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Posts Tagged ‘brad burston’

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Brad Burston: Jews of the Gate (JVP) vs. Jews of the Wall (Stand With Us)

Tuesday, November 23rd, 2010

Recently, I wrote a post about a talk Brad Burston, the Haaretz columnist, gave in Seattle that was hosted by J Street.  I said some tough things about Brad’s remarks that night and he was open-handed and gracious enough not to take personal offense, as so many large-egoed journalists tend to do.  He actually responded to my criticism and while I think we still have differences it was clear that he retained respect for my views.  That doesn’t often happen.

Brad’s been writing a series for Haaretz about his U.S. visit and the latest column is a good one.  In it, he posits a bifurcation in the U.S. between what he calls Jews of the Wall and Jews of the Gate:

The Jews of the Wall are that minority of Israeli and American Jews who sincerely and unshakably believe in permanent settlement in all of the West Bank. Over time, they have become the vanguard both of Orthodox Judaism and the secular neo-conservative Jewish right, whose power and influence, much of it monetary, has American Jewish institutions terrified of their own shadows.

The Jews of the Gate, meanwhile, comprise the majority of Jews in both America and Israel. They want to see a future partition of the Holy Land into two independent states, a democratic and internationally recognized state of Israel next to a sovereign and independent state of Palestine.

Nothing terribly earth-shattering in this.  But what follows is, at least for a liberal Zionist publication like Haaretz.  Burston talks about attacks against J Street, like the cancellation of a talk by the group’s Jeremy Ben Ami at a Newton, MA synagogue after members went on the warpath about J Street’s alleged ‘original’ anti-Israel ‘sins.’

But then Burston did something really interesting.  He wrote this:

This month, when Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the Jewish Federations of North America in what amounts to its annual State of the Jewish Community speech, a group of young Jews issued a remarkable, stunningly poetic counter-declaration to the general message of Everyone But Israel’s At Fault. While Netanyahu, the conference organizers and many of its speakers focused ire on foreign critics of Israel and – in an especially unfortunate McCarthyite phrase, “fellow travelers,” apparently a reference to Jews who question Israeli policy – for de-legitimizing the Jewish state, the message of the counter-declaration was that Israel’s Jewish critics see themselves and should be seen as part and parcel of the Jewish community.

Concurrently, Emily Schaeffer, a Boston-born American-Israeli human rights lawyer and activist, published an essay which clearly signaled to the wider Jewish community that the Boycott, Sanctions, Divestment movement – singled out by a senior Federation official as an existential danger to Israel – had a much more nuanced and complex side than the cartoon villains portrayed by invited experts to the New Orleans gathering.

…The Tel Aviv-based Schaeffer wrote than “just because a person supports BDS and aspires for major change in Israel does not mean that said person cannot love a million and a half aspects about the life, culture, landscape and even politics of Israel today and historically. Nor does it mean that Israelis need to boycott themselves (something that is neither possible nor part of the Palestinian call). The only thing that is black and white in the BDS movement is that the call will remain in effect until Israel — with a lot of help from its friends — ceases to violate international humanitarian and human rights law.”

…In New Orleans, when members of the Young Leadership Institute of Jewish Voice for Peace heckled Netanyahu and held up signs reading that occupation, loyalty oaths and settlements were delegitimizing Israel, they were manhandled, placed in headlocks, and their signs literally chewed to pieces.

A few days later in the Bay Area, an Israeli flag-draped member of a rightist advocacy group, San Francisco Voice for Israel/StandWithUs, disrupting a Jewish Voice of Peace meeting, pepper-sprayed two JVP members in the face and eyes.

The attack followed the May vandalism of the Berkeley home of Rabbi Michael Lerner, whose Tikkun Magazine had awarded its annual human rights prize to Judge Richard Goldstone. Among the vandals’ messages was one reading “Leftists and Islamofascists are Terrorists.”

To my knowledge, Haaretz has until never published a favorable account of the work of Jewish Voice for Peace with the exception of a surprisingly positive article last week reporting on the group’s Bibi protest at the GA.  Nor have I ever seen anything remotely favorable written about the BDS movement.

Unlike Brad, who is an inveterate optimist (when it comes to Israel and other matters too, I presume), I’m hesitant to read a precedent into these editorial decisions.  But it could be, it just could be that something is driving Haaretz to expand its Israel narrative.  It’s embracing voices hitherto unheard or very rarely heard.  And Brad is one who is helping break these barriers.

Of course, the irony is that J Street itself wouldn’t be caught dead in the same room with JVP and here Brad has put them into the same column!  But that’s J Street’s problem, not Brad’s or ours.  Another example, J Street demonstrated at the Hebron Fund dinner in New York last week and wouldn’t even join a group of fellow protestors that included JVP members and (God forbid) Palestinians!  They had to have a mechitzah so none of J Street’s haters would be able to lump them together as they’re creamin’ to do.

Here is more of Brad’s column worth reading:

The Jews of the Gate drive them [Jews of the Wall] bats. Because the Jews of the Gate face the world. The Jews of the Gate face one another. The Jews of the Gate believe in the possibility of a future. They have broken the Israel Barrier. They are being true to what they believe. They are being true to their Judaism and their love of Israel. They are using the tools God gave human beings to repair the world. Their voices and their hands.

The Jews of the Wall, in their drive for uniformity, rabbinical authority, spiritual and genetic cohesion, stand for exclusion. They face the Wall.

They live the past. They translate compromise as surrender. They believe that God’s Arabic vocabulary consists of the word No. They will tell you that they believe in negotiations, but ceding any of the homeland would rend Israeli society to the point of the destruction of the Jewish state. They will tell you that the Arabs hate us, Iranians, the Turks, Barack Obama, that they will always hate us. Therefore we cannot withdraw. If God Himself tells us to, we cannot withdraw.

