Material for December Special Interest Report of the American council for Judaism
PETER BEINART ON “BIDEN’S MORAL FAILURE IN ISRAEL.”
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Writing
in The New York Times (Oct. 8, 2024), Peter Beinart, an editor of
Jewish Currents, notes that, “Through unwavering backing of Israel, Mr.
Biden has effectively supported its unequal treatment and oppression of
Palestinians—-especially in Gaza—-and undermined the ethical rationale
for his presidency…Israel’s political system is explicitly based on
religion and ethnicity. Most of the Palestinians under Israeli
control…can’t become citizens of the state that dominates their lives.”
When
it comes to Israel, writes Beinart, “Mr. Biden hasn’t supported
equality under the law. The war in Gaza has made that contradiction
impossible to ignore. It is most glaring when Biden expresses deep
empathy for Israeli suffering but relative indifference to the far
larger number of dead Palestinians…In his final speech to the U.N…what
he didn’t acknowledge is that for many who believe in the vision of
equality…he has contributed to …despair by effectively treating
Palestinians as lesser human beings and treating Israel as above
international law.”
After
Donald Trump’s victory in the November election,Peter Beinart provided
this assessment in The York Times (Nov. 7, 2024): “In this new era, in
which supporting Palestinian freedom has become central to what it means
to be progressive, the Palestinian exception is not just immoral, it is
politically disastrous…In the heavily Arab-American city of Dearborn,
Michigan, Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris by six percentage
points….Over the past year, Israel’s slaughter and starvation of
Palestinians—-funded by U.S. taxpayers and live-streamed on social
media—-has triggered one of the greatest surges of progressive criticism
in a generation. Many Americans roused to action by their nation’s
role in Gaza’s destruction have no personal connection to Palestine or
Israel. Like many Americans who protested apartheid or the Vietnam war,
their motive is not ethnic or religious, it is moral.”
Beinart
concludes: “The outrage has been particularly intense among Black
Americans and the young…In February, the Council of Bishops of the
African Methodist Episcopal Church called the war in Gaza a ‘genocide’
and demanded that the Biden-Harris administration stop funding it. In
June, the NAACP urged an end to weapons shipments. A June CBS News poll
found voters under 30 opposed arms sales to Israel by 3-1. Seventy five
per cent of Black voters supported cutting off weapons….the Biden
administration kept sending weapons even after Prime Minister Netanyahu
expanded the war to Lebanon. Harris rebuffed a plea to have a
Palestinian speak to the Democratic convention…All that provided Mr.
Trump with an opportunity….Democrats who claim to respect human equality
and international law must begin to align their policies on Israel and
Palestine with these broader principles…The Palestinian exception is not
just immoral, it’s politically disastrous. For a long time,
Palestinians…have been paying for that exception with their lives. Now
Americans are paying too. It may cost us our freedom.” *
TA-NEHISI COATES DESCRIBES ISRAELI “APARTHEID”
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The
respected Black author Ta-Nehisi Coates, a former national
correspondent for The Atlantic and a faculty member at Howard
University, has written a book, “The Message,” that takes him to a
number of countries, including Israel. It is the report about his visit
to Israel that has stirred much discussion.
While
in Israel, Coates witnessed the country’s “two-tier” legal system in
action. He met with displaced residents of the West Bank and wandered
into a park named for Meir Kahane, a “Jewish supremacist” who “promoted
the permanent annexation of the West Bank and Gaza and the enslavement
of Palestinians.” Reviewing the book in the Washington Post (Oct. 13,
2024), Becca Rothfeld notes that writing about the plight of the
Palestinian people “requires a great deal of bravery in a climate in
which critics of Israel are routinely denounced as antisemitic (and in
which Coates himself has been lambasted for venturing to suggest that
Netanyahu’s ethnocracy is inconsistent with the basic tenets of liberal
democracy)…There are any number of books that brush aside the
displacement and mass murder of Palestinians as an afterthought.”
In
an interview with Sean Illing on Vox (Oct.15, 2024), Coates described
his first reaction to observing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians:
“The word I used at the time when I saw it was Jim Crow, because it was
so obviously Jim Crow. You’ve got one set of roads for one group of
people, and the roads you have for the other group of people are
impossibly longer, and those roads have checkpoints, and the checkpoints
sometimes materialize out of nowhere.”
Coates
said that, “Personally, I hate the idea of a state based entirely on
religious or ethnic identity. I am of the mind that discrimination on
the basis of race, ethnicity or religion is never acceptable. There is
nothing in this world that will make separate and unequal okay, and
there’s nothing—-and I’ll use this word—-that makes apartheid okay.”
In
a heated interview on CBS, Coates was asked by host Tony Dakoupil,
“What is it that particularly offends you about the existence of a
Jewish state?” Coates replied: “There’s nothing that offends me about a
Jewish state. I am offended by the idea of states built on ethnocracy
no matter where they are.” Coates went on to discuss the treatment by
Israel of Palestinians and compared this with segregation in the
American South. He said, “I walk down a street in Hebron and a guy says
to me: ‘I can’t walk down the street unless I profess my religion.’”
