Many have written congratulating me on victory we won against the Shin Bet in lifting the gag order against Anat Kamm and Uri Blau.  My haver, Jerry Haber, even wrote a blog post, Thank You, Richard, which was immensely flattering.  I appreciate the sentiment, I really do.  It’s great to feel you’ve made a contribution to help right a wrong.

But unfortunately, we only won one battle and a rather small one.  There is still a war to be fought as I outlined in my last post.  Anat Kam faces life in prison.  Uri Blau in self-exile faces a fate potentially just as bad.  IDF generals who broke the law will likely never receive any punishment.  The Israeli Supreme Court, made a laughingstock by IDF impunity, either hasn’t the power or gumption to call the military brass to heel.  The Shin Bet continues to run roughshod over the civil liberties of Israelis, especially Palestinian citizens.

Israeli democracy is under siege. The rule of law doesn’t rule.  The generals run amok.  There is an internal battle to determine whether citizens run the State or vice versa.  There is much work that remains.

Though I’ve written this before, it can’t be said enough.  I did this with the help of MANY: Israeli journalists, bloggers, human rights activists; and here in the States with the help of Israeli-American activists and American Jewish bloggers and journalists.  I would list them all but I’m afraid the list would make its way to the Shin Bet and cause problems for some of them.  So please don’t take the omission of your name as an indication that I don’t know and appreciate what you’ve done.  May we continue this partnership in the future and use it to make the unaccountable accountable for their actions.  We will be here for the next Anat Kam, and the next…Make no mistake, there will be more Anat Kams till Israel ends the Occupation and rights the grievous wrong that it symbolizes.

Please consider making a donation to support the ground-breaking investigative work of this blog.  For example, the TV news program Russia Today, wants a web interview with me for their Anat Kam story, which means I have to go out and buy a webcam.  Support the work, we’re on the side of the angels.

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• Thank you, Richard (themagneszionist.blogspot.com)

SUNY Buffalo professor emeritus Jerome Slater

SUNY Buffalo political science professor, Jerome Slater has become a welcome addition to the progressive Jewish blog world.  His new one, Jerome Slater: On the U.S. and Israel, covers specific territory for which he is a distinguished expert: human rights, the laws of war and just war theory, and the political rhetoric of the conflict.  Slater is one of the few I know who can take on a figure as formidable as Michael Walzer on his own terms and best him.

Though it is not quite as true now as it once was, I have always said that what the online world needs regarding the I-P conflict is not more savage, confrontational blogs but ones that provide specific expertise and deep knowledge of sources.  Another point I’ve made many a time is that there are too many polemicists and too few academics (right or left) blogging.  That has changed since I first made this argument and a number of excellent academic analysts have entered the fray, but it still holds true.  That’s one of the reasons why Prof. Slater’s blog is so helpful at this time.

His first few posts provide a rebuttal to Moshe Halbertal’s attack on the Goldstone Report and an overall appraisal of that Report and Israeli conduct of the Gaza war.

I urge you to add his blog to your Google Reader.  He plans to treat his blog more as a series of essays than as an everyday blog.  But when he does have something to say it will be important to read it.

Eric Fingerhut wrote a story for JTA today about the controversies swirling around J Street’s decision to cancel a performance by Josh Healy, a Jewish poet and performance artist, because of his likening of Palestinian suffering to the Holocaust.  In the course of the article, Fingerhut writes this:

Another a [sic] session, which is not officially part of the conference but to which J Street is giving hotel space during the event, will include writers who have harshly criticized Israel and questioned its right to exist as a Jewish state. It is sponsored by blogger Richard Silverstein; J Street officials said they have nothing to do with the program.

Unfortunately, Fingerhut did not call me or even e mail to verify the statements with which he described our session.  That actually would’ve been fair.  Apparently, that’s not a value Fingerhut or JTA observes when it comes to Jews like us.  If he had contacted me I would have told him that the luncheon meeting was devised by me and Jerry Haber of Magnes Zionist.  While I cannot speak for every member of our panel, I know that I make very clear that I criticize Israel POLICY and not Israel itself.  This is an important distinction which the Jewish right (within which I include Fingerhut) conveniently omits.  As for the claim about questioning Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state–yes, there are such panel members.  We have a Gazan blogger who likely doesn’t feel much sympathy for this concept.  I imagine from what I know of Phil Weiss’ views, he’s quite ambivalent on this issue.  Helena Cobban likely feels the same.