The Jews of the Wall believe that the entire outside world is hostile to them. The truth, one suspects, is the exact opposite.

They can’t bring themselves to say what they really mean: The Occupation must persist in order that the settlements grow, and the settlements must grow in order that the Occupation become permanent.

They cannot accept that the Jews of the Gate care about Israel no less than they. And that Israel belongs to the Jews of the Gate every bit as much as it belongs to them. The Jews of the Gate want to see a different Israel, a better Israel. There are many more of them than there are of the Jews of the Wall. And their answers to Israel’s problems, to the cliff up ahead [ed., a reference to the closing scene of Thelma and Louise] , are a great deal more reasonable and a great deal more realistic than ‘Shut Up and Gun It.’

Brad seems to believe that America’s Jewish federations are more Jews of the Gate than Jews of the Wall.  I think it’s more of his optimistic side coming out.  Personally, I think this is a bit too much Pollyanna for my taste.  He even thinks there might be hope for the next GA to invite anti-Occupation groups like JVP to come sit under the big tent.  It ain’t gonna happen.  At least not next year or even any year in the near future.  It may eventually happen.  And if and when it does it will be because of courageous Israeli journalists like Brad.  So like Orwell said about democracy: two and half cheers (well, maybe even two and three-quarters) for Brad Burston!

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Brad Burston Called Me an Anti-Semite

Sunday, October 31st, 2010
brad burston

Brad Burston called progressive Jews who deny Israel as the Jewish state 'anti-Semites'

Well, not precisely, but read on.

Burston is a Haaretz columnist with a set of quirky progressive ideas and a maverick streak.  You can’t pin him down precisely.  Sometimes he writes columns that make me proud and sometimes I want to throw a shoe at him (his phrase from a talk he delivered tonight) or at least his column on the computer screen.  A few months ago during the Anat Kamm case he wrote to me some lovely compliments about my coverage of the story.  He said I was brave and I was gratified to hear him say that.  Then I found that he’d been a very close friend of David Twersky, a former Jewish journalist and press officer of American Jewish Congress, who recently passed away from cancer.  Twersky and Burston were part of a garin that lived on Kibbutz Gezer in the 1970s.  I had spent a summer month on Gezer with an earlier American garin in 1972.  We had things in common.

So when I read that J Street would be hosting a talk by Burston tonight at my shul, I e mailed him and invited him to join me for a cup of coffee (which unfortunately didn’t happen).  I was looking forward to meeting him for the first time and made plans to attend his talk.  I was hoping to like him and his views as much as I had over the past few months.  But I was disappointed.  Not in Burston the person, but in his talk.

There are Israelis who, when they speak abroad deliver talks they never would in Israel.  They think their job is to rally the troops, to get them not to give up hope.  And I understand this impulse, I really do.  I too used to be a liberal Zionist (I’m still a Zionist, but that’s another blog post entirely).  But it doesn’t do anyone any good.  It sugarcoats Israeli reality.  It in a sense infantilizes the Diaspora audience by presuming that it either can’t take or wouldn’t understand a full-bore analysis of the extremity of the political situation in Israel.

At the present moment, an Israeli speaking in the Diaspora does a disservice when he makes things appear not quite as bad as they really are.  Only the truth suffices in the present situation.  Perhaps in 1972 or 1982 or 1992, one could perhaps understand the impulse to truncate one’s message.  But such bowdlerization of truth can no longer be justified.

So what did Burston say?  That brings me back to my title.  At one point, Burston said:

About the progressive Jew who sees nothing wrong with the many Muslim nations in the world, but who cannot allow the Jews to have a single state of their own anywhere in the world, I say that person is an anti-Semite.

That’s why I say that Burston called me an anti-Semite, though he didn’t do so personally.  But let me clear about my own views.  I do support an Israel that has a Jewish identity, just as I support an Israel that has a Muslim and Christian identity for those religious groups.  I do not support an Israel which affirms Judaism as its sole or primary national religion to the exclusion or detriment of others.  If Israel is to be a true democracy it must not favor one religion over others.  It must treat religions equally.  That does not mean that Judaism or Jewishness will be disrespected or ignored or subordinated.  But it means that this particular religion will take its place as one of several religions practiced by the nation’s citizens.

That’s why I believe Brad Burston called me an anti-Semite.

There were other parts of his talk that troubled me as well.  When Israeli liberals speak here they usually try to tell audiences things aren’t as bad as they are.  So did the Haaretz columnist.  He told his listeners that things weren’t as bad as they might seem, that Israeli democracy was strong.  As proof, he used a Yediot poll which asked respondents which Israeli politicians they felt most embodied ultra-nationalist, even fascist views.  60% named Avigdor Lieberman.  The speaker used this poll result to say that not only didn’t Lieberman represent a “real and present danger” to Israeli democracy, but Israelis saw through him and would never support him.

What Burston neglected to acknowledge was that the entire premise of the poll and accompanying newspaper articles about it was that fascism was a real and present danger in Israel.  There were other questions in this same poll whose results actually proved precisely the opposite of what he claimed: that is (for one example), that Israeli by large margins support curbs on free speech and democratic rights even when the issues addressed are NOT security related.

Burston argued that while it was true that the Israeli liberal concept of “land for peace” was dead, so was the far right vision of Greater Israel.  He denigrated the notion of the power of the Israeli right over Israeli political life by claiming that it doesn’t even truly represent its ideological legacy.  As proof, he cited the fact that by party, 96 of the 120 Knesset members support a two-state solution.  I find such a claim to be so weak and unpersuasive, I’m surprised anyone with Burston’s clear level of political intelligence would use it.  This presumes of course that every Likud MK supports a Palestinian state, which is ludicrous and Burston should know it.

