The first thing i would say in response is that to be anti-zionist and anti-israel does not equate to being anti-semitic. I am completely against the state of Israel because it is a racist state based on the enitrely racist law of "right of return".
I believe in a democratic secular state of Palestine for both jews, cristians and muslims and indeed any other faith.
I consider the resistance of the Palestinian people a hugely important factor in the creation of a secular state of palestine. The Palestinian people have the right to resist the Israeli occupation, however i belive that the tactic of suicide bombings sets the struggle backrather than taking it forward. Not to mention the fact the it is cruel and inhumane however this inhumanity cannot be compared with the brutality of the Israeli occupation that has take countless more inncoent lives.
The Palestinians should arm themselves to fight back against the Israeli army but avoid innocent civilian casualites wherever possible because the support of the Jews in israel will be hugely important in any genuine and progressive settlement in palestine.

Thank you for tour time

Luke

I am not Jewish, and despise Sharon as much as anyone. But I agree with you that "we" (by which I mean the crowd in general) do need to be more careful not to use the Star of David (which represents the Jewish people and religion) to represent the State of Israel. To do so is to support the zionist lie that Israel= the Jewish people.

What we want is both a Free Palestine and a Free Israel living together in peace

There we go again, zionists playing the old "anti-semitic" card to scare off anyone who dares to speak out for justice for the Palestinians...First of all, Arabs are semites, secondly, NO, there was no anti-jewish slogans/pictures on The march...Sharon is an evil war criminal and is the closest thing to being the devil incarnate and if you regard him as your leader then...who are you loyal too..."Israel" or Britain?

The loudest applause given was to the Jewish Rabbis who went on the platform and stood silently in solidarity with the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have died due to the creation of the terrorist state called "israel".

The only anti-semites are the Zionists themselves.

Free Palestine.

osi says ÒBut also is peace for Israel an important goal. My impression was, that the perspective on this conflict at the demonstration was very one-sighted. The inhuman attacs of palastinian self-murders of cililians in Israel in restaurants, buses and shops were not seen as criminal acts...Ó

Unfortunately osi does not see the much wider terrorism and killing of Palestinians civilians as a problem, and he has the balls to call the demonstration one-sided.

On September 29, HaÕaretz publishes some of the findings of a new Amnesty International report. While Israeli terrorism has killed 250 Palestinian children since the start of the current intifada, the suicide bombers have only killed 50 Israeli children. The IDF is clearly a leading terrorist organization. The report says:

ÒMore than 250 Palestinian and 72 Israeli children have been killed in Israel and the territories in the past 23 months of fighting, according to Killing the Future: Children in the Line of Fire, a new report due out Monday by Amnesty International detailing how children on both sides have been targeted "in an unprecedented manner" since the beginning of the intifada.

The report says that "Children are increasingly bearing the brunt of the conflict. Both the IDF and Palestinian armed groups show an utter disregard for the lives of children and other civilians," says the report. "Respect for human life must be restored. Only a new mindset among Israelis and Palestinians can prevent the killing of more children."

The report charges that the "impunity enjoyed by members of the IDF and of Palestinian groups responsible for killing children has no doubt helped create a situation where the right to life of children and civilians on the other side has little or no value."

According to the report, the majority of children were killed in the territories "when the IDF responded to demonstrations and stone throwing incidents with unlawful and excessive use of lethal force." Eighty Palestinian children were killed in the first three months of the intifada, the report states. "The large number of children killed and injured and the circumstances in which they were killed indicates that little or no care was taken by the IDF to avoid causing harm to children."

It is absurd for American taxpayer to continue the funding of the Sharon terrorism and the killing of so many Palestinian children

Anti-war protestors and peace-lovers are racist, hate-filled, antisemitic zealots, because warmongers are killing out of love and kindness for the people of Afghanistan, Chechnya, Sudan, Bosnia, Iraq and Palestine. Don't mock Sharon, just for being Jewish, he is the sweet, innocent victim of terror. You don't want to upset the New Zionist Order, do you?

I'd like to response to some comments:

"There we go again, zionists playing the old "anti-semitic" card to scare off anyone who dares to speak out for justice for the Palestinians..."
I am not a zioniost, and I have stressed the point that I also think, that Sharon is a criminal, that the Israel army cause suffering and is responsible for the murder of innocent people. It is my opinion, that Israel should abandon its settlements in the Westbank and make compensations to the Palastinians. But, what you present here, is the classical example, for a one-sighted view.


"First of all, Arabs are semites,"

This is crap argument, because the "normal" connoation of anti-semitism is anti-jewishness. And you now how I meant it.



"secondly, NO, there was no anti-jewish slogans/pictures on The march...Sharon is an evil war criminal and is the closest thing to being the devil incarnate"

I dont know, wheter the devil, an religious symbol is a good one for a conflict, with real interest and for people who desire peace.