But let me tell Eric Fingerhut a thing or two about what this panel is meant (and not meant) to do: it is NOT meant to be carefully circumscribed as much of the political discourse on Israel within the organized Jewish community is.  I don’t want to talk only to bloggers who follow a party line or who make Eric Fingerhut comfortable.  I want to talk to a Gazan blogger.  And davka, I want to do it during a J Street conference to give other conference guests a chance to get outside their Jewish comfort zone and hear how the other side sees things.

Will I agree with everything Laila El-Haddad says?  Probably not.  Will she agree with everything I say?  I doubt it.  But I’d rather be sitting and talking to her and 11 other provocative I-P bloggers than to Ami Eden or Eric Fingerhut or Jeffrey Goldberg.  I’ll learn more from these panelists than I would from the latter three any day.

While I am a progressive Zionist, I don’t want to talk only to Zionists about critical issues facing Israel and the Jewish people.  I often disagree with Phil Weiss, who does not consider himself a Zionist.  I even disagree quite often with Dan Sieradski, who is a Zionist.  But I refuse to put Phil Weiss in herem because he has a different view than I do on these issues.  Phil Weiss deserves to be heard within the Jewish community as much as I or even Eric Fingerhut does.  His views on some issues may not be at the heart of the current consensus among American Jews, but many ideas which later became commonly accepted started out at the fringes of social discourse.  If we’d excommunicated Galileo and Spinoza and “disappeared” their ideas, where would intellectual thought be today?

Similarly, my friend Zvi Solow, professor at Ben Gurion University, reminds me that the political slogan shtey medinot l’shney amim (“two states for two peoples”) was first coined by Rakah, the Israeli Communist party, in the 1970s.  At the time, this concept was considered politically outlandish by most Israelis.  Now, even Bibi Netanyhau claims to believe in it.  Does that make him an Israeli Communist?  In 1972, I attended a political rally in Jerusalem advocating Israeli negotations with the PLO (which was a criminal offense).  I was stoned by right-wing demonstrators.  Isn’t it funny how what is treasonous in one era becomes commonplace in another.  Eric Fingerhut should remember that.

JTA is part of corporate American Jewry.  They would like to tell us what we can and can’t discuss within the community.  But I reject this notion.  They are not going to tell me who is kosher for this panel or what subjects are treif.  The very reason I blog is to avoid this notion like the plague.  So if you want a free-flowing debate about these ideas, come to the blogger panel and tell Eric Fingerhut and JTA that your ideas about Israel can’t be confined or controlled.

I want to urge you to attend, if possible, J Street’s national conference, Driving Change, Securing Peace, from October 26-28th in Washington, DC.  Jerry Haber of the Magnes Zionist and I will be hosting a panel of bloggers who write about the Israeli-Arab conflict.  They will include Phil Weiss, Kung Fu Jew, Max Blumenthal, Helena Cobban and Ray Hanania.  We’re also working on a live video feed from Israel that will enable us bloggers there to participate.  If anyone knows of any West Bank or Gaza bloggers whom we can include let me know (they would need a webcam and Skype, or something similar, setup).

Among the questions we’ll be discussing:

1. How have blogs impacted &/or changed the debate over the Israeli-Arab conflict in Israel, Palestine & the U.S.?
2. What can we do to have a bigger impact?
3. Iran: how can bloggers influence the debate over Iranian nukes and what can/should we do if there is a military attack?
4. Goldstone Report, human rights & BDS

For those who may have the long knives out for J Street in the right-wing pro-Israel media.  Our event is not officially sponsored by J Street and nothing said during our session should be construed as representing J Street’s views.  We are bloggers and independent actors.  We do not speak for J Street and they do not endorse our statements.  They have graciously offered us a physical space during their conference.  But that is where the relationship ends.

I expect that it will cost $1,000 for my travel and lodging expenses during the conference.  I would like to ask you, generous readers, to step up and help me defray my costs of organizing and attending this important panel.  Please make as much of a contribution as you can afford in order to make our progressive voices heard at J Street and beyond.

Many of you know that while I’ve been supportive of J Street, I haven’t shrunk from criticizing it when I thought it was valid.  I’ve even criticized aspects of the organizing of this conference including the disavowal of support from Jewish Voice for Peace and Tikkun Magazine.  Among the important voices not present at this conference will be Naomi Klein and Neve Gordon, champions of BDS.  We can imagine why they won’t be there.  And this indeed may be a reason why our panel will not be part of the official program.  But I would rather accept such status along with a guarantee to speak my mind freely on the issues that are important to progressive Jews.