In fact, the vast majority of Israelis say they support a two state solution but few are willing to actually make the compromises necessary right now to make it happen.  The same is true of Knesset members.  There are very few that, if you asked them–do you support a return to 1967 borders, sharing Jerusalem, and a negotiated resolution of the Right of Return allowing some refugees to return–would say yes.  So saying you support a two state solution means nothing in this case, since you’re not willing to face the compromises necessary to achieve it.

I left Burston’s talk during the Q&A when the local Stand With Us board member, David Brumer, began his question with the lie:

I don’t disagree with anything you said tonight.

I knew it could only go downhill from there, and I didn’t have the heart to listen to the rest of a statement from someone who once wrote me an e mail saying I should be spanked for my views.

I’m also struck by the phrase “love for Israel” bandied about by so many liberal Zionists including Burston tonight.  One of the reasons (there were others as well) I didn’t attend Daniel Sokatch’s (he is the CEO of the New Israel Fund) talk here in Seattle this month was its title, Loving Israel in Challenging Times.  I find the notion that one must profess love for Israel before criticizing it to be preposterous.  It’s one thing in a marriage to criticize one’s wife while doing so in the context of the love you have.  But Israel is not a wife.  It is a country.  Wives don’t kill people (not usually), countries do.  I don’t want to make love to Israel.  I don’t want to have children with Israel.  I want it to be a country of which I can be proud as a Jew.  But what’s love got to do with it?  Love is a red herring.  It disables critical debate.  Love means that Israel cannot be something I think it should be, a normal state.  Love puts Israel on a pedestal just as traditional male attitudes toward women put them on similar pedestals that prevented them from being normal human beings.

In the time when I was still on e-mail terms with Leonard Fein, he practically made a fetish out of my supposed lack of love for Israel.  To him, it proved I had left the Zionst reservation because you could only express criticism of Israel out of such deep concern and affection, that your criticism would clearly be couched as that of a concerned parent for a loved one gone astray.  Naturally, I don’t have patience in this hour in which Israel finds itself in extremis for such mollycoddling.

To me it is self-evident that I would not write this blog unless I loved Israel.  It would simply be a waste of time to devote as many tens of thousands of hours to this enterprise as I have unless there was deep emotion attached to the subject.  And there is.  Many decades of my life have been devoted to Israel.  I could not do so unless I loved it.  But I will not trot out such love as if it were a stamp on a passport in order to prove my Zionist bona fides.

It’s the same way with the American far right which accuses the left of hating America and similar nonsense.  No one on the American left owes any explanation, justification or defense to their political opponents on this matter.  I don’t need to confess my love for America in order to criticize it.  In that sense, criticism is love.

It shouldn’t be surprising that Burston has been touring the U.S. on behalf of J Street.  This type of pulling of punches regarding Israel is J Street’s trademark.  I have pretty much given up on J Street as having any useful purpose regarding the Israeli-Arab conflict.  But I had hoped for more from Brad Burston and his talk tonight.

It’s possible that Brad Burston would not deliver the same address to an Israeli audience.  That he would speak more unguardedly, more forthrightly, more directly to such an audience.  That I would admire the penetrating analysis he would bring to bear before such a group.  It’s possible that there’s a Brad Burston in there I can still admire politically.  But I don’t think tonight he did Israel or himself any favors.

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Chomsky to Deliver Bir Zeit Lecture on Al Jazeera

Tuesday, May 18th, 2010

Well, maybe this will teach the petty bureaucrats at the Israeli Interior Ministry a lesson.  After lecturing him for four hours on the errors of his ways in criticizing Israel and telling him what he could or should do to be allowed admittance, they sent Prof. Noam Chomsky packing back to Amman.  Later, Israeli PR flacks attempted to backtrack by lying and claiming it was all a clerical error by a desk jockey the Allenby Bridge.  Still later, they offered to allow him back into the West Bank (which isn’t Israel last I checked, even by Israel’s standards, so why should they even be determining who enters Palestinian territory?).  When Chomsky inquired about whether this was a bona fide official guarantee of entry he discovered it wasn’t.  Israel is just playing games.

But Chomsky, not to be played the fool, has delightfully one-upped them all.  He’s going to deliver his Bir Zeit lecture via video conference from Amman and it will be telecast live on Al Jazeera.  That way it will reach an audience thousands of times larger than the original lecture would have.  Since Al Jazeera is available in Israel, perhaps even Israeli citizens will be able to watch him take apart the hypocrisy and brustishness of Israeli policy and Occupation.

This is the problem with Israeli policy and with all authoritarian regimes (which the Occupation certainly is).  It thinks of the short term benefit, not the long term.  It thinks of tactics instead of strategies.  It puts a finger in the dyke but does nothing to preserve the ecosystem itself.

On a related note, Haaretz columnist Brad Burston has written a typically eloquent, soul-searching cri de coeur about the ugly rise of fascism inside Israel.  Lest my right-wing readers jump on Burston as a typically left-wing commentator, this is simply untrue.  Burston made aliyah decades ago and joined Kibbutz Gezer, where I myself visited when I studied in Israel.  He has impeccable credentials as a liberal Zionist.  So for him to be writing so openly using such strong language should tell us that the canary is singing in the coal mine that is Israeli “democracy.”  Israel is a nation under threat.  Even perhaps a nation beginning to implode under our very eyes from the heap of self-contradictions under which it labors.

elvis costello

Elvis Costello withdraws from Israel concerts (James O'Mara)


I was delighted to read that Elvis Costello, a performer I admire greatly, has cancelled his Israel performances on his upcoming tour.  He wrote a remarkably sensitive, balanced account of his decision which acknowledges that the decision is morally conflicted but had to be made nevertheless:

It is after considerable contemplation that I have lately arrived at the decision that I must withdraw from the two performances scheduled in Israel on the 30th of June and the 1st of July.