"and if you regard him as your leader then...who are you loyal too..."Israel" or Britain?" "

????????????



"Unfortunately osi does not see the much wider terrorism and killing of Palestinians civilians as a problem, and he has the balls to call the demonstration one-sided."

I am seeing the killing of Palastinians as a problem and I believe that they have the right to defend themself. But suicide bombing is also terrorism. And organisation like Hamas and Dschihad have clear anti-semitic elements. So again> It should be a problem to demonstrate with them.

I guess it is interessting that no one responses to my arguments about the comparison, between the Holocaust and the Palastine/Israel-conflict.

Opposition to the murderous policies of the Israeli state isn't anti-semitism.

On the other hand there was some blatantly anti-semitic material being distributed on the march on Saturday. One particularly widespread example was that of the stickers with "Keep Palestine Tidy" as a slogan above a picture of a man throwing the Star of David into a bin. This modification of the anti-nazi symbol of the same figure throwing a swastika into a bin is sickening.

So yes supporters of the policies of the Israeli state regularly scream "anti-semitism" at supporters of freedom for the Palestinians, but that doesn't mean that anti-semitism was entirely absent from the demonstration.

ok,

perhaps a few fringe groups feel so strongly about the hideous crimes that "israel" is carrrying out on a daily basis to Palestinians, that there sentiments and messages have become anti-jewish rather than anti-zionist...but do you blame them?

Is it not Jewish men and women who are stealing Palestinian Land, murdering school children, blowing up holy shrines, uprooting the Palestinian community that has existed there for over 3000 years...and what for? So that they can build another settlement and enjoy more "living space" for the "chosen" people?...or to build another road that only Jews can use?...

Whether you care to admit it or not, the majority of Jews are active zionists and regularly donate financially to "israel" as well as blackmailing anyone who intends to act fairly for Palestinian rights (possible Israeli agents? Edwina Currie? Monica Lewinsky?), They spy on any socialist, pro-palestinian groups and all for the sake of Israel (read "By way of Deception" by Victor Ostrovsky for insight into how all Jews are required to assist the Mossad, Israeli intelligence).

Has anyone noticed how if anyone utters a word against "israel" they get bombarded with hate mail and death threats, for example John Pilger, Robert Fisk...

All in all, zionists are Jews, and Jews are zionists, therfore are all part of the creation and assistance to this monster Israhell....until the day that Jews stand up and take back their hijacked religion from the racist ideoloy of zionism, then anti-semitism will continue.

Zionism is a form of nationalism, but has many different forms, from the socialists who would advocate co-existence with Palestinians, to the die-hard Likud, etc, who are akin to the fascists. Although some variants are far worse than others, like all nationalism, Zionism should be opposed from an internationalist socialist stand-point. However, it is interesting to draw parallels between Zionism and Palestinian nationalism. There are fascists within Palestine, such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, as well as moderate nationalists.

Personally, I think all nationalism, whatever its basis, should be opposed by all socialists, humanists and libertarians. Nationalism is inherently divisive, exclusionary and statist and often creates the kind of fundamentalism in which Jews and Arabs, or Catholics and Protestants, advocate a zero-sum game, where one or the other are annihilated.

Down with the Israeli state! Down with the Palestinian state! Long live humanity, justice and peace!

Factually, to equate Israels treatment of the indigenous Palestinian population to the Holocaust is incorrect.

I personally think the model of apartheid is more appropriate, though Israels treatment of Palestinians is worse than Apartheid South Africa's treatment of Blacks.

However when we hear discussed openly in the Knesset (Israeli parliament) the idea of transfer (a policy of ethnically cleansing the indigenous population from their homes and forcing them into Jodan, and other Arab states), we have to suggest that Israeli democracy increasingly takes on a fascistic character.

When we hear Israeli heads of State refer to human beings as animals - "The 2 legged beasts" (Menachem Begin), "Grasshoppers compared to us" (Yizthak Shamir) and hear members of the cabinet also using such language - (The assassinated tourism minister refered to Palestinians as lice, during the '82 War General Rafael Eitan stated the aim was to destroy the PLO in Lebanon to make Palstinians in the Occupied Territories "drugged cockroaches scuttling in a bottle") - we have to wonder about Israel - in what other state in the world would it be possible for a head of state to make blatantly racist statements of this nature, except apartheid South Africa or Nazi Germany?

To a refugee in Shatilla or Sabra refugee camp where Sharon was complicit in the murder of 2,000 men, women and children the comparison to the Nazi's would seem appropriate.

We also learn from our friends in GUSH SHALOM (ISRAELI PEACE BLOC), that Ariel Sharon is planning on the day America goes into Iraq to ethnically cleanse the whole West Bank -
To uproot 3 million people from their homes.

