Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

Yesterday, I wrote a post noting that Haaretz reported that the New York UJA-Federation withdrew its sponsorship for the Other Israel Film Festival. It is devoted to highlighting the Israeli Arab experience through film. When I read the Federation’s quoted reasons for withdrawing they ran hollow to me. Now I know it’s all bunkum.

Here’s what the Federation said:

A UJA-Federation spokesperson denied that the reason for the withdrawal of support was political or connected in any way with the festival’s content, citing a failure to receive approval through appropriate channels within the organization.

“A request was made to have UJA-Federation lend its name to help generate interest in the event. The request was granted although it did not go through the proper approval process,” a statement from the organization said.

This of course is gobbledy gook. How can the request have been granted while at the same time it didn’t go through the proper approval process? Are they saying that the employee who approved the sponsorship didn’t have the right to have done so? Or are they saying that whoever approved the sponsorship didn’t realize how heavily the Fed’s right-wing pro-Israel megadonors would come down on Federation for the decision?

The following speaks volumes on that score:

…Sources, however, cite outside pressures from right-wing elements in the Jewish community and from potential donors who objected to an Israeli festival that was about the country’s Arab citizens only.

I guess we’re going to have to do some digging to find out who those “right-wing elements” and “potential donors” were. It’s also laughable to cite the fact that the Festival only dealt with Israeli Arabs as a reason to reject sponsorship. This smacks of racism. If UJA-Federation supports the State of Israel then it must perforce support all citizens of Israel including Israeli Arabs. If it does support Israel and all its citizens then there can be no problem with a film festival honoring Israeli Arabs. If, however, UJA Federation supports only the Jewish citizens of the State of Israel, then it should say so.

What follows are other bogus excuses mounted by Federation to obfuscate the reasons it withdrew:

Meretz USA, a civil rights and peace organization that is “fully independent of the Israeli political party Meretz-Yahad,” according to its Web site, was also among the initial list of sponsors.

UJA-Federation officials said the organization’s inclusion in the original promotional materials was the result of a simple mistake.

“Once the proper review process took place, we recognized that there were two issues that would prohibit us from lending our name in support of this event.

“First, we were listed as a sponsor yet no additive funds were provided directly in support of the festival.

Are they claiming that UJA-Federation never sponsors events unless it has donated funds to support the event? If so, I find that a highly unusual guideline and would wonder whether it’s actually true. And I say this as someone who both worked at UJA-Federation (in Westchester) and spent many years as a non-profit fundraiser.

“Secondly, an Israeli political party was also listed as a sponsor in the initial brochure.

“In order to maintain UJA-Federation’s capacity to mobilize the broadest expression of the New York Jewish community we make every effort to avoid association with Israeli or American political parties.

“Our role is to mobilize the Jewish community to stand with the people of Israel and we preserve this capacity by strictly avoiding being associated with any Israeli political parties.”

This again is entirely bogus. Meretz USA, as noted at the Other Israel website is NOT an Israeli political party. It doesn’t even directly or financially support the real Israeli political party Meretz-Yachad. In fact, the former is prohibited from doing so as a 501 c3 registered non-profit organization (login required). As such, it cannot engage in politics. It can only engage in educational programs.

The Fed spokesperson’s weaselly explanation also begs the question: has the Federation ever sponsored events by similar organizations like American Friends of Peace Now, Likud USA, American Friends of Likud, etc.? I’d be willing to bet it has. If it has, then the explanation goes out the window and we’re returned to what is undoubtedly the real explanation: the Fed’s right-wing pro-Israel leadership put the kibosh on Festival sponsorship. Now, what I’d like to do is expose their real reasons.

There are 2 million Jews in New York. Only 70,000 of them give to UJA-Federation (around 3.5%). Of those 70,000, roughly 2% give 90% of the overall funds. That means that around 1,400 New York Jews hold the purse-strings for the entire local Jewish community. Those megadonors are overwhelmingly right-wing and pro-Israel. They don’t support a Palestinian state, they don’t support withdrawal from West Bank settlements, they do support war against Iran, they do support the Iraq war, they are heavily Republican and Likud.