One lives in hope that music is more than mere noise, filling up idle time, whether intending to elate or lament.

Then there are occasions when merely having your name added to a concert schedule may be interpreted as a political act that resonates more than anything that might be sung and it may be assumed that one has no mind for the suffering of the innocent.

…If these subjects are actually too grave and complex to be addressed in a concert, then it is also quite impossible to simply look the other way.

…I am not taking this decision lightly or so I may stand beneath any banner, nor is it one in which I imagine myself to possess any unique or eternal truth.

It is a matter of instinct and conscience.

…Sometimes a silence in music is better than adding to the static and so an end to it.

I cannot imagine receiving another invitation to perform in Israel, which is a matter of regret but I can imagine a better time when I would not be writing this.

With the hope for peace and understanding. Elvis Costello

Haaretz notes that Santana and Gil Scott Heron have also joined in the protest by cancelling their own performances.  I hope other performers will read Costello’s nuanced, humble and carefully articulated statement in full.  It gives them much to ponder.  I too want to make clear that I do not support such a decision as a means of harming Israelis, especially those who share a critique of Occupation.  This is a political act, not one of petty vindictiveness.  Of course, many Israelis will mistakenly take it as the latter.  This is not an act that ultimately seeks harm to Israel or God forbid, it’s destruction.  It is a moral statement that tells Israel that the rest of the world will no longer sit idly by.  That if Israel wishes to continue down this road, a price will be paid in isolation.  And that when Israel ends Occupation, then that price will be redeemed and Israel’s status will be restored.

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Haaretz’s Burston: Pain of the Liberal Zionist

Saturday, February 20th, 2010

Brad Burston's Zionist crisis of conscience (Jews for Justice for Palestinians)

I empathize with Brad Burston.  I feel his pain.  The current rightist government is driving him to despair as a liberal Zionist.  It is destroying his dream of an Israel that is good and moral and at peace with itself and its neighbors.  I think I have long since lost some of the hopes and dreams Burston had (though my pain at times is no less than Burston’s).  I still consider myself a Zionist, but I would guess that our conceptions of it would be different.

Which is the reason why Burston’s dilemma compels me.  He’s still in territory I left some time ago.  But the very fact that he occupies ground that many Israelis do occupy means he is a bellweather of sorts for the liberal-left Zionist.  If Burston is facing a crisis of conscience, that is an important indication of a chink in the armor of the latter-day Zionism and its liberal supporters.

Avrum Burg went through such a crisis several years ago, abandoned liberal Zionism and Zionism in general, and emigrated from Israel to France and as a result opted out, to an extent, of this political debate.  It will be interesting to see whether, like Burg, Burston will have the courage of his conviction, and whether he will move to a more radical position or remain in his liberal Zionist mode.

Since he’s such a powerful writer when his passion is engaged, I enjoy quoting him at length.  Before I do though, I’m troubled by his juxtaposition of the supposed far-left anti-Zionist position with his own.  There are anti-Zionist who truly hate Israel, but there are anti-Zionists who do not and they’re not treated fairly by Burston’s formulation.  With that caveat, read on:

At times like these, I envy the people who passionately, frankly, with all their hearts, despise Israel.

Hate Israel enough, and the Jewish state’s failings and blunders, its self-satisfied blindness and its resultant self-destructive policies, cause not pain, but delight.

Hate Israel enough, and you’re spared all inclination to try to fix what’s wrong, to work to set it right. On the contrary, hate Israel enough, and you may come to believe not only that the country deserves to be punished to the point of replacement by a different state – Israel may well do the job all by itself.

This is one of those times.

I have made my peace with the fact that this is not the same country I moved to, so long ago. I learned when I first came, that Israel was not the country I’d thought I was moving to.

But this is different. This time is a test for every Israeli, and so far, we are failing.

There was once a time when Israel longed to be a member in good standing of the community of nations. There was a time when one of its fondest goals was to end its status as a nation in quarantine, boycotted, unrecognized, unwanted, kept firmly at arm’s length.

No longer. Without asking its people, without a second thought, Israel, at its highest level, has taken an executive decision. Unable to beat the forces who want to see Israel as one of the world’s primary pariah states, it has resolved to join them.

Determined to take our fate into its own hands. Israel, at its highest level, has decided that the job of delegitimizing the Jewish state must not be left to foreigners and amateurs. Showing itself desperate to be a pariah state, Israel will now get it done on its own.

What the far-left from Britain to Berkeley has been unable to bring off – a sense among Israel’s allies that Israel has become a heartless, morally heedless aggressor state worthy of sanction and shunning – the far-right in Israel’s own government, and in particular, its Foreign Ministry, seems determined to inculcate to the full.

We should have known that something like the Dubai assassination debacle was going to happen. The process of de-legitimizing Israel from within was going too slowly.

It was not enough choose a pathetic side issue, a Turkish television show with anti-Israel scenes, as grounds to humiliate with infantile malice the highly respected ambassador of Turkey – a nation whose relationship with Israel, though troubled, remains crucial from every strategic and diplomatic standpoint…

Referring to the bellicose, confessed and convicted disgrace who is his foreign minister and superior, Ayalon told Channel Two, “His policy is proving to be effective. We will not allow a situation where every country will kick us. If there will be an attack [even if verbal or cultural] on Israel, we will leave all options open, including the expulsion of ambassadors.”

It wasn’t enough to threaten our relations with the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Austria and the whole of the European Union, as well as the emirates and other moderate Muslim states, by apparently violating the basic conventions of all civilized states in the Dubai murder.