END THE OCCUPATION NOW!
IMPLEMENT ALL UN RESOLUTIONS
(FOR AN END TO OCCUPATION AND THE RIGHT OF RETURN FOR PALESTINIAN REFUGEES ETHNICALLY CLEANSED FROM THEIR HOMES IN 1948).

Chosen and Choosing

In an article of mine[i], I described a British Jewish scholar Mr Hiyam Maccoby, a ‘Jewish nationalist’. His daughter, Miss Deborah Maccoby, of London, a correspondent and a friend, rose to the challenge and objected to “the completely distorted picture of Dr Maccoby”.

“He cannot be described as a right wing Jewish nationalist. In the 1970s, he was one of the signatories of a letter to the Times advocating a federal solution to the Israel/Palestinian problem. He is now a supporter of the two-state solution. His views are very close to those of Amos Oz, who is hardly a right-wing Jewish nationalist”, she wrote.

Dear Deborah, it is nice to know that the important British Jewish scholar, Dr Maccoby, does not belong to the right wing of Jewish nationalism. Or is it? He would like the Gentiles of Palestine to have their separate state, permanently disarmed, broken into a few separate pieces, its borders permanently guarded by the Jewish state next door, its newspapers and TV programmes censored by the Jews, its holy places under Jewish control. He would not return the properties confiscated from the Gentiles in 1948 and 1967, probably not even the lands confiscated last year. In other words, Dr Maccoby stands for the creation of a ghetto for Goyiim spread over small slivers (often and appropriately called Bantustans) of their land.

Let us translate his position into British realities. What would you call a man who supports the creation of a separate Jewish state in [the London suburb of] Golders Green, transfer of all British Jews into this state, confiscation of all Jewish properties outside of Golders Green, and, of course, disenfranchisement of the Jews in Britain? Would he qualify as a right-winger? Oh yes. As a member of the lunatic fringe? Absolutely. As a mad Nazi? Probably. He would surely be well to the right of any British party, even to the right of the National Party and the National Front. But in Jewish politics, such a man would not be even a right winger, but a moderate.

Unwittingly, you touched the core problem of the Jewish community in England (and that of the US). If the opinions I described above are ‘moderate’ for the community, the community needs a psychoanalyst. Probably a programme of de-Nazification would do even better. Because, as you correctly say; these opinions are considered moderate among Jews. As I do not wish to hurt your filial feelings, I’ll tell you that my own mother considers your father’s opinions as left-wing and defeatist. She would have the Gentiles expelled or killed. Like many Israeli Jews, she is dreaming and hoping for a Jewish Hitler.

Apparently, the Jewish community nurtures dark thoughts. I do not know whether these thoughts are induced by the conflict in Palestine, or whether the conflict in Palestine just made these thoughts visible. If the desire for Palestine unhinges their minds, Jews should forget Palestine and save their souls. Let my right hand forget me, if I forget Jerusalem, said R. Judah ha-Levy, but it is better for you to lose one hand than for your whole body go into hell, replied the Gospel.

If the conflict in Palestine just made these thoughts apparent, the British society should limit the influence of the sick community until it heals. It is an illusion or self-deception to presume that Jewish opinions on Palestine/Israel do not influence their vision of the world. The prominence and influence of the sick Jewish community in your country is a major source of trouble in our troubled world. The elevation to be a peer of the realm of that man-eating ogre, the Pillar of the Tories, Conrad Black, friend of Pinochet, Sharon and Thatcher, husband of Barbara Amiel, the owner of the Telegraph and numerous other newspapers is a proof of the influence and infectious nature of the malady.

And what of Labour? Another freshly minted lord, Michael Levy a.k.a Viscount Reading, a friend of Sharon, is the grey eminence behind the New Labour leader, the Prime Minister of Great Britain and the US envoy plenipotentiary, Tony Blair.

A fervent Zionist, Levy was the man who made Tony Blair the Prime Minister of England. He found youthful Tony, managed his election campaign and brought him to power. (Levy learned a lot from Bronfman, who was instrumental in bringing Clinton into the White House.) Blair made Levy his special envoy to the Middle East, but the Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook blocked Levy’s attempts to re-Zionize British policy. He even refused to give the freshly knighted Michael Levy a room with a secretary in the Foreign Office. It was short-sighted of Cook, who annoyed Israelis on previous occasions as well. After Blair’s re-election, Cook received the boot, and Levy was elevated.

You can see the consequences of it at work, in the BBC. The intrepid Robert Fisk of The Independent reported on August 4, 2001: “BBC officials have banned their staff from referring to Israel's policy of murdering its guerrilla opponents as "assassination". BBC reporters have been told that in future they are to use Israel's own euphemism for the murders, calling them "targeted killings". Robert Fisk concluded it was due to ‘Israel’s diplomatic pressure’. Probably that is how it looks from Beirut, but if Fisk would check the story with London, he would find another source of influence, the British Jewish community and its prominent members in both major parties.

