorsed by nearly the whole of the United Nations (including many African and Arab-Muslim states) as well as by the human rights community and the International Court of Justice. So far as I understand it, nothing in the two-state solution inherently validates a discriminatory state on either side of the Green Line. The original 1947 UN Partition Resolution, although recommending the creation of a “Jewish” and an “Arab” state in historic Palestine, also explicitly called for complete equality of rights for the respective minorities. Personally, I have said many times that Palestinians should not recognize Israel as a “Jewish state” (whatever that even means), unless Israel also explicitly endorses full and equal rights for its minorities and rescinds all discriminatory legislation. You might then argue that, if I oppose discriminatory states on either side of the border, then “logically” I should, like you, also support a single democratic secular state. Alas, a huge chasm separates logic from politics. The U.S. stole half of Mexico, about one of every ten Americans is of Mexican descent, and the Mexican economy is totally dependent on remittances from Mexican workers in the U.S. So “logically” we should solve the problem of illegal Mexican immigration, which causes several hundred grisly deaths along the border each year, by merging the U.S. and Mexican democracies into a unitary secular state. Indeed, isn’t it “racist” to oppose such a solution? But, this “solution” has exactly zero prospects of gaining traction in the U.S., so politically serious people work for immigration reform. Does it make them racists or sellouts? I think not.

Weiss: But Mexicans haven’t called for a single state. I do believe in self-determination. I also believe in the legal principle of stare decisis. Preserve a peaceful status quo. Partition was racist, inasmuch as it was rejected by the majority who lived in the region. But it was effected—more or less. And rejected by the Palestinians and ultimately dissolved by the expansionist Israelis.

I might accept partition if it had any basis in reality. I believe there are many unjust situations that are beyond my control and that, out of the desire to preserve order, I’m not attempting to overturn. I’m a realist in that regard. Stare decisis meant not wanting to revolutionize slavery in the south during the time of historic compromises. In this situation, a realist recognizes that these people, Palestinians, whom neither of us can really speak for, have never had any sovereignty and are being bullied and oppressed from one day to another to the point that hundreds have put their lives on the line in nonviolent protest and hunger strikes. What is the likeliest way to freedom? You care about that goal; that’s why you’re for the two-state solution. I care for it, it’s why I heed Palestinians, most of whom I talk to don’t believe that the two-state solution is possible any more. My friends simply don’t believe a viable state can be created in what’s left of the 22 percent.

Wanting to end their suffering and subordination is also why I have heeded the boycott call, which represents a very broad segment of Palestinian society and which is nonviolent. If there was a real path to a viable two-state solution I might support it, and I believe that most Palestinians would. But there’s not.

I didn’t mean to conflate the racism of the colonization scheme under slavery with partition. Apologies. But the analogy for me is the pace of historical development in an unjust situation in which hopes have been dashed. We went in a very short period of time from bourgeois people like me tolerating slavery and abolitionists like Wendell Phillips calling for “non resistance” to slavery to…Emerson endorsing violent resistance…to a very bloody war to extirpate slavery—all over a 6-year period during which the establishment felt it could get away with breaking historic compromises. If the settlements hadn’t been extended in 1854—if the slaveholders hadn’t pushed slavery into Kansas—John Brown might not have been radicalized. He was. His radicalization is among the real human consequences that flow from major events.

In this situation, historic compromises also have been vitiated, and every time I see activists in the West Bank, they are more radicalized and focused than they were the last time. They are involved in a real, living movement against never-ending oppression, and their hearts and minds are now shaped by that process—and I have come to the understanding that if there is one thing I can do it is to give that movement oxygen because I share the goal of a peaceful solution.

Who am I to tell a college student who has never been to the sea, which he can see from his rooftop, not to throw a rock? A John Brown type could ignite a great bloody war there— another reason I’m for boycott.