Curiously, one of the conference’s keynote speakers will be Rabbi Eric Yoffie, who wrote in the Jewish Forward that J Street’s opposition to the Gaza slaughter was “shameful.”  I understand why J Street has invited Yoffie.  But I felt that it was Yoffie’s attack that was shameful, and not J Street’s position.  I should add that I’ve also praised Yoffie in the past for speaking to a Muslim conference and being attacked by the Jewish right for doing so.  I think we’ve got to call ‘em as we see ‘em.  But I do think Yoffie has some explaining to do.

All that being said, J Street has agreed to our panel and understands the independent role we play in the blogosphere and at their conference.  That is something that is important and praiseworthy.

Several prominent U.S. academics have come to Neve Gordon’s defense after he published an endorsement of the Global BDS movement in op-eds in the Guardian and L.A. Times.  As I’ve written here, Israel’s right wing media, politicians and Gordon’s Ben Gurion University have closed ranks against him.  The school’s president even suggested he should leave if he doesn’t like it there.  In the process, Gordon’s Israeli critics have displayed the inadequacy of Israeli notions of academic freedom and free speech.

This is why it is important that two distinguished academics, Stephen Walt and Jerome Slater, have risen to Gordon’s defense.  In his Foreign Policy blog, Walt weighs in with a colloquium on the meaning of academic freedom.  It is a lesson that it would do Pres. Carmi a world of good to study:

…Neither President Carmi nor her spokesperson seem to understand what academic freedom is all about. The tenure system and the principle of academic freedom exists for one main reason: to permit academics to say what they think without fear of retribution (provided, of course, that they aren’t advocating a violent crime or some equally heinous act). Reasonable people can take issue with what Gordon wrote, of course, but nothing he said is even remotely near the boundaries of acceptable discourse in a democracy that values free speech and academic freedom. I’m not quarreling with President Carmi’s right to disagree with Gordon; I’m just saying that her statements are at odds with the core principle of academic freedom, a principle that senior academic administrators are supposed to defend. She can’t fire him, of course, but for her to call his op-ed an “an abuse of freedom of speech” was clearly intended to have a chilling effect on discourse. And trying to stifle the free exchange of ideas is not what we normally expect university presidents to do.

…This incident illustrates the harmful effects that the occupation is having on Israel itself. As opinions harden and the Israeli body politic moves rightward, dissenting voices inevitably get squelched or encouraged to leave the country. Any and all criticisms of Israel’s conduct get attributed to either enduring anti-Semitism (when made by gentiles) or labeled as treason or “self-hatred” (when made by Jews). Israel’s universities, once a legitimate source of national pride, become more and more politicized, with faculty expected to stay within the “acceptable” national consensus and with donors encouraged to fund programs intended to propagandize rather than enlighten.

Jerome Slater, emeritus professor at SUNY Buffalo, has also weighed in with a letter to Pres. Carmi.  If you are an academic I urge you to disseminate this post to your colleagues and ask them to write to BGU’s president:

Dear Prof. Carmi:

I am a retired political science professor, still active in writing about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict…In the 1960s, following service as an anti-submarine warfare officer on a U.S. destroyer, I wrote to the Israeli embassy to volunteer my services on an Israeli destroyer, should that be necessary. In the spring of 1989 I was a Fulbright lecturer at Haifa University.

Those are my credentials. I write now to protest as strongly as I can your attack on Neve Gordon. That Israel is becoming an apartheid state, and if not that, then a brutalizing occupier and represser of the Palestinians is plain to anyone who has even rudimentary knowledge of the history of Israel’s behavior towards the Palestinians…Rather than becoming a light unto the nations. Israel today has fallen into a moral abyss.

It does not necessarily follow that Gordon is right in calling for a boycott…However, your attack on Gordon, your invitation for him to leave the country, will only have the effect of making Israel–even its universities, or at least BGU–even more reprehensible in the eyes of knowledgeable people. Including American Jews, like me.