In much of this they diverge from the majority of the Jewish population. Most New York Jews would have no problem with UJA-Federation endorsing the Other Israel Festival. In fact, the vast majority of the thousands who attend the Festival will be Jewish. The problem with our current Jewish communal structure and leadership is that they don’t represent the rest of us. They represent their own narrow political views and economic self-interest. And that’s a shande.

tags meretz-usa, new-york-uja-federation-drops-other-israel-film-festiva, pro-israel

In order to maximize exposure of this blog in the Jewish blogosphere, I’ve registered with a number of Jewish blog aggregators including Jblogosphere.com, JewishBlogging and Jrants. Each of them has been gracious enough to include my feed in their directory of Jewish blogs. I don’t get a huge amount of traffic from them but I get enough to find them a useful tool to disseminate my work and I appreciate the service they provide.

I also registered at a fourth aggregator, JBlogCentral, which is sponsored by IsraelForum. Oddly enough, I noted that after submitting my blog and seeing my posts display there they stopped appearing. So I submitted again and they resumed displaying on the site. And then they stopped again. When I searched the site for my posts using Google I could find them using Cache, but I got an error using the regular Google site link saying the page was no longer available.

When you’ve dealt with Jewish right-wingers as long as I have you can smell a rat a mile off and I sure smelled one. I did some research and discovered that IsraelForum is one of those right-wing pro-Israel sites. It tried to host a Jewish blogging award this year and got into such controversy with the original founder of the award that he withdrew approval for them to use the original name of the competition.

So I had a pretty good suspicion that I’d been blackballed for not being sufficiently “pro-Israel” enough for inclusion in the blog directory (the site does note in several places that it is “pro-Israel” by which they really mean they support a hard-right political agenda). Just for the hell of it, I thought I’d check the site rules to see which one I’d “violated.” Here’s all they say on the matter:

How do we decide which blogs to include in our service?
We have no particular policy, other than trying to avoid blogs that promote hate, illegal activities, adult content, etc. But we cannot guarantee that we will be 100% successful at our attempts to avoid such content. We rely on our readers to report content that is clearly inappropriate.

So either I “promote hate, illegal activities or adult content.” We can safely ditch the last item. I think we can safely ditch the second one as well. But “promoting hate”…not that’s an interesting one. Does a progressive Zionist blogger “promote hate” of Israel? Hmmm. Hard to wrap my mind around that one. And just what is it about my blog that merits exclusion from a site which purports in its name “JBlog Central” to be a central repository of Jewish blogging. Maybe they should change their name to “JBlog Not-So-Central?”

So what does that tell you about the ideological orientation of JBlogCentral and Israel Forum? I’ve written to the site each time I discovered my exclusion including most recently yesterday. Never got a response the first time. Let’s see what they have to say if anything this time.

And just in case they rewrite their rules to reflect my criticism, we’ll keep a copy of the cached page so we can remind them of the arbitrariness of their own rules.

tags jblog-central, jewish-blogging, jrants, pro-israel, progressive-zionist

M.J. Rosenberg just gave me a head’s up about Yale’s withdrawal of a faculty appointment to Juan Cole after a concerted campaign against him from Yale Jewish donors and other Jewish neocons. Both Jewish Week and The Nation report that Cole had been approved by several faculty committees before pro-Israel forces managed to muster a a concerted effort to stop him. Philip Weiss writing in The Nation says:

The controversy erupted this spring after two campus periodicals reported that Cole was under consideration by Yale for a joint appointment in sociology and history. In an article in the Yale Herald, Campus Watch, a pro-Israel group that monitors scholars’ statements about the Middle East, was quoted as saying that Cole lacked a “penetrating mind,” and suggesting that Yale was “in danger of sacrificing academic credibility in exchange for the attention” Cole would generate. Alex Joffe, then the director of Campus Watch, told me Cole “has a conspiratorial bent…he tends to see the Mossad and the Likud under his bed.” For its part, the Yale Daily News twice featured attacks on Cole by former Bush Administration aide Michael Rubin, a Yale PhD associated with Campus Watch and the American Enterprise Institute. In an op-ed Rubin wrote, “Early in his career, Cole did serious academic work on the 19th century Middle East…. He has since abandoned scholarship in favor of blog commentary.”