And as for zero traction for the one state solution: the two-state solution has had zero traction in the Obama administration. European support for two-state solution can’t keep people from being shot in Gaza or their cisterns being destroyed all over the West Bank. I believe the two-state paradigm is dying even inside establishment consensus. People are searching for a new paradigm. And so I fall back on the same solution I supported for the Mubarak tyranny…the right of the people to vote for their rulers…

Finkelstein: I am sure that some Mexican “one-staters” want to abolish the border or, at least, and in the name of the “right of self-determination,” want the areas stolen by the U.S. to be returned. Would you then support this political program because of the Mexicans’ “right to self-determination”? If Salafis manage to gain primacy in the Palestinian movement (not an altogether impossible prospect: witness what’s happening in neighboring Egypt), and demand an Islamic state, and the expulsion of all Jews from Islamic Palestine, would you support this demand in the name of the Palestinian “right of self-determination”? Do Palestinians, as a component of their “right of self-determination,” also get to dismantle and incorporate the Kingdom of Jordan, which after all was part and parcel of historic Palestine before Churchill chopped it off?

You make out “the right of self-determination” to be a Palestinian blank check to do whateverthey want wherever they want. The “right of self-determination” is a moral principle that still must, in each individual application, be filled with political-legal content. Of course, “people” have the right to self-determination, but then the thorny questions set in: which people,where and how? Do New Yorkers have a right to self-determination? Do Upper West-Siders in Manhattan? Regional or personal autonomy within a state is also a form of self-determination. On a moment’s reflection, it becomes evident that these are enormously complex questions, and in fact a scholarly literature that can fill several good-sized libraries has been devoted to untangling them. Not very successfully, in my opinion—which was why one of Woodrow Wilson’s advisors warned him that this right was “loaded with dynamite.”

In the case of the Israel-Palestine conflict, the near-unanimous consensus for the past three decades has been that the Palestinian people do have a right of self-determination, to be exercised in the “occupied Palestinian territory,” which consists of the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip. I see no cracks in this consensus; quite the contrary, judging by all international forums, it has only gotten stronger over time. The concluding sentence of the 2004 International Court of Justice advisory opinion speaks to “achieving as soon as possible…the establishment of a Palestinian State, existing side by side with Israel, and its other neighbors, with peace and security for all in the region.” Do you really believe that the sentiment expressed in this historic and authoritative statement is less representative of international opinion and the current understanding of international law than that of your activists, who invoke the Palestinian “right to self-determination”as if it were a blank slate on which one can write as one pleases, and invoke “international law”as if it were whatever one wants it to be? Incidentally, I don’t understand how one can claim a Palestinian right of self-determination and not a reciprocal right to self-determination of Israelis (or Jewish Israelis, depending on how you define the unit of self-determination) residing there the past 60-130 years (depending on where you start counting). In the name of a distinct and unique identity, Palestinians rejected their incorporation into the Jordanian state as equal citizens. Don’t Israelis (or Jews residing in Israel) also get to claim a distinct and unique identity? And, if so (I cannot see why not), then where do they get to exercise their right of self-determination? The international community says, inside the Green Line. You might reasonably disagree with this cartographic distribution, but still, so far as I can tell, you don’t make any allowance for their reciprocal right. You might say that Israelis (or Jewish Israelis) can exercise this right alongside Palestinian Arabs within one unified state. But then, why shouldn’t Palestinians exercise their right within one unified Jordanian state? Distinct and unique identities cut both ways, don’t they?