It was necessary to stage a quick follow-up, for the sake of balance, perhaps, in going after our relations with Israel’s indispensable ally. In a gratuitous move breathtaking in its haughtiness, its ignorance of and disrespect for the United States and the American Jewish community, the Foreign Ministry – spearhead of Israel’s campaign against boycotts abroad – elected this week to boycott a meeting with five U.S. Congressmen visiting Israel.

Why? The representatives were visiting under the auspices of J Street. J Street, in the ministry’s eyes, is guilty of the crime of explicitly calling itself pro-Israel, while not agreeing wholeheartedly with everything the government of Israel says and does.

I have come to envy the people who hate Israel. They’ve got every reason to smile.

…No one can defend this anymore. There’s too much that looks bad, and much too much of it is true.

Like so many of Israel’s recent actions, the motives for the Dubai assassination are debatable. The negative impact is inarguable.

…My wife, who cares about this country as deeply as anyone, was singing this morning, but with a smile I have come to recognize as a sign of pain. ” … And they call the state Pariah.”

All those years of isolation, of quarantine, are coming home to haunt us. Now it turns out that the contempt for the rest of the world that it bred in Israeli Jews, extended to contempt for immigrant Jews as well.

The response of many Israelis to what appears to be officially sanctioned theft, exploitation, and ruin of the identities of immigrants to Israel, was terrifying in its good humor, with morning talk-show hosts making fun of their Hebrew, even as they made light of their plight.

…This is what I have learned about the government of this place, and many of the voters who put it there. Intelligent people who are too smart to be able to see themselves clearly, render themselves stupid.

And countries which cannot bear to look, even if they have good reasons, render themselves dangerous – first of all, to themselves.

This is not the country I first came to. But I still care about it, even if I know it may care much less than I would like, about me.

I have come to envy the people who hate Israel, because they cannot feel the tragedy in the phenomenal possibility, the depth and breadth of humanity that is going to waste here…

There is so much right about this analysis and it is so heartfelt and powerful that it is hard to find fault with it.  If I would criticize Burston’s position at all, he places the blame for his disillusion almost wholly on the current Likudist government. He’ll find no disagreement from me on that.  However, by implication he seems to be saying that a different Israeli government with a different set of parties in power might do better or differently.  I find this highly doubtful.  With the current set of parties and leaders, none have the capacity to lead Israel out of the wasteland in which it finds itself.

This nation is hopelessly lost in the wilderness like the Israelites led by Moses who wandered for forty years till they entered the land of Israel.  Latter-day Israel too has wandered for more than 40 years in the wilderness of Occupation.  They have no leader of the quality of Moses to lead them out of oblivion.  There is no Israeli de Klerk  (or Palestinian Mandela for that matter).  That is why I have come to despair of the ability of Israel unaided to correct its errors and put itself on the right track.  If this conflict is ever to be resolved it will only come from the forceful intervention of outside forces like the U.S., EU, UN and/or NATO.

I wish Brad Burston well and hope he will follow the logic of his own despair to some other place than the Sinai of liberal Zionism.  It will be a hard, painful journey.

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Burston on Gaza War as Root of All Israeli Evil

Sunday, February 14th, 2010

Brad Burston, Haaretz’s columnist can be a helluva fine writer.  I’ve written at least one laudatory post about him.  After doing so, I read pieces by Burston which seemed almost to be written by a different person.  They were churlish pieces attacking Israel’s Jewish critics.  I chalked it up to a journalist feeling that it was his duty to show he could criticize both the right and left.  I thought I would never find a reason to write about his work again, till tonight.

Burston has written one of the most powerful, cogent and hard-hitting critiques–not only of the Gaza war, but of the current mess in which Israel finds itself in–I’ve ever read.  Seemingly every Israeli NGO or peace activist is under savage attack.  At the present moment, Israel faces a civil liberties crisis as dire as the U.S. faced during the McCarthy era.  The New Israel Fund, a classical Zionist NGO if there ever was one, is under mortal threat.  Its leader, Naomi Hazan has been publicly and graphically attacked in terms that would’ve made Goebbels proud.  Richard Goldstone has been called a traitor to his people.  Alan Dershowitz as much as put a price on his head.  Jewish women have been arrested for trying to leyn Torah at the Wall.

So it is like a balm in Gilead to read such graceful, soaring language from Burston:

This is about fear of the dark. Of the monstrous. In this case, the terror of finally uncovering what we ourselves are really made of.

This is about the lengths we will go, and the depths, in order to protect what we so desperately need to believe about ourselves. This is about how many others we will need to blame, vilify, assault, scapegoat and smear, before we actually take one wholly honest long look in the mirror.

This is about the war we made in Gaza, and what it did to Israel. This is about how Israel’s conduct of the war has done more damage to the Jewish state than all the thousands and thousands of Palestinian rockets and mortar shells put together. It has been a year and more since a truce was called in Gaza, and – thanks in no small part to Israel’s freely admitted policy of hamstringing and stonewalling UN investigators – the world is still at war with Israel.

The result is only now becoming felt. In a thousand ways, in new ways every single day, we have brought the war home.

Israel’s battle plan, which effectively called for bludgeoning Hamas and the whole of Gaza into a state of shock, had the further effect, intentional or not, of inducing shock in Israel itself.

Here Burston presents a daring thesis for an Israeli audience–that Goldstone was right:

In some cases, shock expresses itself in combativeness. A lashing out even at those who are trying to help.

In our state of shock, we were unable to see that Richard Goldstone was trying to save us. And that the Goldstone Report is exactly what Israel needs. We fought him every step of the way, convincing ourselves – just as in Gaza – that the unfolding catastrophe was the best of the available scenarios.