Israel’s treatment of Palestinians has always been important in Cole’s reading of the Middle East. Naturally, Israel is central to neocons, too. Michael Rubin accused Cole of missing the good news from Iraq and of being anti-Semitic. That charge was soon taken up in the Wall Street Journal and in the New York Sun. “Why would Yale ever want to hire a professor best known for disparaging the participation of prominent American Jews in government?” wrote two Sun co-authors. One of them, according to Scott Johnson, was a student of Alan Dershowitz’s at Harvard [ed. Mitchell Webber, a Yale graduate who is now a law student and a research assistant for Alan Dershowitz at Harvard Law School,]. The other is Johnson’s daughter, Eliana, then a Yale senior. After that article, Johnson, a Minneapolis lawyer and Dartmouth grad, wrote up the case on his blog, which describes itself as a friend of Israel, and attacked Cole as a “moonbat.”

Alex Joffe denies that a network went after Cole. “There wasn’t any organized opposition. It was a question of people becoming aware of it somehow and each getting in his two cents.” Asked about pot-stirrers, Johnson says, “I think if you look anywhere but Yale, you’d be making a mistake.”

Well, if this isn’t a network, neither are the professionals who exchange cards at New York parties. Joel Mowbray, a Washington Times columnist who has assailed the consideration of Cole, sent a letter to a dozen Yale donors, many of them Jewish, warning of Cole’s possible appointment. According to the Jewish Week, “Several faculty members said they had heard that at least four major Jewish donors…have contacted officials at the university urging that Cole’s appointment be denied.” Still, Johnson’s point is well taken. It must have been Yale insiders who got the news out to Cole’s enemies, as Cole’s appointment passed one after another of several institutional hurdles.

Jewish Week adds on this score:

Several faculty members said they had heard that at least four major Jewish donors, whose identity the faculty members did not know, have contacted officials at the university urging that Cole’s appointment be denied.

And while most faculty members contacted for this piece agree that it is highly improbable that outside pressure played a part in the tenure committee’s decision, the letters and the subsequent calls suggest a campaign to discredit Cole.

So here you have the hardline pro-Israel Campus Watch, Scott Johnson, author of Powerline one of the most widely read right-wing blogs, a student of Alan Dershowitz and daughter of a Scott Johnson writing in the New York Sun, Joel Mowbray of the Washington Times, and Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute orchestrating a right-wing pro-Israel campaign to deny Cole the job. And this is only what is publicly known because these people were the ones willing to use their names in voicing their opposition. Who knows whether groups like Charles Jacob’s DAVID Project or even Aipac were involved more surreptitiously. And one shouldn’t forget that while the groups can maintain plausible deniability regarding their own involvement that wouldn’t prevent such a behind the scenes effort by individuals affiliated with those groups.

To anyone idiotic enough to deny or besmirch Cole’s stellar academic credentials, Weiss reminds you of them:

Academics…say that Yale was drawn to Cole by top-rank scholarly achievement. He is president of the Middle East Studies Association, speaks Arabic and Persian, and has published several books on Egyptian and Shiite history. “We were impressed with Cole’s scholarly work, and a wide set of letters showed that he is also highly regarded by other scholars in the field,” says political science professor Frances Rosenbluth, a member of the Yale search committee that chose Cole. Zachary Lockman, an NYU Middle Eastern studies professor, says, “It’s fair to say he is probably among the leading historians of the modern Middle East in this country.” Joshua Landis, a professor at University of Oklahoma, describes Cole as “top notch.”