I personally don’t see any point in engaging in these intellectual acrobatics because they don’t lead anywhere, just as trying to figure out what’s “just” seems to me a dead-end. I have read through the record of deliberations after the June 1967 war at the United Nations, and it seems to me that many of the States assembled made a good faith effort to find a just and reasonable solution (see pp. 203-221 of Knowing Too Much). The framework laid out in UN Security Council Resolution 242 (1967) eventually metamorphosed into the two-state formula for resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict. Instead of conjuring new notions of justice, I think it makes more sense—and here, I agree with Gandhi—to try to get people to act onexistent notions of right and wrong. Ending the occupation and finding a “just solution” to the refugee question would, in my opinion, significantly ameliorate the wretched conditions of Palestinians, and would not preclude working for a yet more just future. To realize these goals would be ascending one rung on Jacob’s Ladder, which—like ending Jim Crow in the American South, and Apartheid in South Africa—would be both a historic victory and an insignificant one in the eternal struggle (“every rung goes higher and higher”) for human emancipation.

Weiss: Norman, I think you are playing some word games here. While I recognize the wisdom in the warning Wilson’s advisers gave him, when I speak of self-determination I am speaking of a Palestinian national community that is now well defined, albeit with the trans-geographical wrinkle of the Palestinian exile community, which asserts a role here.

And when I honor Palestinian self-determination, what I’m saying is that my sense of that Palestinian community is that, They don’t believe in the two-state solution anymore, and why should they? I have a dear friend in East Jerusalem. He had some hope in statehood. Now he feels deceived. I defer to his feeling. My friend doesn’t like Salafis, and neither do I; and in fact when Egypt emerges into democracy and is freed from meddling from the West, or freer from it, I think Salafi influence will diminish. As a progressive, I believe that some of these traditional and intolerant trends in the Arab world we can influence best by getting out of their business. And that in fact Zionism with its Jewish nationalist ideology has fed Islamic ideologies. As the U.S. helped to foster Iranian Islamism by depriving the people there of democracy…

But let’s get to the central question here: As you say, there are now two national identities attached to the same land. This has always been the problem. Though I never had any truck with the Zionist claim, they did create an Israeli people. I’m reading Amos Oz right now—Israeli through and through. And these competing and irreconcilable identities/narratives/claims are now the intractable problem that poses such a huge risk. It seems that more violence is inevitable, we want to forestall it. You want to do so by imposing a solution that I don’t believe Palestinians seek any more. Let alone Israelis. Because it is as you say the consensus of the world. And that is true, though a decrepit consensus.

And when I say the two-state solution wasn’t that fair to begin with, I’m saying, I don’t think such an imposed solution can last. It doesn’t seem very fair to me as an outsider. It involves a 25-mile tunnel underground between West Bank and Gaza. Oh my god…Who would like that?

I find the two state paradigm both ineffective—it didn’t stop expansion one bit and led Palestinians to hope for a nation that was never delivered, even as countless other peoples got nations—lately Kosovo, South Sudan, East Timor—and not especially appealing. That tunnel! And today Ali Abunimah’s historical model—It’s South Africa, and world pressure will force it ultimately to change its character—is more reasonable and persuasive than Daniel Kurtzer’s/J Street’s Save the two-state solution. I think that’s the way things are more likely to work out in a peaceful manner.

(The other historical model I find compelling is Fawaz Gerges saying in the Nation some time back that Israel is like a Crusader state, it will die away in 100 years.)

But truthfully, I find a lot of this sort of argument abstract and even somewhat meaningless. Do I have any power to effect the outcome? I doubt it. I would have been an Oslo liberal if I’d paid any attention during the 90s; and Oslo had no effect, I believe, because both Israelis and Palestinians didn’t really want that. And given my absence of power over the Israelis and the Palestinians and their sense of competing peoplehoods, I think of the communities over which I have some influence, because they’re actually mine: I’m an American, a Jew and a citizen of the world. All these communities I hope to move toward recognition of Israeli apartheid and act out of that knowledge.

The other night Jeremy Ben-Ami of J St said that the next chapter of the struggle is that the world endorses one man/one vote between the river and the sea. I think he is right about this, and though he sees this as a fearful prospect, I say as a world citizen that it will be a good thing. That gives me an important imaginative task. I want to unconvince American Jews of their Zionism, and explain to them that it is the kind of separatism that blacks once sought under Marcus Garvey. I want American Jews to embrace for Israel the sort of status we have here. I will undertake this task as a left wing progressive. I reflect that the U.S. has changed enormously since 1967 in countless areas of culture and human and civil rights. Gays, feminists, blacks– I don’t need to tell you. Now US births are majority minority, and we have a minority president.

