[Salon] The Story of a Lifelong Supporter of Israel Who Underwent a Spiritual Awakening

Wake Up And Reclaim Your Humanity:

Essays on the Tragedy of Israel-Palestine,

By Richard Forer, Mindstir Media, 291 pages, $14.99

By
ALLAN C.BROWNFELD
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This thoughtful book, which won the New York City Big Book Award, tells the story of Richard Forer, a lifelong supporter of Israel and Zionism, who underwent a remarkable spiritual awakening. His decision to engage in a careful search for historical facts that might question his unwavering acceptance of the Zionist narrative enabled him to write about the Israeli occupation of Palestine with honesty, separating fact from fiction.

Forer grew up in Trenton, New Jersey where he attended a Reform synagogue. His identical twin brother has been a prominent member of an Orthodox Hasidic sect since the early 1970s. Another brother is a former president of one of the largest Reform synagogues on the East Coast. Other Orthodox members of his family live in Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Forer is a past member of American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). His first book, “Breakthrough: Transforming Fear into Compassion—- New Perspective on the Israel-Palestine Conflict” was published in 2020.

“Until my confrontation in 2006 with the circumstances that obliged me to begin an intensive study of Israel-Palestine, I had never even bothered to research the history. My view of the Middle East had been shaped by my attendance in Sunday School in the 1950s, where my impressionable mind soaked up stories of my people’s sometimes triumphant and often harrowing past and of the heroic establishment of Israel, the one sanctuary from the monstrosity of anti-Semitism. History was not in doubt. We had maintained a presence in the Holy Land since time immemorial and, in spite of great hardships had persevered to establish a Jewish state. With bravery and grit, we had expelled Arab forces that resented our presence and were too uncivilized to appreciate that after thousands of years of longing and prayer we had returned home. At the mercy of blind loyalty, I rejected any consideration my beliefs might be erroneous…With my journey as a guide, this book asserts that blind loyalty , false beliefs and enemy images do not have to dictate our destiny…Through hard work and a commitment to the truth…we can achieve a just resolution to this tragedy.”

“More To The Story…Than I Already Knew”

On July 12, 2006, Hezbollah militants killed three Israeli soldiers and abducted two in a cross-border raid into northern Israel. This and other recent events, notes Forer, “reinforced my lifelong fear that the Arab world would not rest until it had wiped Israel from the face of the earth.” He attended a rally at the Jewish Community Center in Albuquerque and contributed to AIPAC. Then he received an unexpected call from Sam, an old Jewish friend, who was planning a visit: “I launched into a two-hour diatribe against Israel’s enemies. Sam just listened, never arguing….Unlike me, he had studied the history of Israel-Palestine for years…he suggested I look into the writings of two Jewish Israeli professors I’d never heard of: Baruch Kimmerling and Tanya Reinhardt…until that moment…I had never allowed myself to consider the possibility that there was more to the Israel-Palestine story than what I already knew.”

Shortly thereafter, Forer went to the library and took out several books, “The Palestinian People: A History” by Baruch Kimmerling and Joel Migdal, and “Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History” by Norman Finkelstein. He saw on the Finkelstein book jacket the words “Joan Peters exposed as an academic hoax.” This interested Forer because Peters’ book, “From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict over Palestine” had “been my bible, the treasured source I had used to rebut criticism of Israel and the only book I had ever read on the subject.”

Peters claimed there was no such thing as a Palestinian people. In his reading of the Finkelstein book, Forer found that his sources included Human Rights Watch, Amnesty Intrrnational and the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. He recalls that, “Consistent with each other, their findings castigated Israeli policy and behavior. Documented charges included deadly force by Israeli soldiers against unarmed men, women and children; the bulldozing of houses, sometimes with inhabitants still inside, collective punishment of large numbers of civilians based on alleged crimes by lone individuals; using Palestinians as human shields; the theft of water from Palestinian villages; Israel’s commonplace use of torture and its reliance on political assassinations.”