Had Israel cooperated with the panel, it might have begun to learn how to prevent another war like this one, and how to fight future wars entirely differently. Only now, with the shock beginning to subside, have Israeli military and legal officials begun publicly to concede that battling the Goldstone panel was a colossal blunder.

Burston here also propounds an unpopular idea in Israeli circles, that the Gaza siege is as much a blunder as the war itself was.  And this argument segues into the most important point of his column–that the war has led inexorably to the current attack on Israeli democracy and the peace movement:

And it is this Israeli government, in continuing its siege of Gaza, in denying Gazans access to concrete and other materials needed to rebuild homes destroyed by Israeli fire during Cast Lead, that lends further credence to the Goldstone Report’s suspicions that Israel’s policy has been and continues to be one of collective punishment of a civilian population.

Despite the nightmarish numbers of civilians killed in Gaza, the right has argued again and again that the problem with the war was that it was not pursued aggressively enough. Now, at home, they are getting their way. Finally, the war is being pressed to the full – with peace activists and human rights workers as the primary targets.

The Dahiya Doctrine of overkill and unimaginable, unremitting force, is being applied against the elements of Israeli society most strongly defending democracy and elemental rights. Finally, the war at home is being run the way the right wants. No holds barred. A fresh new onslaught on democracy every single day.

And if his thundering column had ended with the following passage I would’ve called it a masterwork of decency and humanity:

The Goldstone Report is, indeed, deeply flawed. But it is exactly what Israel needs. A deeply flawed report for a deeply flawed country. A country which will not, and cannot, begin to heal itself, repair itself, right itself, unless it faces with honesty and courage the issues and allegations raised by the report.

As long as Israel ducks the report, and keeps buried the whole truth about Cast Lead, it will not recover from this state of shock. Israel will be more vulnerable than ever to destruction from within.

But alas, he didn’t.  And this goes to my criticism of Burston, where he seems to lose the courage of his convictions and lapses into standard anti-Palestinian rhetoric:

Gaza, ruled by a Hamas which wants to see Israel exterminated – and which has only grown richer, better armed, and more popular as a result of the Israeli embargo – will continue to hold the whole of Israel in a crippling, withering, ultimately destructive state of siege.

The notion that Hamas wants Israel exterminated is a beloved trope of the very Israeli right Burston has spent this entire column deriding.  I have no problem with criticizing Hamas.  But if you want to do that you have a responsibility to do it accurately and precisely.  And this anti-Hamas slur is neither accurate nor fair.  But I do very much like Burston’s closing image of a Hamas which, by the very nature of Israel’s siege of Gaza, holds Israel under siege as well.

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Gaza, Meretz and the Bankruptcy of Israeli Politics

Thursday, December 25th, 2008

In case you didn’t know, Meretz’s call for a military strike against Gaza reminds us we’re in the middle of an election campaign.  It also reminds us of the utter bankruptcy of the national political process.  If you speak forthrightly about what must be done for peace, you lose votes.  If you pander to nationalist-security sentiment, you may not gain votes (especially if you’re Meretz), but you won’t lose them.

Every reasonable person both inside and outside Israel knows what will stop the rain of Qassams descending on southern Israel.  Hamas has told them what it wants: lifting the siege.  If Israel agrees to end its depraved policy of suffocating Gaza, then Hamas would renew the tahdiya and there would be, if not peace, at least calm.  In the long term of course, Israel would have to negotiate at least indirectly with Hamas for longer-term & more comprehensive peace agreements.

Hamas, of course, rejected renewal of the ceasefire on Israeli terms, which essentially gave Israel peace and Gaza ongoing misery.  The rocket barrage unleashed since the end of the ceasefire is unpardonable, especially since the longer it lasts the more likely it will lead to the death of an Israeli civilian.  But if Israel listened to reason and common sense, it would realize the siege hasn’t worked and won’t work (not to mention that it is morally indefensible and a violation of international law); and would lift it.  Then there would be no missile barrage, hence no military incursion.

An indication of the delusional thinking affecting Israeli politicians is this statement:

Chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee Tzahi Hanegbi [said]…”If the Qassam [rocket] fire does not stop, the Israel Defense Forces will fight you with the same might with which it fought Hezbollah during the Second Lebanon War,” said Hanegbi (Kadima), speaking to Army Radio.

Hanegbi is under the illusion that threatening Hamas with what Israel served up to Hezbollah is a deterrent.  Someone ought to tell him the news: the IDF failed in Lebanon just as it will fail in Gaza.  The only people the IDF frightens is unarmed civilians.

It is, of course, politically bankrupt for Meretz to call for an incursion.  It signals that even the left has lost its bearings in Israeli politics.  If you can’t speak plainly and clearly and find a place in the political process, what is that process worth?  The process has led to disaster after disaster.  The coming operation, if it does not end with the deaths of Israeli soldiers and Gaza civilians, certainly will do absolutely nothing to end the Qassam barrages.  They may stop for a day or a week.  But they will resume as they always have after this type of military action.  It will be the same old cycle of misery and failure into which Hamas and Israel have sunk themselves.

While I find myself sometimes in strong disagreement with Brad Burston, he’s hit the nail on the head in this week’s Haaretz column, with his own characterization of this imminent offensive, Can the First Gaza War Be Stopped Before It Starts?

He quotes Brig. Gen. Shmuel Zakai, former IDF Gaza commander, with some sensible ideas about ending the Qassam fire. The fact that they are sensible means, ipso facto that there will never receive serious consideration by the Israeli powers-that-be:

“The state of Israel must understand that Hamas rule in Gaza is a fact, and it is with that government that we must reach a situation of calm.”