And during the very same period, Israel, as a direct consequence of Zionist ideology and occupation—and a warrior state isolation and dependency on western powers, the political conditions Hannah Arendt anticipated 70 years ago—has gone down a wholly different cultural/social path. Toward greater racism and intolerance.

If American Jews understood all this, and honestly espoused for Israel the type of society/polity they seek in the U.S., Israel would transform itself.

Finkelstein: I do not think practical obstacles constitute the root of our difference. A cosmopolitan like yourself couldn’t possibly believe that a 25-mile-long tunnel (I am not sure from whence you get tunnel: most experts speak of a highway) is such an insuperable obstacle: doesn’t the typical New Yorker commute at least 1.5 hours to and from work each day? The heart of our difference is time frames. You seem at ease gesturing to a solution that might take a “hundred years.” It’s easy enough to prognosticate in terms of centuries if you live among the creature comforts here, and not amid the abject misery there. South Africa began implementing Apartheid in 1948, and the U.N. General Assembly passed its first resolution condemning Apartheid in 1961. It then took some thirty more years and a vastly different world before Apartheid was dismantled. The Soviet Union, a critical backer of the ANC, was gone, while the Civil Rights Movement had transformed the cultural landscape of the U.S., without redistributing wealth—all of which meant that privileged South African whites realized by 1990, rightly, as it turned out, that they had much less to fear than hitherto imagined from Black empowerment.

You euphorically herald on your web site every inch closer Israel itself draws to a full-fledged Apartheid state. I might also note that you often, misleadingly, conflate predictions by, say, Shulman in the NYRB, that Israel will become an Apartheid state if…  with an acknowledgement that Israel proper has already become an Apartheid state, which is something quite different. In this regard you resemble your political bedfellow, Omar Barghouti, who proclaims that a 40 percent vote at a Park Slope coop in favor, not of boycotting Israeli products, but of holding a referendum to decide whether or not to boycott Israeli products,signifies that 40 percent “voted for BDS.” (See The Nation, 3 May 2012. DoNation fact-checkers give BDS a free pass?) What’s more, Barghouti explicitly and emphatically equates BDS with, at a “minimum,” full implementation of the Palestinian right of return (see his book BDS: The global struggle for Palestinian rights). So, if 40 percent of these coop members “voted for BDS,” and if support for BDS signals support for full implementation of the Palestinian right of return, then it must mean, and Barghouti must be saying, that 40 percent of these coop members in the heart of a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York support the return of 6.6 million Palestinian refugees to Israel. Whenever I come across hyperbolic nonsense like this, it brings to mind the sage exhortation of African revolutionary Amilcar Cabral: Tell no lies, claim no easy victories.

Now, returning to the main point, I do not see why it’s so terrific if Israel becomes a full-fledged Apartheid state “from the river to the sea.” You seem to believe that it will cast a bright light on the ghastly reality—as if Israel’s brutal military occupation of the West Bank and open-air prison in Gaza weren’t enough of a ghastly reality!—and thereby hasten a solution along the lines of South Africa. But if Israel was able to evade the international consensus favoring a two-state settlement for the past 40 years, why won’t it be able to evade a one-state settlement for an even longer time? Indeed, the reality of Israel’s existence is so deeply entrenched in the international system that it’s just as likely that Israel’s absorption of the occupied Palestinian territories will lead to calls for a new partition. Has the Balkans experience in the 1990s already vanished from memory? Ironically, such a new partition would probably be some version of Avigdor Lieberman’s plan: annexation of the Jewish settlements to Israel, and detachment of predominantly Arab areas from Israel. As the Chinese proverb goes, Be careful what you wish for.