Shocked at Israeli Behavior

Many of the reports cited were posted online and Forer spent hours going over passages quoted in the book. He found that they had all been accurately cited and he slowly “felt shocked that a country in which I had invested a lifetime of loyalty would treat people this way. My shock turned to anger that Israel was perpetrating these abuses in my name as a Jew…I could not accept any more what my society had taught me to believe…Just as throughout Eastern Europe my people had been guilty of the crime of being Jewish, under Israeli domination every Palestinian is guilty of the crime of not being Jewish…My unquestioned acceptance of the Jewish Zionist narrative had distorted my ability to empathize with another people.”

His continuing study of Israel’s relationship with Palestinians caused Forer much anguish. He read in detail about June 14,1982 when the Israel Defense Forces began a siege of Beirut, Lebanon, bombarding the Lebanese capital from the sea, air and land and killing thousands. A few weeks later, Menachem Begin told the Knesset , “No one, anywhere in the world, can preach morality to our people.” On Sept. 16, Ariel Sharon and Chief-of-Staff Rafael Eitan sent Israel’s allies, the Christian Phalangists, whom they had armed and trained, into the Lebanese Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. For four days, Israeli troops surrounded the camps and sealed all exits. Phalangists dismembered, raped, and massacred residents in a bloodbath the U.N. General Assembly denounced as “an act of genocide.” Estimates of fatalities ran as high as 3,500. Sharon called the dead, who were mostly children and older men and women “terrorists (who needed) mopping up.”

In February 1983, Forer points out, “…the Kahan Commission of Inquiry issued its report…Accusing the Israeli government of ‘indirect responsibility for what occurred in the refugee camps’…The commission reprimanded Begin…and criticized other officials, some—-Sharon included—-with the recommendation they be removed from their posts…Aside from Kahan, no other deliberative body charged a single Phalangist or Israeli soldier for crimes related to Sabra and Shatila. The message from the international community was that Israel could get away with murder.”

Silencing Criticism of Israel By Calling It “Anti-Semitic”

Forer devotes a chapter to the manner in which Israelis, and their American allies, do their best to silence criticism of Israel by categorizing it as “anti-Semitic.” Shulamit Aloni, a leader of the Meretz party and former Minister of Education, who received the Israel Prize “for her struggle to right injustices and for raising the standard of equality,” described how this works: “It’s a trick. We always use it. When from Europe, somebody is criticizing Israel, we bring up the Holocaust. When, in the U.S., people are criticizing Israel,then they are ‘anti-Semitic.’” (Democracy Now, Aug. 14, 2002).

Early Israeli leaders, Forer shows, promoted this idea even before the state was established. David Ben-Gurion declared, “Henceforth, to be anti-Israel was to be anti-Semitic.” Abba Eban, who served as Israel’s ambassador to the U.N. as well as deputy prime minister, expanded the definition of anti-Semitism: “One of the chief tasks of any dialogue with the Gentile world is to prove that the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all.

Ironically, Forer shows us, Zionism’s founder, Theodor Herzl, had little familiarity with Judaism and did not practice the religion: “Herzl was so disaffected with his heritage, he offered to convert Jews to Roman Catholicism if the Pope would back his plan for a Jewish state. His disaffection may explain a prediction he made, one that has come to pass: ‘The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.’ In Herzl, who did not circumcise his son, , religious Jews saw an Am Ha’aret (ignoramus)…this founder of a movement so influential it supplanted ‘God’ with ‘Israel’ and transformed a religion into a nationalistic movement…”

Replacing Religious Judaism With Nationalism

As Zionism moved toward replacing religious Judaism with nationalism, many Jewish leaders objected. On July 16, 1947, four months before the passage of the partition plan, Yosef Zvi Dushinsky and Zelig Ruven Bengis, the Chief Rabbis of the Ashkenazi Jewish community in Jerusalem, gave written testimony to the U.N. Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) announcing the community’s “definite opposition to a Jewish state in any part of Palestine.” They urged that Jerusalem be an international zone where “there should be implemented the unity of international brotherhood towards all mankind…”

Forer’s research has uncovered many little known Jewish critiques of Zionism. New York rabbi David Shapiro, for example, criticized Zionism’s insistence that Jerusalem is the eternal capital of the Jewish people. In Dec. 2017 he said: “The Jewish people don’t have a capital. We have never had a capital. Countries have capitals…The Jewish people are not a country or a region, the Jewish people are a religious community.”