“He was the wunderkind of Middle East Studies in the 1980s and 1990s,” Landis says. “He can be strident on his blog, which is one reason it is the premier Middle East blog…. [But] Juan Cole has done something that no other Middle East academic has done since Bernard Lewis, who is 90 years old: He has become a household word. He has educated a nation. For the last thirty years every academic search for a professor of Middle East history at an Ivy League university has elicited the same complaint: ‘There are no longer any Bernard Lewises. Where do you find someone really big with expertise on many subjects who is at home in both the ivory tower and inside the Beltway?’ Today, Juan Cole is that academic.”

Of course, Cole is on the left, while Lewis is a neoconservative. And it is hard to separate Cole’s scholarly reputation from his Internet fame. Cole started his blog, Informed Comment, a few months after September 11. He quickly became the leading left blogger on terrorism and the Middle East, delivering every day, often by translating from Arabic newspapers.

And to those critics who claim Cole’s publications have been sidetracked by his blogging take a close look at his publication list.

The pro-Israel crowd has attacked the Columbia Middle East Studies program, attempted to deny Rashid Khalidi an appointment to Princeton. And now they’ve sent Juan Cole packing back to the University of Michigan. David Horowitz has tarred Joel Beinin of Stanford as a “campus supporter of terror.” Stephen Walt, co-author of The Israel Lobby, who just stepped down from his Harvard deanship accepts that his hopes for academic advancement are finished after crossing Aipac. Cole himself has resigned himself to the same fate:

“I knew when I began to speak out [at his blog, Informed Consent] that I wasn’t going to be hired. I knew my academic career was over. I knew that I can be in this place, be a professor of Middle Eastern studies at the University of Michigan for the rest of my life. But I would never be a dean. I would never be a provost. I would never be in the Ivy League. I’m not surprised. I’m not upset. Actually, the bizarre thing is that Juan Cole was considered by Yale in the first place.”

And Cole added this telling addendum in a Jewish Week interview:

Cole, while refusing to comment on the tenure committee’s vote, told The Jewish Week he believes that “the concerted press campaign by neoconservatives against me, which was a form of lobbying the higher administration, was inappropriate and a threat to academic integrity.

“The articles published in the Yale Standard, the New York Sun, the Wall Street Journal, Slate, and the Washington Times, as part of what was clearly an orchestrated campaign, contained made-up quotes, inaccuracies, and false charges,” he said. “The idea that I am any sort of anti-Jewish racist because I think Israel would be better off without the occupied territories is bizarre, but I fear that a falsehood repeated often enough and in high enough places may begin to lose its air of absurdity.”

But the fact of the matter is that nothing that Cole says about this subject has not already been said two or three times over by scores of Israeli commentators in newspapers like Haaretz, Maariv and Yediot Achronot. The fact of the matter is that the Aipac crowd can’t muzzle dissent in Israel, but sure can (try to) do so here in the States and has rather remarkable record of success on that score.

While Jewish Week’s coverge of the story generally echoed Weiss’ in The Nation, I found this passage for the former publication slightly off kilter:

The reasons behind the rejection remain unknown; several calls to a Yale spokeswoman went unreturned.

But university insiders say that the uncharacteristic rebuff may have been influenced by several factors, central among them the political commentary Cole writes on his blog, “Informed Comment.”

Often favoring a pugilistic tone and consistently criticizing Israel’s policies in the West Bank, Cole has attracted a visibility that has made him a favorite target of several conservative commentators.

I’d maintain that “the reasons behind the rejection” are quite known and recounted clearly above and even in the Jewish Week article itself. Cole was certainly rejected for his views of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

It’s a goddamn shame. There’s a lesson to be learned here. If you’re a serious, ambitious academic you better watch your step. If you have views that run counter to Aipac’s you’ll have to learn to censor yourself unless you’re willing to draw the wrath of the Dershowitzes, American Enterprise Institutes and Aipacs of this world. As an NYU professor notes–whatever happened to the free exchange of ideas, academic freedom, etc.?

[Zachary] Lockman…finds the process fearful: “Since September 11 there has been a concerted effort by a small but well-funded group of people outside academia to monitor very carefully what all of us are saying, ready to jump on any sign of deviation from what they see as acceptable opinion. It’s an attack on academic freedom, and it’s not very healthy for our society.”