Israel must also understand that Hamas is a pragmatic organization, Zakai continues. “The moment that the organization understands that Qassam fire is contrary to its interests, it will stop the fire.

“We need to work in an integrated manner. The situation is a complex one…”An integrated approach, on the one hand, includes demonstration of military might…and on the other hand, also using a carrot, to cause Hamas to understand that refraining from firing exactly serves their interests.

In Zakai’s view, Israel’s central error during the tahadiyeh, the six-month period of relative truce that formally ended on Friday, was failing to take advantage of the calm to improve, rather than markedly worsen, the economic plight of the Palestinians of the Strip.

He believes that Hamas would have – and still would – accept a bargain in which Hamas…would halt the fire in exchange for easing of the many ways in which Israeli policies have kept a choke hold on the economy of the Strip.

“…The carrot is improvement of the economic situation in the Gaza Strip. You cannot just land blows, leave the Palestinians in Gaza in the economic distress they’re in, and to expect that Hamas will just sit around and do nothing. That’s something that’s simply unrealistic.”

In the end, Israel must realize that “we can’t impose regimes on the Palestinians. We can’t cause the Palestinians [to decide] who will rule over them. Hamas took over the Gaza Strip. This is a fact. I do not believe that the state of Israel should cause another ruler to come to power in Gaza borne on the bayonets of the IDF. ”

“It’s just like after the disengagement. We left Gaza and we thought that with that troubles were over. Did we really think that a million and a half people living in that kind of poverty were going to mount the rooftops and begin singing the Beitar hymn? That is illogical.”

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Failing the Lynch Test, Proudly

Saturday, July 5th, 2008

In May, Akiva Eldar wrote in The Nation about a felicitous encounter he had with an Egyptian cab driver who picked him up in New York City.  The man followed Eldar’s reporting religiously and praised it effusively. In the course of the article, Eldar notes an important column that Israel’s most popular daily columnist wrote criticizing Haaretz’s commentators for their attitude toward Palestinian terror:

…Nahum Barnea wrote in November 2000 (in a publication of the Israel Democracy Institute) that “there are Israeli reporters who do not pass the ‘lynch test.’” These, he wrote, are journalists who could not bring themselves to criticize the Arabs even when two Israelis were savagely murdered by a mob in Ramallah. Barnea…went on to argue that our [the journalists'] support for the Palestinian position is absolute. He concluded, “They have a mission.” I was honored to be mentioned as one of those journalists, alongside my fine colleagues Gideon Levy and Amira Hass.

I admit to being guilty as charged.

Me too. You see, I resent the fact that there is a “test” that you must pass in order to be considered truly supportive of Israel when it suffers a terror attack; that you must be prepared to bray for blood vengeance or else be insufficiently patriotic or pro-Israel or whatever term you’d like to use. Similarly, I’d like to think, in fact I know, there are Palestinians who don’t scream for vengeance whenever the Baruch Goldsteins, Natan-Zadas, or the IDF perpetrates a ritual act of bloodletting. There must be those on both sides who understand that the acts of individual terrorists do not mean that an entire people have hatred of the other inscribed in their DNA; or even that the horrific acts of a national army represents a destiny of perpetual war for both peoples.

The genesis of this post was entirely contrary to most posts based on ideas contributed by readers. This one came from an especially hateful and annoying one, Bill Pearlman, who wrote in reply to my last post about the bulldozer terror attack in Jerusalem:

…You should check out the lynch test has [sic] spelled out by Nahum Barnea. Sombody [sic] with way more reason to be bitter than you. You fail miserably…

Since I’d never heard of the “lynch test” it set me to Googling which turned up Akiva Eldar’s sterling piece from The Nation. Without Pearlman’s ankle-biting comment, I wouldn’t have learned that I proudly failed Nahum Barnea’s test, which insists that all red-blooded Israel supporters must hate ALL the enemy when a SINGLE one commits an act of blood lust.

Haaretz’s Brad Burston has definitely passed the lynch test with this churlish, obtuse rant:

The attack came after the latest in a series of attempts by groups in the States, some of them atheist/anarchist, some of them Muslim, some of them Jewish, to lobby Prostestant churches and respected universities to divest from Caterpillar, because the IDF uses its bulldozers to demolish Palestinian homes.

I would like to hear them now. Just once. I would like them to divest from terrorism. Not understand it as the natural outgrowth of the crimes of occupation. For once, I would like my sisters and brothers on the left to be every bit as hard on their comrades the Palestinians for taking a bulldozer and crushing Jews, as they are on Israel for bulldozing homes.

Why would anyone on the left or otherwise NOT understand terror as a “natural outgrowth of the crimes of Occupation?”  In the Israeli context terror and Occupation walk hand in hand.  What Burston does not understand is that believing this does not condone terror.  It does not say Palestinian terror is justified.  It merely says that such terror is not an evil without cause.  This is what Burston refuses to concede.

He continues:

…What’s a decent person supposed to think?

That it’s all right to launch rockets against residential areas during a cease-fire, because the occupation is still going on? That it’s all right to crush Jewish civilians, because the occupation has not been halted and settlers continue to build homes?

…What’s a decent person to think when the man who drove the bulldozer was himself the father of two, a construction worker from East Jerusalem, whose desire to kill Jews – and, in so doing, further soil and damage the cause and name of Palestine – was greater than his feeling for the mother who had to throw her baby from a car to save it?

What is astonishing about this monologue is that Burston refuses to understand the suffering the Occupation inflicts on the Palestinians.  Does he believe that the Palestinians must simply acquiesce to that suffering; or perhaps protest it by writing letters to the prime minister?  If the Occupation brings deadly violence to the everyday lives of Palestinians, does Burston think that the same will not happen to Israelis?  What specifically indemnifies Israelis from feeling any pain when their army inflicts pain on another people?