Israel’s treatment of Palestine’s indigenous population violates both international law and Jewish values, Forer shows us. He quotes Israelis who admit this reality. Former Shin Bet (Internal Security Agency) directors Avraham Shalom and Carmi Gillon admitted that Israel acts as “a brutal occupation force.” Gillon declared: “We are making the lives of millions unbearable.” One of Israel’s founding myths, which Forer remembers being taught in religious school, was that Arab leaders instructed Palestinians to flee their homes in 1948 and that Israel, therefore, is not responsible for the Palestine refugee problem.

Arab Leaders Never Urged Palestinians To Leave

In 1959, Columbia University historian Walid Khalidi proved this claim to be false, and two years later Irish scholar and U.N. diplomat Erskine Childers independently corroborated Khalidi’s findings. “by examining archives of Arab governments and newspapers and the reports of the CIA and the BBC,” writes Forer, “which monitored and transcribed every Arab radio broadcast of 1948, both men proved that Arab leaders never gave such instructions. To the contrary, they broadcast appeals to Palestinians not to flee their homes. There were even times they threatened to punish anyone who left their village or city. (Israeli historian) Benny Morris’s research supports Khalidi and Childers. ‘There is no evidence that the Arab states…wanted a mass exodus or issued blanket orders or appeals to flee.’”

Indeed, in June 1948, the Arab section of Israel’s Intelligence Service produced a paper titled, “Migration of Eretz Yisrael Arabs between December 1, 1947 and June 1, 1948.” It said: “Without a doubt (direct Jewish hostile actions against Arab communities) were the main factor in the population movement.” Forer notes that, When asked by the U.N. To account for its claim that Palestinian flight was encouraged by Arab leaders, the Israeli Foreign Ministry library could not produce a scintilla of supporting evidence.”

Forer’s continuing research showed him that Zionism, from its very beginnings, sought a Palestine free of its indigenous Palestinian population. In 1895, Theodor Herzl wrote in his diary: “We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries , while denying any employment in our own country…Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.” In conjunction with denying employment, Herzl proposed starving Palestinians and forcing them into exile.

Population Transfer Committee

Forer writes that, “The Jewish Agency established the first Population Transfer Committee in 1937 to develop strategies to rid the land of Palestinians.” David Ben-Gurion declared: “I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it. “ on December 20, 1940, Joseph Weitz, director of the Jewish National Fund’s. Lands Department, wrote: “it must be clear that there is no room in this country for both peoples…If the Arabs leave it, the country will become wide and spacious for us….the only solution is a land of Israel without Arabs…There is no room here for compromises. Not one village must be left, not one (Bedouin) tribe.”

In religious school and in his involvement with the Jewish community over the years, Forer always was told that the Jews were the “chosen people.” He writes that, “Israel’s occupation of Palestine and its duplicity regarding its promises to the nations of the world demand an answer to the following question: what, according to Judaism, are the Jewish people chosen for? Are they chosen to covet, steal, lie, oppress, rob, and pervert justice, or are they chosen to rectify injustice, to be a blessing to the world, a light to the nations; to reflect God’s goodness and perfection by observing His mitzvoth…If Judaism is a divine revelation that aspires to elevate the consciousness of humankind, then adherents must understand its most sacred principles place a higher value on human life than on emotional and messianic attachments to land, no matter how holy they imagine that land to be.”