We have a perfect witness of the racism inherent in the Jewish community, the well-known feminist writer and a good person Andrea Dworkin, who wrote:

“I realized only as a middle-aged adult that I was raised to have prejudice against Arabs and that the prejudice wasn't trivial. I was taught that Arabs were irredeemably evil. Over the years, I learned about Israeli torture of Palestinian prisoners; I knew Jewish journalists who purposefully suppressed the information so as not to "hurt" the Jewish state. My [liberal] opinions put me into constant friction with the Jewish community, including my family, many friends, and many Jewish feminists. I don't believe that American Jews raised as I was are free of this prejudice. We were taught it as children and it has helped the Israeli government justify in our eyes what they have done to the Palestinians. We've been blinded, not just by our need for Israel or our loyalty to Jews but by a deep and real prejudice against Palestinians that amounts to race-hate.”

Now, this race-hate produces the horrible fruits of genocidal war. Dave Edwards wrote last week in ZNet: “We live in a world where Tony Blair can insist that "nothing can justify the killing of civilians", even as B52s are doing just that in Afghanistan. Never has the deep, unconscious racism of Western society been more apparent. And at the heart of this belief, in turn, I fear, lies a truly lethal conceit: that our men, women and children really are more valuable, more precious, more fully human, than their men, women and children”.

Do you recognise the source of this lethal conceit? Could it be the idea of chosenness, rejected by Christ but upheld by our Jewish community? Does it remind you of the maxim, “the life of a hundred Gentiles is not worth one Jewish toenail”? It was proclaimed by Rabbi Yaakov Perrin, on Feb. 27, 1994 and quoted by the N.Y. Times, Feb. 28, 1994. It was repeated by Rabbi Yitzhak Greenburg, one of the leading Cabbalists, and implemented by ‘the reprisal tactics’ of Ariel Sharon.

Do you think the increased influence of the Jewish community is purely coincidental with this outburst of racism, with the bombing of Afghanistan, with continuing destruction of Iraq, and with Israel’s full-scope Nazi treatment of Palestinians?

Look at another coincidence. The Jewish state has the biggest gap in the developed world between the richest ten percent of income and the middle classes. Bank managers earn ten thousand dollars a month, after taxes; Jewish office and industrial workers earn up to about 1,250 dollars a month; native Gentiles earn about 1200 dollars a year. Do you think that the increased influence of the Jewish community is purely coincidental with steep rise of the social gap in England and in the US, the next two states on the ladder?

You are my friend, Deborah; you do not have to feel accused because I am not accusing you. We do not choose where to be born. You could have been born in the family of a Prussian Junker, a steadfast supporter of the Third Reich. I could have been born to the family of cannibals who ate Captain Cook.

Still, the children of Junkers and Cannibals whose eyes have been opened to alternative moralities have a choice: to stick to the family and community tradition or to reject the evil ways of their fathers and embrace humanity. We are not Chosen, we are choosing. That was the message of Jesus misunderstood by your respected father.

I think, comments like bob donated them to the discussion, are an fair good example for a latent racist wordview!

Bob: "Is it not Jewish men and women who are stealing Palestinian Land, murdering school children, blowing up holy shrines, uprooting the Palestinian community that has existed there for over 3000 years...and what for? So that they can build another settlement and enjoy more "living space" for the "chosen" people?...or to build another road that only Jews can use?... "

If you relate the actions of some people, esspecially of a government and its army (instruments of opression), to the religion of most of the people of a speical state - and therefore to the religion of a lot more people in the world - this is racism or anti-semitism. Sharon is not a war criminal, because he is a jew. The soldiers, of the IDF, don't kill innocent people, because there are jews. You have to look on the material, political, historical and cultural elements of a conflict, to analyse and decide, why and how, it is possible, that there is so much murder and suffering. It is a quiet simple, even simplicitic argument to reduce these action on the religion. And if you think that is understandable or justifiable, than you justify racism.
Imagine one would say, the terrorists of 11 september were
Muslims, so its understandable in someway ok, that Americans have some ressentiments against Muslims. That would be in the same way nothing else than racism.



Another quotation from Bob: "Whether you care to admit it or not, the majority of Jews are active zionists and regularly donate financially to "israel" as well as blackmailing anyone who intends to act fairly for Palestinian rights (possible Israeli agents? Edwina Currie? Monica Lewinsky?), They spy on any socialist, pro-palestinian groups and all for the sake of Israel (read "By way of Deception" by Victor Ostrovsky for insight into how all Jews are required to assist the Mossad, Israeli intelligence)."