The pro-Israel crowd strikes again. And freewheeling academic discourse is the victim. We’re all the poorer for it.

The Yale faculty should be ashamed of what a group of its members did in this case. How could they allow non-academics in some cases, and non-Yale faculty in others set the tone for what should’ve been a purely intra-faculty decision? Furthermore, their actions have reinforced a hostility between academia and the blog world since academics who blog are increasingly seeing their blogging included in hiring, tenure review and promotion considerations, and often not in a favorable sense. If you teache and make a false step in your blog you’ll be made to pay. And in some cases, merely writing a blog counts against you since more hidebound academics look down their nose at blogs as mere dabbling since it is devoid of conventional oversight like peer review, formal sourcing, and the “rules of evidence” are considerably looser.

As someone who blogs about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I’ve commended the very few faculty who blog about this specific field (there are only two or three). I once asked Joel Migdal a specialist on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the University of Washington if he knew of professors in his field who blogged and whether he’d ever considered doing so. Joel looked at me a little like I’d come from outer space. The thought and the concept clearly had hardly entered his mind. I can’t say his reaction surprised me based on what I already knew. But now I can’t even say I blame (not the right word) him for his response. How can any faculty member with a progressive perspective on this conflict considering blogging? Unless you blog with a wholly pro-Israel agenda (by which I mean ‘rightist’) you’re likely to be made to pay.

The university community is not the only one impoverished by decisions like this one. The blog world itself is both diminished and assaulted when our blog peers are assaulted within their professional fields for the perfectly reasonable, though controversial things they may write. For those of us who wish to see the influence of blogs on society and intellectual life increase, we should be aghast at what happened to Juan Cole. And we should all be ashamed of what Scott Johnson at Powerline, who after all must have impeccable academic credentials in this field to have assaulted the qualifications of Cole, has done to a major intellectual figure in the field of Mideast studies.

Billmon has a terrific and bilious (in a good way) post that excoriates Yale for its treatment of Cole. It’s quite a tour de force of fabulous invective. Inside Higher Ed also covers this story.

tags academic-freedom, aipac, alan-dershowitz, american-enterprise-institute, informed-comment, jewish-week, M.J.-Rosenberg, michael-rubin, neoconservatives, philip-weiss, pro-israel, the-nation-magazine, yale, yale-withdraws-juan-cole-faculty-appointment

The Bush Administration, which at one time claimed it was actually seeking a way of providing assistance to Palestinians in dire economic straits, seems to have changed its tune. According to the NY Times, a European plan to channel aid through the World Bank has run afoul of the U.S. Treasury Department’s sanctions against banks which do business with Hamas. Apparently, no bank is willing to run the risk of being declared an aider and abettor of terrorism and face the subsequent legal and business sanctions:

The Europeans have proposed that the World Bank set up a “mechanism” through which donations from Europe and the Arab world can get to the Palestinians.

But American and European officials say that might violate American sanctions laws, which could lead to penalties against any bank that allows a transfer of money to employees in a Hamas government, even if the transaction is overseen by the World Bank.

“This is a nasty situation,” said a European diplomat, who was not authorized to speak publicly on the issue. “No bank wants to run afoul of American banking laws and get shut down by the Treasury Department.”

The United States Treasury has barred almost all financial dealings with the Palestinian Authority in response to Hamas’s rise to power, under a federal law that makes it a crime to provide funds to terrorist groups…

Faced with criticism from Arab countries, the United States joined with Russia, Europe and the United Nations in early May on a plan to speed aid to the Palestinians, bypassing the Hamas government.

But as negotiations on the plan proceeded, a rift opened between the Bush administration and its allies in the Middle East negotiating process. The World Bank is now caught in the middle, various officials said.

The bank president, Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary in President Bush’s first term, has told European negotiators that he wants to help the Palestinians but that the bank has not received adequate guidance from the United States and the Europeans about where the money is to go.

“The World Bank would like to facilitate the delivery of assistance that a number of donors are eager to provide, so that the Palestinian people do not suffer from a lack of social services, particularly health and education,” Mr. Wolfowitz said Wednesday.