Forer cites many respected Jewish voices who object to what has happened in the name of Judaism. The philosopher Martin Buber expressed the view that, “Only an internal revolution can have the power to heal our people of their murderous sickness or cause less hatred (for the Arabs). It is bound to bring complete ruin upon us. Only then will the old and young in our land realize how great was our responsibility to those miserable Arab refugees, in whose towns we have settled Jews who were brought here from afar, whose homes we have inherited, whose fields we now sow and harvest, the fruits of whose gardens , orchards and vineyards we gather, and in whose cities, that we robbed, we put up houses of education, charity and prayer, while while we babble and rave about being the ‘People of the book and the light of the nations.’”

A Form Of Idolatry, Replacing God And The Jewish Moral Tradition

Making the State of Israel the center of Jewish interest and concern, Forer argues, represents a form of idolatry, replacing God and the Jewish moral and ethical tradition. He recalls the point made by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel: “Judaism is not a religion of space and does not worship the soil. So, too, the State of Israel is not the climax of Jewish history, but a test of the integrity of the Jewish people and the competence of Israel.”

In a discussion of Israel’s “Strategies of Dispossession,” forer writes: “Israel is the only country in the world that uses home demolitions to collectively punish a population under its rule. Since 1967, it has demolished over 48,000 Palestinian homes but not one Jewish home. Among the reasons for the demolitions are: the inhabitants of a home are friends, neighbors or relatives of someone suspected of a security offense; they built their homes on land Israel covets for settlements; they built them without permits. From 2010 to 2014, the Israeli government approved 1.5 per cent of Palestinian permit requests.”

Discrimination against Palestinians, Forer shows, is built into the very structure of Israeli government. On July 18, 2018, the Knesset passed the Basic Law: “Israel the Nation State of the Jewish People.” It pronounced that, “The exercise of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.” This law, in Forer’s view, “enshrines a right to discriminate against Palestinians and other minorities and annuls the promise of Israel’s Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel to ‘ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.’ The minority is 25.5 percent of Israel’s total population. Jews now have legal justification for barring non-Jewish families from living in their communities. Accenting its bias, the nation-state law affirms the ‘ingathering of the exiles,’ a Jewish right of return to Israel, while ignoring the same right for Palestinians.”

“Not a state for all its citizens”

Months after the Knesset passed the nation-state law, Israeli television celebrity and model Rotem Sela commented to her 830,000 Instagram followers: “When the hell will someone in this government let the Israeli public know that this is a country for all its citizens and that every person is born equal. And also, that the Arabs are human beings.” Prime Minister Netanyahu responded: “Dear Rotem Sela, I read what you wrote. First of all, an important correction: Israel is not a state for all its citizens. According to a basic law we passed, Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people—-and the Jewish people only.”

In earlier years, when Israeli leaders such as Ehud Barack boasted that, “We have the most moral army in the world,” Richard Forer believed what he was told. He recalls that, “For most of my life it went without saying that Israel’s armed forces were the most moral in the world. I didn’t need its leaders to affirm the obvious. I just knew it,but when they did affirm it, I felt a sense of pride along with gratitude that my people were superior to other people. If someone tried to contradict my dogma with tales of attacks on schools, hospitals, mosques, and other civilian structures, I maligned their information as anti-Semitic propaganda. My confidence was based on a life-long conviction that Jews were by nature both innocent and just, then comparing those qualities to what little I knew about Arabs…it never entered my mind that I might be biased or could learn something of value if I took the time to research the history. The difference between Jewish honor and Arab enmity was self-evident.”

He views it as his “good fortune” that his reawakening in 2006 transformed his view of the world and motivated him to correct the arguments he once cherished: “In the years since, my research has concentrated on Israeli sources…Earlier I mentioned that compulsory transfer of the indigenous people was a tenet of the Zionist movement. Neither Ben-Gurion nor other Zionist leaders were under any illusions they could achieve their goals through peaceful efforts…During the 1948 War of Independence, Ben-Gurion said, ‘A small reaction to (Arab hostility) does not impress anyone. A destroyed house—-nothing. Destroy a neighborhood and you begin to make an impression.’ “

“Strong and brutal reaction”

In his diary, Ben-Gurion recorded Palmach commander Gen. Yigal Allon’s intentions: “There is a need now for strong and brutal reaction…If we accuse a family —-we need to harm them without mercy, women and children included. Otherwise this is not an effective reaction. During the operation there is no need to distinguish between guilty and not guilty.”