You should read some nazi-propaganda from the commo hate pages. This is the same crap about an jewish world conspiracy, with jewish agents, the Mossad with his fingers in all bad things, that happen. That is so complete nonsense and rubbish, that its not possible to find a rational argument against it. But that is the way, in which prejudices and racism work. And this last break is anti-semitic too, because bob fantasise about a connection between all jews in the world, to manipulate nations and destroy the Palatinians. Thats exactly how antisemitism has workes in nazi-germany: Tell some conspiracy stories, no one could proof and put in this wat ressentiments and prejudices about a special group in the minds of the people.

Seven Pillars of Jewish Denial

Seven Pillars of Jewish Denial

Tuesday, October 01 2002 @ 02:23 PM GMT

By Kim Chernin

I am thinking about American Jews, wondering why so many of us have trouble being critical of Israel. I faced this difficulty myself when I first went to Israel in 1971. I was an ardent Zionist, intending to spend my life on a kibbutz in the Galilee and to become an Israeli citizen.

Back home, before leaving, I argued almost daily with my mother, an extreme left wing radical, about the Jews' right to a homeland in our historical and therefore inalienable setting. However, once established on my kibbutz on the Lebanese border, I began to notice things that disrupted my complacency.

We used to ride down to our orchards on kibbutz trucks with Arab workers from the neighboring villages and were occasionally invited to visit. We liked sitting on a rug on a dirt floor, eating food cooked over an open fire, drinking water from the village well. Above all, we loved the kerosene lamps that were lit and set in a half circle around us as it grew dark. But walking home it occurred to me that our kibbutz had running water, electricity, modern stoves. Our neighbors were gracious, generous, and friendly, although I had learned by then that the land the kibbutz occupied had once belonged to them. We were living on land that was once theirs, under material conditions they could not hope to equal. I found this troubling.

The path from this troubled awareness to my later ability to be critical of Israel has been long and complex. Over the years I have spoken with other Jews who have traveled this same path, and to many more who haven't. In each of us I have detected mental obstacles that make it hard, sometimes impossible, for us to see what is there before our eyes.

Our inability to engage in critical thought about our troubled homeland is entangled by crucial questions about Jewish identity. Why do American Jews find it difficult to be critical of Israel? Here, set out in linear form, are seven obstacles to a Jew's ability to be critical of Israel.

Seven Obstacles:

1. A conviction that Jews are always in danger, always have been, and therefore are in danger now. Which leads to:

2. The insistence that a criticism is an attack and will lead to our destruction. Which is rooted in:

3. The supposition that any negativity towards Jews (or Israel) is a sign of anti-Semitism and will (again, inevitably) lead to our destruction. Which is enhanced by:

4. Survivor's guilt. Which contains within itself:

5. A hidden belief that we can change the past. Which holds:

6. An even more hidden belief that a sufficient amount of suffering confers the right to violence. Which finally brings us to:

7. The conviction that our beliefs, our ideology (or theology), matter more than the lives of other human beings.

Obstacles: Conviction

The first three obstacles reveal a cluster of convictions about Jewish endangerment which tend to reinforce one another in insidious ways. We can trace the development of this consciousness. It goes something like this:

We keep a watchful eye out, we read the signs, we detect innuendo, we summon evidence, we become, as we imagine it, the ever-vigilant guardians of our people's survival. Endangered as we imagine ourselves to be; endangered as we insist we are, any negativity, criticism, or reproach, even from one of our own, takes on exaggerated dimensions; we come to perceive such criticism as a life-threatening attack.

The path to fear is clear. But our proclivity for this perception is itself one of our unrecognized dangers. Bit by bit, as we gather evidence to establish our perilous position in the world, we are brought to a selective perception of that world. With our attention focused on ourselves as the endangered species, it seems to follow that we ourselves can do no harm.

We are so busy warding off danger we become unaware that we endanger others. We fill up, we occupy, all the endangerment-space. When other people clamor for a portion we believe they are trying to deny us our right to this ground. At its most vehement, our sense of ever-impending Jewish peril brings down on us a willed ignorance, an almost perfect blindness, to the endangerment of others and to the role we might play in it.

When I lived in Israel I practiced selective perception. I was elated by our little kibbutz on the Lebanese border until I recognized that we were living on land that had belonged to our Arab neighbors. When I didn't ask how we had come to acquire that land, I practiced blindness.

Long before I went to Israel, my mother would bring out a rolled up poster of a Palestinian youth. Without saying a word, she would unroll it and hold it up. It showed a very young man lying in the road in a pool of his own blood. This image had caused a major family breakdown when she showed it to her brother, who stormed out without saying goodbye and didn't speak to her again for years.

On another occasion, there was an even more violent scene with the father of an old high school friend of mine. My mother unrolled the poster, he jumped up from the couch, raised his fist at her, and stormed from the room. Before slamming the door behind him, he shouted back: "This time, Rose, you've gone too far. Next thing, you'll be calling Israeli soldiers." Here he caught himself, but couldn't hold back. "You'll be calling Jewish people who defend their lives." Another break, and then, finally, the unthinkable word: "You'll be calling us fascists."