What is astonishing about the following passage is that from the rampage of a single troubled Palestinian, Burston has extrapolated the innate hatred of the entire Palestinian people for Jews from time immemorial:

I, for one, would like to ask for proof of what it is that Palestinians really want. I no longer believe that it’s as simple as wanting statehood.

This is what I don’t yet want to admit: that for all these years…what a critical mass of Palestinians want most, perhaps even more than statehood, may be as simple as the vile thrill of vengeance, as straightforward as nothing more than seeing Jews dead and gone.

Here Burston has become entirely unmoored.  He has used the beserk ramapage of a single troubled Palestinian and extrapolated from it an innate hatred of the entire Palestinian people for Jews.  This is without doubt racism of the most pernicious sort.  Yes, Burston and all Israelis have the right to feel anger for this attack.  But their anger should be directed at the individual and not the individual’s nation.  Once again, Burston is engaging in the politically bankrupt act of assigning collective guilt.

Let me be clear about what I am not saying: I am not saying that such acts of terror on both sides should not be condemned when they occur. That should go without saying. Terror does not bring peace closer. It only leads to more terror. That is why violence of any kind is reprehensible.  It is why I am in favor of bringing both sides before the bar of international justice for their heinous acts.

But if there is going to be violence–and of that we can be sure given that we’re talking about one of the more blood-soaked regions of the world these days–we must not fall into traps set for us by false allegiance to a set of prejudices that make the enemy out to be demons and us out to be superior to them.

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Bradley Burston’s Ten Lies Israelis and Palestinians Tell Themselves

Friday, May 5th, 2006

Bradley Burston, Haaretz columnist, is a real dragon-slayer when it comes to putting the lie to cherished notions of the anti-Palestinian camp within Israel and the anti-Israel camp within Palestine. He’s written another masterful column, The Lie of Victory, which eviscerates ten sacred principles that right and left lives by regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

10. The lie of ‘We Were Here First’

What Palestinians tell themselves: We are the descendants of the Canaanites, we were here before you. We are the heirs of Ishmael…Your claims to be the descendants of the Hebrews are specious. You are Russians, Americans, Khazars. We were here before you. We have been here forever. Nothing can make us leave.

What Israelis tell themselves: We are the direct and genuine heirs of Abraham…whose son took the name Israel. Your claims to be Canaanites are specious. Many of you came from neighboring Arab lands a few generations ago. We were here before you. We have been here forever. Nothing can make us leave.

9. The lie of ‘the State They Don’t Deserve’

Right-wing Israeli version: There is no such entity as a Palestine, and no Palestinian people, as such. They are artificial constructs, to serve the aim of ousting the Jews from their land. Moreover, terror has shown them undeserving of a state.

Militant Palestinian version: The Jews are a foreign growth in the body of Palestine. They came here from Europe and America, expelling Palestinians in the process, and it is time for both to return to their respective homes. The state of the Zionists is illegal, it is build on land that was part of the nation of Islam, and will not endure.

The truth:…The principle of self-determination and the history of national movements, to say nothing of the development of Zionism and the Palestinian statehood movement, suggest that peoples themselves are empowered to decide if they constitute a people, and if that people legitimately aspires to independence.

This lie is close to, but not the same as:

8. ‘We don’t recognize them’ [ed., or "They don't recognize us"].

But we do, of course. Hamas talks about Israel incessantly. Israel talks about Hamas in nearly every breath. Then sides have an endless array of go-betweens managing every conceivable aspect of indirect contacts.

This lie is, in turn, similar to but not the same as:

7. ‘There is no partner’

The fact is that the lack of a partner serves the needs of both Ehud Olmert and Ismail Haniyeh…Olmert has given indications of a preference for unilateralism, a position made much easier by an internationally shunned Hamas government.

At the same time, the last thing Palestinian Prime Minister Haniyeh needs is to be viewed as a collaborator with Israel. “There is no partner,” may have a different meaning when Hamas says it, but the advantage is mutual.

6. The lie of ‘National Socialism.’

Palestinian version: They are as bad as the Nazis.
Israeli version: They are as bad as the Nazis.

5. The lie of ‘the Only Language’

Both versions: Force is the only language they understand.

4. The lie of ‘will.’

Both versions: Our will is stronger than theirs, our cause more rooted, our stubbornness more pronounced, our endurance more bottomless, our tradition more timeless, our defiance more directed, our rage more justified, our presence more entrenched.

3. The lie of ‘revenge’

Arguably the hardest lie of all to resist. The lie that suggests that we alone have been wronged, that we have a duty – as well as a gut drive – to avenge that wrong, and that in so doing, we will somehow put an end to the injustice. The lie that masks the fact that the need for revenge is the engine of escalation, the breeder fuel of perpetual war.

2. The lie of ‘victim monopoly’

Both versions: WE…are the victims. We kill in self-defense, our enemy kills innocents in cold blood. The moral high ground is clearly ours. The news media are demonstrably biased toward our enemy.

1. The lie of ‘victory’

In the Middle East, there is no such thing as victory. Ask George Bush. Ask the victors of the Six Day War. There is no such thing as Mission Accomplished, clear-cut triumph, a simple win.

We want to believe in victory, because the prospect of no hope for triumph, for some meaning to all the suffering, is beyond unbearable. Nonetheless …

In the Mideast, today’s victory is tomorrow’s nightmare. In a situation pitting Western concepts of defeat and victory against the Islamist view of martyrdom, no one can win.

Next time you hear any of these “old chestnuts” dragged out in an argument, you have only to point your opponent to this post or Burston’s column to put it to rest (not that a right-winger will accept Burston’s as the last word on this).

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