I should add that this isn’t the first time that BGU has fallen down in its duty to defend academic freedom.  Prof. Yigal Arens, a professor of artificial intelligence at USC, had been invited to participate in an academic panel in his field at a conference at the University.  But when members of the Israeli intelligence services also participating in the conference threatened to withdraw unless Arens was excluded–he was.  It seems Prof. Arens views on the Occupation are considered too extreme by some in the intelligence establishment.  Perhaps they feared that he (the son of Israel’s former Likud defense minister, Moshe Arens) might reveal state secrets to Israel’s enemies.  At any rate, one can see a pattern emerge here.  Academic freedom is window dressing as far as Israel is concerned.  It is honored only in the breach and when necessary.  When the chips fall it is jettisoned as easily as a litterbug throws a butt out a car window.

A side issue to consider in light of the debate over BDS and academic boycotts is the claim by opponents that politics should not interfere with the free exchange of ideas that occurs on a campus.  But doesn’t BGU’s behavior in both instances above put the lie to this contention?  In other words, Israeli universities are just as political in their way as advocates of the academic boycott.  President Carmi would make a much stronger case against academic boycott would she and her faculty honor the principle of academic freedom themselves.

Jerry Slater, professor at SUNY Buffalo, has published an important essay, A Perfect Moral Catastrophe: Just War Philosophy and the Israeli Attack on Gaza in Tikkun Magazine, examining Israel’s moral claims in pursuing Operation Cast Lead.  Slater uses just war theory as the basis with which to explore the justifications for the war and Israel’s general claims about Hamas and Palestinian terrorism. While I am neither a political nor moral philosopher and the arguments advanced do stray into academic territory, Slater’s is a rigorous examination of the logic and moral underpinnings of Israel’s arguments. It deserves close reading by all who ponder the justice of the competing moral claims of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The political science professor has published in Tikkun for a number of years, though his views seem to be at variance with what I call the softly critical, but pro-Israel views of Michael Lerner. So I should not have been surprised by the latter’s dipsy-doodle disclaimer in his introduction to the piece on the Tikkun website. Frankly, I’ve been reading all manner of magazines for decades and I don’t think I’ve ever read a stranger editorial comment than this:

We decided that instead of presenting our perspective [on the Gaza war] once again, we would present two partisans, neither of whom reflects the compassionate tone and attempt to understand the other side that we believe is essential if we are ever to move from the “blame game” to the healing. We hoped thereby to document the extent of each side’s inability to hear the suffering of the other side. It is this inability that makes real, tikkunish healing impossible. This healing would be better achieved through the approach outlined by Cherie Brown (see the print edition)…

Lerner seems to be saying: “I know you guys are tired of my bloviating on this subject so, since you’re all so hot and bothered, I’m going to publish two pieces I really hate which represent the conflict, and discussion about it, at its worst.

Why would any editor in his right mind do this or admit to doing it publicly if he did? I believe that he’s done Jerry Slater a deep disservice in insinuating that his piece is a typical piece of partisan hackery, when it is a deeply researched and carefully argued moral tour de force.

Further, Lerner felt so squeamish about Slater’s denunciation of the Gaza war that he commissioned a pro-Israel hack from the American Jewish Committee to “rebut” the professor’s claims.  Among other things, the AJC staffer scurrilously claims that Slater believes:

“…unless Israel withdraws completely to its pre-1967 borders, Israeli civilians should be allowed to die.”

One of the worst sins an editor can commit is feeling so insecure about his editorial decisions that he feels he must cover his bases when he publishes a strongly argued moral essay by commissioning a piece that argues the precise opposite. Lerner’s problem is that he doesn’t have the courage of his convictions. You can’t have your cake and eat it too when you’re an editor. You stand for something. You don’t stand for the thing and its opposite.

I’d like Michael Lerner to explain to me why Israel killing 1,400 Gazans, including hundreds of women and children, and possibly committing war crimes requires Jerry Slater to “hear the suffering” of Israelis? In addition, it is false to insinuate that Slater does not acknowledge the moral impermissibility of targeting civilians, whether they be Israeli or Palestinian. But he does not hold the violations of both sides to be equivalent and that is what disturbs Lerner, who would rather find both sides equally at fault.

Not surprisingly, given the above disclaimer, it appears unlikely that Slater will ever publish again in Tikkun. It will be Lerner’s loss. He appears to feel squeamish at scholars who tell it like it is when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He’d rather talk about the latter in emotive terms (i.e. “compassionate,” “healing,” etc.) than rigorous moral or political ones.

Oh and Michael, “tikkunish” is not a word and shouldn’t ever be one. As an editor, you should know that reining in one’s urge to neologize is a good thing.

For the real just war wonks out there, Slater has published a longer version (pdf) of his piece replete with deeper documentation and footnoting.