Slam. My friend and I looked at my mother in shock, amazed to find her silent and unperturbed. Between us, between my mother and myself, I was the one still practicing blindness. Where my mother saw martyrdom, victimization, tragedy in the image of the fallen youth, I saw a dangerous enemy stopped short in his effort to destroy our people. My friend's father, who lived in constant dread of Jewish annihilation, may have seen a necessary vengeance, an image of justice. I don't know what my friend saw. I drove her home in silence and we never met up with one another again.

My mother, for her part, never said a word. When I stared at her she merely narrowed her eyes and looked back with an expression that implied: "Am I afraid of a word? Am I going to let a word keep me from seeing?"

The fixed certainty of impending Jewish destruction. Wherever we look, we see nothing but its confirmation, the same old story, always about to happen. In the grip of this persuasion, any other possibilities of meaning are swept away; we are unable to imagine things, even for a split second, from another's point of view. It took me years to overcome this blindness. My thoughts would return to the scene in my mother's living room; I would pore over the image, the outrage, the silence.

One day, during an enormous inner struggle, most of what I believed about most of what mattered most to me fell apart. (Buber refers to such an event as "an elemental reversal, a crisis and a shock.) Years of images and impressions I had kept at one remove came resoundingly together. I saw what my mother had seen: A boy gunned down by a superior military force; a very young man fighting for the survival of his people, who were far more endangered that ours.

Wherever we look, we see nothing but impending Jewish destruction. To see a people far more endangered than ours: step one in the dismantling of blindness.

Obstacles: Survivor's guilt

Guilt goes something like this: I was walking across the beautiful square in Nuremburg a couple of years ago and stopped to read a public sign. It told this story: During the Middle Ages, the town governing body, wishing to clear space for a square, burned out, burned down, and burned up the Jews who had formerly filled up the space. End of story. After that, I felt very uneasy walking through the square and I eventually stopped doing it.

I felt endangered, of course, a woman going about through Germany wearing a star of David. But more than that, I experienced a conspicuous and dreadful self-reproach at being so alive, so happily on vacation, now that I had come to think about the murder of my people hundreds of years before. After reading that plaque I stopped enjoying myself and began to look for other signs and traces of the mistreatment of the former Jewish community. If I had stayed longer in Nuremburg, if I had gone further in this direction, I might soon have come to believe that I, personally, and my people, currently, were threatened by the contemporary Germans eating ice cream in outdoor caf?s in the square. How much more potent this tendency for alarm must be in the Middle East, in the middle of a war zone!

What was the reasoning underlying my fear? If we live in a world as dangerous to us as the Holocaust was to our people, we can be that much closer to the victims of the Holocaust, we can know their apprehension and terror; perhaps we may even succeed in taking their suffering upon ourselves. No one holds these beliefs knowingly. But they hold on to us: in a tragically paradoxical way, our guilt brings us to magnify our vulnerability. It seems that no victory on the Israeli side, no crushing of the perceived enemy, no destruction of their wells or complete dismantling of their infrastructure, can change our fear that they will defeat us or alter this perception of ever-present danger.

We will not let it happen again. But this claim, which seems to point exclusively into the future, is also yoked to our inability to accept the past. By keeping the past alive, by living it all over again, we attempt to alter it. Hidden within the militant "never again," is the anguished, impossible cry: "It will never have happened."

There is a widespread assumption among our people that the vanished victims of the Holocaust would approve of what we do to make sure their fate cannot again befall the Jewish people. Is it fair, however, to assume that their suffering and death would hold no other meaning for them than a recourse to violence, vengeance, and paranoia?

Some of our people, listening in on our ancestors' imagined, otherworldly discourse, hear only the endless repetition of the never again. I hear, not in my name.

There is a new poster. It shows a single Palestinian woman facing a massive Israeli bulldozer. Looking at this image one immediately understands what Primo Levi (a survivor) meant when he claimed that the Palestinians are the Jews of the Middle East. Can we face the fact that we make use of the Holocaust as a way of refusing to see our own lamentable actions?

I hate this idea. It is, I think, the harshest moral reproach I have ever directed against myself. I can just about tolerate the idea of a survivor guilt that exaggerates my sense of vulnerability and leads me to perceive danger and an enemy where there may be instead a suffering neighbor. Can I, (can we), really face the idea that we are using the six million, hiding behind them, importing our own meanings into their suffering and death, using their victimhood for propaganda? It took me a long time to face this charge; to recognize that some part of my ever-increasing concern with Holocaust victims, Holocaust books, and first-person Holocaust accounts, was serving as a cover up, distracting my gaze from a living struggle in which another people were enduring a victimization for which we Jews were responsible. For which we Jews are responsible.