I find the italicized phrase laughable. Paul Wolfowitz wants to help the Palestinians about as much as Aipac does. In fact, he’s a certified member of the pro-Israel lobby in Washington (”Wolfowitz is considered by many political analysts a neoconservative…known for his passionate pro-Israel advocacy.” –Wikipedia). I don’t believe for a second what he says here. He’s merely using the issue of “lack of guidance” as a convenient excuse for inaction.

This is closer to what Wolfowitz actually believes:

European officials charge that there is a real humanitarian crisis because of the aid cutoff, and some say the Bush administration may actually be seeking to block funds in order to promote chaos and eventually bring down the Hamas government. Bush administration officials strongly deny the accusation.

“There is no humanitarian crisis in the Palestinian territories,” the senior administration official said. “There is a political and security crisis, and the Hamas government has to make some responsible decisions about how to handle it.” The best way, he said, would be for Hamas to reject violence and recognize Israel.

This statement alone illustrates perfectly why the Bush Administration will never and can never play a constructive role in bringing the parties together for a peace negotiation. It is hopelessly compromised by such lunatic, divorced-from-reality views which have, as their sole basis, a deep, pro-Israel bias.

The “senior administration official” quoted above clearly subscribes to the Dov Weisglass approach to the current Palestinian crisis (“It’s like a meeting with a dietitian. We need to make the Palestinians lose weight, but not to starve to death.”). Utterly cynical and diabolical. While I have no control over Dov Weisglass’ twisted views and utterances, I am utterly disgusted that my own government is endorsing them lock stock and stinking barrel.

Every academic and humanitarian study about the current situation in the Territories notes the dire nature of the need; the hunger; the impending health crisis; the descent into abject poverty. Yet our blinkered officials can see “no humanitarian crisis.” Makes you sick to your stomach and ashamed to say you’re an American.

tags new-york-times, palestinian-humanitarian-crisis, paul-wolfowitz, pro-israel, u.s.-policy-toward-palestinians, world-bank

Rachel Shabi has done progressives interested in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict a great service with her Salon.com article, Come, see Palestine!. The title misconstrues the actual contents of the piece which ranges over wide territory comprehensively covering both the Taglit-Birthright program and the Birthright Unplugged program.

But first let’s go back to the beginning:

Having identified Diaspora Jews as being hopelessly lapsed and in danger of intermarrying into extinction, two New Yorkers, Michael Steinhardt and Charles Bronfman, founded Taglit-birthright israel. Billionaire Bronfman inherited the Canadian Seagram’s liquor empire while Steinhardt made a small fortune as a Wall Street wizard. The latter, a self-proclaimed atheist, is nonetheless worried that Judaism is in danger of becoming obsolete.

What Shabi neglects to mention is that Steinhardt is an ardent supporter of George Bush and the Israeli right. A staff member of a Jewish organization wrote me today:

A…kid I know went in summer of ‘04 and Steinhardt greeted the group when it returned to JFK. He told the kids that now that they care about Israel, they need to put that care into practice by working to re-elect GW Bush!

So essentially, what Steinhardt and Bronfman had in mind was creating the Aipac, Jewish Federation donors of the future. Young Jewish automatons programmed by their Taglit tour leaders to turn them into adamantly pro-Israel supporters of a peculiar Israel-can-do-no-wrong Zionism:

What worries critics, however, is not the “I love being Jewish” outcome of a trip to Israel but the underpinning political goals of Taglit. Susan, a 27-year-old Seattle student, took the Taglit tour last year. She was struck, she says, by…the prevalence of anti-Palestinian comments during her trip, organized through the University of Washington (campuses often coordinate birthright trips). She didn’t like the tour leader expressing his [pro-Israel] view as universal truth while leaving out facts that supported the Palestinian side.