Coates
said he was walking with a Palestinian whose father and grandfather
were born in Hebron, “And I have more freedom to walk than he does. He
can’t ride on certain roads. He can’t get water in the same way that
Israeli citizens who live less than a mile away from him can. Why is
that okay? Either apartheid is right or it’s wrong…Either what I saw is
right or it’s wrong.” *
NETANYAHU HAILS TRUMP VICTORY, APPOINTS EXTREMIST U.S. AMBASSADOR; HUCKABEE NAMED U.S. ENVOY TO ISRAEL
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Donald
Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election was welcomed by
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. According to the Washington Post
(Nov. 7, 2024), “Netanyahu rejoiced over Donald Trump’s election victory
as he banked on resetting relations with Washington and following
through on his maximalist aims in the country’s multi-front war…Israel
Ganz, head of a council representing Israeli settlers across the
occupied West Bank, celebrated the moment as a historic ‘opportunity for
the settlement movement’…There was optimism among hawks that Trump
would allow Israel to confront Iran more directly.”
Prime
Minister Netanyahu announced the appointment of a new ambassador to the
U.S., Yechiel Leiter. A native of the U.S. who emigrated to Israel,
Leiter is an activist associated with the extreme elements of the
settler movement. He is himself a settler and resides in the West
Bank. He is a strong proponent of the expansion of illegal West Bank
settlements. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz ((Nov. 9, 2024) declared
that, “By appointing a prominent settler activist as Israel’s ambassador
to the U.S., Netanyahu is signaling his belief that Trump will support
the unilateral Israeli annexation of the West Bank and parts of the Gaza
Strip.”
The Jewish
Telegraphic Agency (Nov. 11, 2024) noted that, “His appointment likely
signals that Netanyahu expects the incoming Trump administration to take
a friendlier approach to Israeli West Bank settlements than President
Joe Biden’s administration. Trump unveiled a peace plan in the final
year of his first term that would have left Israel in control of vast
swaths of the West Bank, and Trump’s ambassador to Israel during his
first term, David Friedman, was also a supporter of settlements…In 2020,
in a letter to American Christians, Leiter hailed Trump’s presidency
and encouraged U.S. support for settlements. He called the first Trump
administration ‘the best three years in U.S.-Israel relations ever.’”
President-elect
Trump has named former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee to be U.S.
ambassador to Israel. During his 1988 presidential campaign, Huckabee
declared that, “There is really no such thing as a Palestinian” and
advocated Israeli annexation of the West Bank. He said that, “The title
deed (to the West Bank) was given by God to Abraham and his heirs.” He
described himself as “an unapologetic, unreformed Zionist.”
In
an article headlined “Mike Huckabee’s Old-School Christian Zionism Is
Bad News For Anyone Who Wants Middle East Peace,” Tristan Stura, writing
in The Forward (Nov. 15, 2024) argues that, “Huckabee is an old-school
Christian Zionist with the goal of establishing full Israeli sovereignty
over Gaza and the West Bank…The goal of the ideology…is the removal of
Palestinians from the biblically defined land of Israel to facilitate
Christ’s return…Under Huckabee’s ambassadorship , Israel will become
markedly less likely to find a peaceful resolution to this brutal
conflict.”
Israel’s
finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, on Nov. 11, welcomed Donald Trump’s
victory and said it meant “the time has come” to exert full Israeli
sovereignty over parts of the occupied West Bank. He told members of
his Religious Zionist Party that, “Trump’s victory brings an important
opportunity…We were on the verge of applying sovereignty over the
settlements” on the West Bank. “Now,” he said, “the time has come to
make it a reality.”
The
highest U.N. Court this year ordered Israel to end its occupation of
Palestinian territory, evacuate existing settlements and pay reparations
to Palestinians who have lost land and property. The Israeli
government declined to participate in the proceedings, which Netanyahu
described as an “abuse of international law and the judicial process,”
and rejected the “false decision they produce.” *
RABBI MICHAEL LERNER, R.I.P.
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Rabbi
Michael Lerner, who merged Judaism with progressive thought and was a
strong advocate for Palestinian rights as the founding editor of Tikkun
magazine, died at his home in Berkeley, California on August 28. He was
81.
As a graduate
student at the University of California at Berkeley, he protested the
Vietnam War, supported the civil rights movement and led the campus
chapter of Students for a Democratic Society. Throughout his
professional life, as he established himself as a psychologist and a
rabbi, he argued in behalf of a “politics of meaning.” This new
politics, he argued, would address “the psychological, ethical and
spiritual needs of Americans.”
Tikkun
magazine was best known for its criticism of Israeli policy toward
Palestinians, including the occupation of the West Bank, the
longstanding blockade of Gaza and the establishment of what Tikkun
characterized as an “apartheid” society. He wrote in 2001 that, “In its
treatment of Palestinians, Israel has engaged in activities that are
morally unacceptable—-violations of fundamental human rights—-and
deserve to be criticized.”
After
the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, Tikkun condemned the
“horrific actions of Hamas” and noted that the “unfolding horror in
Israel and Gaza is an escalation of decades of state-sanctioned violence
by Israel against Palestinians…It is only by recognizing our shared
fears and our shared tears that we will find our way through this
nightmare.”
It was
Lerner’s view that, “Judaism has things specific to teach the liberal
and progressive world. We’ve been in a struggle against slavery and the
forms in which the human spirit has been suppressed. So our experience
is rich in how to carry that struggle on and not be destroyed.”*
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