Arafat is not Hitler. The Palestinian terrorists are not the SS. We are no longer the victims. The world has changed, but Jewish identity has not kept up with it. If we lived in the present, we would have to acknowledge that the Jewish people of the twenty-first century are no longer the world's foremost endangered species. We would have to recognize that we, as a people, are ourselves capable of victimization. Seeing ourselves as ordinary people, not victims: Step two in the dismantling of blindness.

Obstacle 6. Suffering, Violence

The Israeli army that defends our homeland behaves brutally, uses torture, fires upon innocent civilians. What justifies the behavior of this army? We call it self-defense but this is, I suggest, only the surface of our justification. Further down, tucked carefully away in our collective psyche, we find a sense of entitlement about our violence. Our historic suffering, as a people, entitles us to the violence of our current behavior. Our violence is not horrendous and cruel like the violence of other people, but is a justified, sacred violence, a holy war. Of course, we would not want to know this about ourselves it would make us too much like the perceived enemy whose violence against us we are deploring. When the suicide bomber blows up a hotel full of Passover celebrants, we see clearly that this is an instance of hateful, unjustifiable violence. (And it is, it is.) When we destroy a refugee camp of impoverished Palestinians, this, in our eyes, is a violence purified by our history of persecution. (And it is not, it is not.) We are puzzled that much of the world doesn't see our situation in the same way.

I think many of us hold this view of purified Jewish violence without being aware of it. Though we rarely admit it, the Torah is full of ancient stories marked by tribal violence done in the name of Jehovah. We know the story of Elijah wrangling with the prophets of Baal on Mt. Carmel. The prophet wins a clear victory for Jehovah over the Canaanite gods. We know, but don't make much of the fact as we retell the story, that after Elijah won the contest on Jehovah's behalf he took the prophets of Baal down to the brook Kishon and slew them there. All 450 of them. I have not heard of or read a midrash that elaborates this massacre.

I recently wrote an article about the traces of Goddess worship in the Torah.

When I cited this example of Elijah and prophets, my three editors, all intelligent and well-educated Jewish women, were uneasily eager to have me supply a footnote for this contentious assertion. They were as surprised as I initially had been to discover that the account of this violence was in the Torah itself. And yet they had certainly read Kings II.

In a similar vein: We celebrate the military victories of Joshua. But do we really take in what they involved? "Joshua, and all Israel with him, went on up from Elon to Hebron. They attacked it, took it and struck it with the edge of the sword, with its king, all the places belonging to it and every living creature in it (my italics, Josh. 10:37)." I have yet to hear a rabbi help us imagine this event in which women and children, the very young and the very old, are put to the sword.

Our sense of victimization as a people works in a dangerous and seditious way against our capacity to know, to recognize, to name and to remember. Since we have adopted ourselves as victims we cannot correctly read our own history let alone our present circumstances. Even where the story of our violence is set down in a sacred text that we pore over again and again, we cannot see it. Our self-election as the people most likely to be victimized obscures rather than clarifies our own tradition.

I can't count the number of times I read the story of Joshua as a tale of our people coming into their rightful possession of their promised land without stopping to say to myself, "but this is a history of rape, plunder, slaughter, invasion and destruction of other peoples." As such, it bears an uncomfortably close resemblance to the behavior of Israeli settlers and the Israeli army of today, a behavior we also cannot see for what it is.

We are tracing the serpentine path of our own psychology. We find it organized around a persuasion of victimization, which leads to a sense of entitlement to enact violence, which brings about an inevitable distortion in the way we perceive both our Jewish identity and the world, and involves us finally in a tricky relationship to language. That boy over there with the black face mask and a rock. That is a terrorist. That boy over here with a sub-machine gun, firing on the boy with the rock, he is a soldier.

A trick of language? A highly dangerous trick. I was once persuaded to show up for rifle training when I lived on my kibbutz, although as an American citizen I wasn't required to attend. And whom did I imagine I would shoot? And kill? I, who cannot kill a moth? I never imagined it had to do with killing. Because of the language I used (I lift this rifle in defense of my beleaguered homeland) the training became a clean act, necessary, not even in need of justification. Accepting our own history of violence. Step three in the dismantling of blindness.

Obstacle 7. Ideology vs. Living People?