Israeli military historian Ariel Itzhaki, director of the IDF archives in the 1960s, tried to convert Israeli discourse from denial to reality. He wrote: “A generation has gone by and it is now possible to face up to the ocean of lies in which we were brought up. In almost every town conquered by the War of Independence acts were committed that are defined as war crimes, such as blind killings, massacres and even rapes.”

Richard Forer laments the hatred toward Palestinians fomented by religious leaders in Israel: Murderous hatred toward Palestinians is no aberration. Shmuel Eliyahu, chief rabbi of Safed, one of Judaism’s four holy cities, urged the Israeli army to stop arresting Palestinians, proposing instead that ‘it must execute them and leave no one alive.’ In 2010, Rabbis Yitzhak Shapiro and Yosef Elitzur from the Old Yosef Chai Yeshiva in the settlement of Yitzhar near Nablus published ‘The King’s Torah, Part One: Laws of Life and Death Between Israel and the Nations.’ Endorsed by prominent rabbis, this compendium of Halacha explains that the sixth commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ applies only ‘to a Jew who kills a Jew.’ The rabbis instruct their readers: ‘There is a reason to kill a child if it is clear that they will grow to harm us; in such a situation the attack should be directed specifically at them.’ The rabbis also teach that goyim are ‘uncompassionate by nature’ and that attacks on them ‘curb their evil inclinations.’”

Living By The Sword,”We will Destroy Ourselves”

In a Nov. 2003 interview, former Shin Bet directors Ami Ayalon, Carmi Gillon, Avraham Shalom and Yaakov Peri warned that if Israel failed to make peace with the Palestinians, it would be “heading downhill towards near-catastrophe. If…we go on living by the sword, we will continue to wallow in the mud and destroy ourselves.” Sixteen years later, at the 2019 J Street national conference, Ayalon, also a former commander-in-chief of the Israeli navy, predicted that Israel’s quest to expand its borders , build more settlements and prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state “will isolate Israel …increase anti-Semitism around the world …and be the end of Israel as the founding fathers of Zionism envisioned it.”

This book, Forer concludes, “…is my way of standing up and telling the truth, of saving Israel from itself and the Palestinian people from the unfair and, yes, cruel treatment they have been subjected to for generations. It is a product of a commitment to separate fact from fiction and learn the documented history of two peoples. When I first made this commitment it set in motion a release from an existential condition I was not even aware I had embodied for most of a lifetime. As denial and dogmatism gave way to an urgency to carry on objective research, I observed how a core identity affected my relationship to the world, influencing what or who I was drawn to, what or who I was repelled by, how I judged or tolerated others…No longer blind to Israel’s intentions…I was liberated from the dark side of indoctrination and the bondage of unquestioned loyalty.”

This book tells the story of a lifelong supporter of Israel who underwent a remarkable spiritual awakening in which he came to the spiritual realization that he was as much Muslim or Christian as Jewish and as much Palestinian as Israeli or American. We share, he came to see, a common humanity, and we should examine events in the world objectively, seeking to discover what is true and what is not—-and then to act upon it.

It is regrettable that the organized Jewish community, for so long, has presented a version of history which is seriously flawed. Many thoughtful individuals have sought to discover the truth and Richard Forer stands out among them. His book deserves as wide an audience as possible for it seeks and presents the truth about a situation in which Jewish moral and ethical values have been sacrificed for narrow political ends. Truth may not always be easy to confront, but Richard Forer has done so effectively in this important book.

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Allan C. Brownfeld is a nationally syndicated columnist and is editor of
ISSUES, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.