Weiss: You are right to say that I embrace any statement by anyone that it’s either apartheid or about to be apartheid in the West Bank, and conflate the two. I do so from a moral impulse: I need to bear witness to what I have seen in the West Bank. It’s horrifying. The legal separation, the separate roadways, the two classes of resident, one that can vote and one that can’t, one that can travel freely and one that can’t, and all on a racial basis—this is apartheid. Apartheid on steroids, as Stephen Robert wrote in the Nation lately. Yes, some statements have been prospective and I probably pushed them. But David Shulman’s statement was not. He writes:

“At the moment, this single state, seen as a whole, fits Beinart’s term—a coercive ‘ethnocracy.’ Those who recoil at the term ‘apartheid’ are invited to offer a better one.”

Norman, I urge you not to put yourself in the position of extenuating the conditions on the West Bank.

Do I sound gleeful or overbearing? I agree that’s a problem. But I see a duty in bringing Americans the news. I should work on my tone; you know that I want to reach Jews. I think that’s where the power is over this question. But let me get to the heart of our difference, not the practical—and no I don’t see any virtue in a 25 mile tunnel, as Bernard Avishai promoted the connection, I think it’s an environmental, emotional disaster—but the conceptual.

As you say, and I love this statement, the destruction of apartheid over many years was achieved because of cultural changes in the U.S. We respect minority rights. We have seen the hearts of homophobes and sexists and racists transformed by social change. And this is all that I as an idealist prescribe for Israel. Because it has sealed itself off from these larger changes in the formaldehyde of Marcus Garveyism—Jewish separatism—and embattled militarism (all those wars that you playfully titled Atilla the Hun and the like, when we were on the bus in Gaza), it becomes an uglier place all the while. And meantime the Arab Spring has electrified young Arabs with the idea that they will get to choose their leaders. Palestinians want that right. I think American Jews could fairly quickly convince Israelis to embrace one man one vote too if we only were honest to ourselves, and spoke up about the kind of polity we actually love: one in which a minority has rights, and Jews can aspire to run things. I believe you are in denial of the psychic reality of Israel, the world they have made. Lia Tarachansky reporting on Jerusalem Day:

“Every year tens of thousands of right wing Israelis celebrate the occupation of East Jerusalem 45 years ago. This year the celebrators marched through Damascus Gate and the Muslim Quarter chanting ‘Muhammed is Dead’ and celebrating a 1994 massacre of 29 Palestinians in Hebron.”

And you’re worried about Salafists? We must clean up our house first. I wonder if in your heart you actually believe a core idea of Zionism, that Jews need sovereignty in their own land. That Jews are unsafe in the west, and we should have our own country. Myself I don’t believe these things. And more, I believe the existence of a Jewish state is causing endless turmoil in the Middle East.

As an American who was indifferent through Oslo, I was willing to accept Partition. I don’t actually think it’s my business if some foreign country is Jewish, Catholic or Muslim, though they all ought all to guarantee minority rights. But inasmuch as the peace process has failed again and again and the Israel lobby has caused Obama to capitulate, I understand that young Palestinians have turned their back on that road; and if my community is being polled, I’m going to stand up for what I believe in, multicultural democracy.

I’m sincerely asking you what you—who writes God “G-d” and whose beloved mother somehow survived the Warsaw ghetto and a German concentration camp—believe in. I think you’re imprisoned by old paradigms and not siding with the human dreamers. John Brown believed so firmly in human equality that he had blacks eating at his table when no abolitionist did so. He did not care what anyone thought on this score; and his dream had tremendous consequences. The Egyptian revolution was the most exciting public event of my adult life. If you and I had been having a dialogue about Egypt even two years ago, neither of us would have predicted anything like it. But young visionary Arabs toppled a system by not believing in its powers. And they communicated that lack of belief to people who for generations had been fearful of a tyrannical government. The triumph of the revolutiona