A guest blog post by Jerome Slater, regular Tikkun Magazine contributor and University Research Scholar at SUNY Buffalo:

The general level of Israeli political discourse on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, most of which has always been low, seems to have reached a new nadir since the Israeli attack on Gaza. What follows is but one example, but a telling one.

Anat Lapidot-Firilla is a political scientist teaching at Hebrew University, a highly prestigious position. In Friday’s Haaretz she wrote a column, “What is Behind Turkey’s Antagonism Toward Israel,” in which she purports to explain the recent cooling of Israel’s alliance with Turkey, in particular prime minister Recep Erdogan’s anger at the Israeli attack. She offers a range of “theories,” including Turkish domestic politics, Erdogan’s clashes with the Turkish army, his alleged dreams of becoming a leader of the Muslim world, and even his personal pique.

Everything, that is, but genuine Turkish outrage at Israel’s ongoing oppression of the Palestinian people, which except for a passing reference to “shrill complaints” about the Gazan attack–revealing language in itself–is not considered as one of these many possible explanations. Indeed, Lapidot-Firilla could have simply made a neutral reference to Turkish anger at Israel as an observable fact and as one of the contributing explanations, without even having to acknowledge that the anger might be an understandable and legitimate response to Israeli behavior.

But no. Although written as if it was expert commentary by a leading scholar, this is not scholarship, but propaganda masking as neutral expert commentary. The very essence of scholarship is a commitment to truth, even uncomfortable truths. What Lapidot-Firilla has written is a travesty on an honorable profession.

Jerry Haber and I, along with Verso Books, the publishers of A Time to Speak Out, have prepared the following statement from American Jews condemning the Gaza assault and Israeli policy toward the Palestinians. We hope that you will sign it and encourage others you know to do so as well. Roane Carey of The Nation has expressed some interest in publishing it there, if we succeed in getting a significant number of signatories. We hope you will help start a viral campaign by promoting this statement as widely as you can via e mail, websites and general word of mouth.

To sign, please send your full name, title (if you wish), & affiliation (if you wish) to this address. It is only for signatures and not for regular correspondence. For that, please e mail me or this site directly.

“We Shall Not Be a Party to Their Counsel!”

As human beings, we are shocked and appalled at the mass destruction unleashed by the State of Israel against the people of Gaza in its current military operation, following years of Israeli occupation, siege, and deprivation.

As Americans, we protest the carte blanche given Israel by the US government to pursue a war of “national honor,” “restoring deterrence,” “destroying Hamas,” and “searing Israel’s military might into the consciousness of the Gazans.”

As progressives, we reject the same justifications for the carnage that we heard ad nauseam from the supporters of the Second Iraq War: the so-called “war on terror,” the “clash of civilizations,” the “need to re-establish deterrence” – all of which served to justify a misguided and unnecessary war, with disastrous consequences for America and Iraq.

But as Jews of different religious persuasions, from Orthodox to secular atheist, we are especially horrified that a state that purports to speak in our name wages a military campaign that has killed over 1,000 people, a large percentage of them civilians, children, and non-combatants, with little or no consideration for human rights or the laws of war.

While the moral and legal issue concerning Israel’s right to respond militarily in these circumstance can be debated, there is near-universal agreement that its conduct of the military operation has been unjust and even criminal – with only the usual apologists for the Jewish state disagreeing.

As Jews, we stand united with another Israel, the patriarch Jacob, who cursed his sons Simeon and Levi for massacring the people of Shechem in revenge for the rape of their sister Dinah. Like Jacob, “we shall not be a party to the counsel of zealots. We shall not be counted in their assembly. (See Genesis 34. 49: 5-7).

As Jews, we stand united with the Jewish sages who rejected the zealotry of the Jewish “terrorists” at Masada, those who masked ethnic tribalism in the cloak of “self-defense” and “national honor.”

As Jews, we listen not only when the sage Hillel says, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” but also when he says, “If I am only for myself, what am I?” Hillel’s closing words also ring true in this hour of decision when a ceasefire is demanded of both sides: “If not now, when?”

Finally, as American Jewish progressives, and as human beings, we condemn Hamas and Israel for violating the human rights of civilians on both sides, although we do not necessarily declare these violations to be morally or legally equivalent. We affirm the rights of both Israeli and the Palestinian peoples to self-determination and self-defense, as we affirm the rights of both Israelis and Palestinians to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.