The Taglit tour might encourage tears at the Wailing Wall, but the 8-meter-high, concrete separation wall snaking through the West Bank is rarely mentioned. When it is, says Susan, the context is dismissive. “At one point I saw what looked like the [separation] wall in the distance and asked our guide about it,” she says. “The guide gave a very terse response about how, yes, that was the wall and, see everyone, the Palestinians are trying to drive ‘us’ from ‘our land’ and so we must keep ‘them’ out.” Taglit trips do not go beyond the Green Line marking the internationally recognized border between Israel and Palestine. According to one former birthrighter, the Green Line was not even marked on the map he was given on the tour.

The Taglit trip, one former participant says, does a good job of “tugging at one’s Jewish heartstrings,” and then seeks to equate being Jewish with the need for Israel to “protect us and all the Jews.” According to Susan, her attempts to redress the pro-Israel slant were not welcome. Group discussions were zealously facilitated and stuck to a narrow script that excluded any conversations about how participants felt about Israeli policy.

Aaron took the trip in December 2004 when he was 22; he’s now back in Canada where he lives and works in community radio. He believes Taglit aims to encourage pro-Israel activism overseas. His trip leaders, he says, “kept emphasizing how much we could do to help on campus at universities.” He adds: “This point was driven a lot: that Israel is suffering from constant insecurity and a state of war against them, and the way we can prevent that is to try and promote Israel’s good image back home.”

Taglit of course denies the charges of being overly propagandistic:

Taglit bats off any accusations of having a political agenda. “I don’t think it’s political for Jews to support Israel,” says Mark. “It should be an integral part of every Jew’s identity.” [Gidi] Mark [of Tagli] draws a distinction between supporting Israel and supporting Israel’s policies. He adds that Taglit trips incorporate organizers and speakers from a variety of backgrounds and viewpoints. As to why Taglit trips don’t go to the West Bank, he first cites the security issue and then says, “We feel that people first of all should feel strong about their own identity and then know about other ethnic groups.”

That’s of course the answer one would expect from a somewhat sophisticated marketer for a pro-Israel project that needed to pretend to project an aura of non-partisanship. In fact, it’s the kind of smarminess we’ve all grown accustomed to from Aipac. But let’s ask a few questions about Taglit and its program. First, there’s this phrase: “incorporate organizers and speakers from a variety of backgrounds and viewpoints:. Very nice. But who precisely does it invite? At Jewschool, there’s a comment thread discussing a Taglit tour event which featured Bibi Netanyahu and Natan Sharansky as speakers. That certainly would be incorporating speakers from a variety of backgrounds and viewpoints. Netanyahu is a far-right leader of the Likud from an American-Israeli background and Sharansky is a farther-right Israeli pol of Russian background. That satisfies me. No propaganda here.

Just perusing the Taglit website, I see a page devoted to “The Disputed Territories.” Not the commonly accepted “Occupied Territories” because Taglit can’t bear to admit there is an Occupation and that the Territories in question are occupied. Too much sticky political explanation necessary to call them what the rest of the world does.

I also find somewhat pernicious Taglit’s deliberate confusing of the separation between Judaism and Zionism. This quotation is from Beyond Crisis Judaism, an article featured at the group’s website:

…We need a positive, relevant Zionist vision using Jewish nationalism and Israel to solve modern personal problems as well as “the Jewish problem.”

In truth, for Taglit Israel IS Judaism. It is what I call the fetishization of Jewish identity by turning Israel into THE core value of Judaism. While I am both a proud Jew and (progressive) Zionist, I recognize the distinction between the two. If you don’t, then you’re doing nothing more than replacing Judaism with Israel as your new religion. It is a convenient substitute for those like Taglit which seek magic bullets in combating Jewish assimilation. But nothing trumps actual study of Judaism in order to bring young people closer to it. By that I mean the study of Hebrew and the sacred texts which form the core of our identity. The Kotel, a mandatory part of the emotion-cranking Taglit experience, is not the core of Jewish experience. It is not a shortcut to, or magic bullet for feeling Jewish. It is but one of many aspects of our history.