Some American Jews will soon set out to join settlements on the West Bank or to volunteer for the Israeli army. Others are going to Ramallah to help the Palestinians, hoping that their presence there will make it harder to smash through the city with tanks, randomly killing civilians. Still others are talking about a peace brigade that will be established along the border, a human buffer zone between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

Jewish identity, stretched out between these extremes, is up for grabs. At one extreme, the decision to further occupy the West Bank is guided by a sense of Jewish destiny and by an ideology that claims Judea and Samaria as Jewish sacred ground. These claims are based on archaic conversations with God. The Orthodox families moving to the settlements will set themselves down among a hostile population, will be trained to shoot, and will participate in the further partition of Palestinian lands. They will take up a great deal of the water when there is already not enough water for their neighbors, many of whom go for days without being able to wash or even drink. In service to an archaic idea these people will see their Arab neighbors, not as a humbled, battered, impoverished, hopeless people, but as a potent enemy living illegitimately on ancient Jewish land. In the grip of ideology some things get neglected. Living people, the present, the sanctity of civilian life become less important than what, exactly? An idea? The idea of the Jewish people as chosen by God, living out a covenant with Him?

When I first went to Israel in 1971 I was on my way to a new kibbutz in the Golan Heights. It was a bleak, grim, heavily armed place with living conditions as rough as those faced by the early pioneers. There were no trees on this kibbutz, no gardens, no fields, no grazing animals. It was an armed camp made up of mud, reserve forces, and young Israelis who were there to hold the newly acquired land. I was convinced that I belonged with them, although I was not invited to stay. Today I want to ask that younger self - What can it mean to be God's people if this election does not come with a concern for all living peoples? Would it mean that the God who once spoke to our people has nothing new to say?

Our God is a God of many changes. The old warrior God who has had nothing new to say for thousands of years has been able, over time, to unfold aspects of Himself our Israelite ancestors would have found surprising. In Talmudic thought the war-like, conquering diety evolves into a God of profound ethical concerns. He has revealed the Shechinah, his female, compassionate side, who comes to her children on the Sabbath and goes out with us into exile. She has, along the way, shown herself to be in love with a good story. She inspires midrashim, cherishing them as much as stories and teachings regarded as more sacred. She rejoices as women speak to her through their own prayers and rituals in settings that for too long excluded women. She is a God of perpetual unfolding; we, her people, inherit a tradition that asks for and imposes on us the work of continual renewal. Compassion, service, and a concern for justice are the imperative expressions of our divine worship.

Call to Prayer, Call to Action

What Judaism means and will come to mean follows from the choices we make today. Our acts, as Jews, promote or defeat the crucial purpose of Judaism to maintain a potent, living, intimate relationship to a divine force that tears through the universe busily promoting transformation. The call of this presence, as I experience it sitting here at my desk, is towards community and action, to the awareness that if we can't do everything we can still do something.

We can clarify our vision. There is no reason we must continue to live either in survivor's guilt or in a sense of our inevitable victimization as Jews. We need not take refuge in an entitlement to violence or a remorseless emphasis upon our suffering. We can see the world as it is, not as it was or as we hope or fear it might be. We can enlarge our sense of Jewish identity to include both vulnerability and aggression. We do not have to be blind. We can see and we can act.

If we don't happen to be the people called to Ramallah we are certainly the people who can join the long march to social justice. We can: take on the conservative policies of the established Jewish institutions, incessantly pester the White House and Congress to intervene in the Middle East, join organizations that support a Judaism of radical commitment to social justice.

Challenge, pester, join - they do not seem to have the epic scope required by events that involve so much suffering and death. But it would be a mistake to diminish their significance. They stand well within the radical challenge the prophets have always made to the conservative Jewish establishment; they direct themselves, against all odds, toward formidable obstacles and will require the staying power of a visionary, activist community. These commitments, in our time, in a world in crisis, must be recognized as an essential form of Jewish prayer.

But are we, as a people, still capable of prayer? How will we manage to pray, we who have just seen this:

Wednesday, June 19, 2002. 7:10 am. Eyewitness. Fifteen-year-old girl:

People coming apart! o my god! right in front of us all over the place! O my god! o my god! Mama gets out of our car. Mama steps on a finger. Let's get out of here Mama, let's go, let's run, let's get away. If you walk in the street you will fall, you will slip in the blood, Mama says we have to help them, Mama says never take the bus, walk everywhere we have to go. Could happen, any day, any minute, look around, look over your shoulder, keep an eye out. That's me, screaming no no no no no no no. That's me shouting get them, get them, make them stop, do something, kill all of them.

We who have just seen, who know, who have witnessed, if we are to pray, we will have to call upon the highest development of our Jewish God, evoking the compassion of the Shechinah and the traditional female abhorrence for violence. We will have to imagine the midrashim that will, in time, inevitably be told to our ethical God about the struggles between Israel and Palestine. In this crisis we need a divine presence who is still talking to us and is closely in touch with the contemporary world of our people, so that, when we are able to pray, our prayers might sound like this:

Make it possible for us not to seek vengeance. Help us to find the way that is not the way of violence. Teach us to grieve without turning into those who have brought us to grief. Help us to remember the innocence of the innocent. Teach us to remember ourselves, a holy people. If compassion is not possible for us, If love is not possible for us, Teach us not to hate.