Thankfully, there are other variants of Zionism–ones that call for real independent thinking on the subject. Ones that apprehend more than just the narrow interests of the Israeli right. Ones that posit an Israel living at peace with a neighboring Palestinian state and in which peace comes not from bullying or intimidation, but through negotiation and compromise.

Shabi also covers an interesting counter-tour sponsored by Birthright Unplugged which might be called the Jewish pro-Palestinian mirror of Birthright:

If Taglit trips gloss over the Palestinian experience, Unplugged trips live it. Traveling on Palestinian transport and staying in Palestinian homes, participants experience for themselves the difficulties of life under occupation…

Unplugged goes to Bethlehem and nearby Deheishe refugee camp, Hebron, Ramallah, the northern region of Salfit, and finally a destroyed Palestinian village on the Israel side of the Green Line. (The trips cost $350 excluding travel to Israel.) “Mostly, it just takes you to places and you see things with your own eyes, things that are self-evident and require no explanation whatsoever,” says one former Unplugged participant. It’s enough, he adds, just to see the effect of the separation wall and countless checkpoints on daily Palestinian life.

Taglit is also dealing with the relatively recent phenomenon of progressive Jews who take advantage of the free trip offered by Taglit to join a Birthright Unplugged tour:

To Taglit leaders, the birthright trips have had some unwanted consequences. Some participants have used the trips to either “birthleft” or “desert,” as they put it. Trippers ranging from a handful to hundreds, depending on whom you ask, have crossed the Green Line into the Occupied Territories after the Israel trip, to work with the International Solidarity Movement.

In fact, the organization recently expelled a Taglit participant who announced her intention of joining a Birthright Unplugged tour. This seems odd to me. If someone signs up for your tour and completes it what do you care what they do afterward? Unless that is, there is an ideological component to your tour and someone who attends a counter-Birthright program is somehow violating the ideological vision of Taglit. That couldn’t be what the expulsion is about now could it?

“It is taking advantage of the Jewish money that sends people to Israel, exploiting this money to promote an agenda which is not the agenda of the people who funded Taglit,” says [Gidi] Mark [of Taglit]. Potential candidates who are discovered to have a “hidden agenda” are not allowed onto the trips.

Ah, so now we’re getting closer to the real truth. Taglit does indeed have an “agenda” or political viewpoint and counter-Taglit runs, pardon the pun, counter to it. But why should it? The organization admits it deliberately refuses to deal directly with the issue of the Palestinians except when its tour leaders resort to the type of propaganda talking points mentioned above. Why do they blame Birthright Unplugged for taking up the slack? If Taglit doesn’t like what the other group is doing why doesn’t it present its own version of the facts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Why doesn’t it visit both Israeli settlements AND Palestinian villages? Why doesn’t it introduce participants to both Natan Sharansky and Yaser Abed Rabbo? No doubt, they’ll argue that this isn’t the goal of the trip which is to introduce young people solely to Israel. But any trip to Israel that ignores the Palestinians ignores the 800 lb. gorilla in the room. Not to mention that by ignoring the Palestinian dimension they give Counter-Birthright a perfect opportunity to exploit their omission.

I want to make clear that while I’m in favor of young Jews meeting both Israelis and Palestinians on their trips to the region, I’m not necessarily in favor of the full political agenda represented by Birthright Unplugged. ISM, which it supports, is not my cup of tea. Anti-Zionism is also not my cup of tea. I’m not in favor of the propaganda represented by Taglit nor am I in favor of the mirror-image propaganda represented by Birthright Unplugged. I’d want tour particpants to learn about Israel AND Palestine.

Jewschool features an interview with the two founders of Birthright Unplugged in which they discuss their mission and how it relates to Jewish identity.

In fact, I’d love to see a smart Jewish philanthropist endow a progressive Israel tour program for young Jews that presents this conflict in a nuanced, balanced way. If they gave a nice chunk of change to the New Israel Fund, American Friends of Peace Now, the Israeli Policy Forum or Brit Tzedek to undertake such a project they’d be doing American Jewry a great mitzvah.

tags counter-birthright, israel-youth-tour, pro-israel, rachel-shabi, salon.com, taglit-birthright

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