The next step for liberal Zionists after Gaza: a
Freedom Summer with Palestinians
In
an era of direct action, supporters of the two-state solution must start
putting their bodies on the line.
The third Gaza war in less than six
years now seems to be over. On the surface, despite the horrifying destruction,
it doesn’t appear to have ended much differently than its two predecessors. But
if you think of each war as a snapshot in political time, you can see how the
picture has changed.
With each war, the prospects of an
American-brokered two state solution have dimmed. In late 2008, when Israel
launched Operation Cast Lead, its prime minister supported a Palestinian state
free of Israeli troops on almost 95 percent of the West Bank. Today, Israel’s
prime minister has essentially ruled
that out.
In 2008, the United States had just elected a president eager to put
Israeli-Palestinian peace near the center of his foreign policy agenda. Now
that American president has given up. In 2008, it was rare and exotic to hear
intellectuals propose alternatives to the two state solution. Now the New York
Times publishes them all the
time.
The Boycott, Divestment and
Sanction (BDS) movement is built for this moment. Its activists long ago
abandoned hope that Washington would aid the Palestinian cause. Nor would they
mourn the demise of the two state solution, since key BDS leaders oppose the
existence of a Jewish state within any borders.
The American Jewish right is built
for this moment too. The more hostile global opinion becomes to Israel, and the
more that hostility shades into anti-Semitism, the more hawkish Jewish groups
can stand at the ramparts, ignoring Israel’s misdeeds and raising money by
telling Jews that we’re living in the 1930s once again.
In the United States, the people
least prepared for this new era of outside-the-Beltway activism are us: Those
American Jewish liberals who still consider the two state solution the best
hope for a just peace between the River and the Sea. Although J Street, the
most well known liberal Zionist group, was born only six years ago, it was born
in a prior age. In its first year of life, 2008, it saw Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud
Abbas come within months of inking a two state deal. (That’s what the two of them have subsequently said). In
its second year, 2009, it saw Barack Obama appoint a high-profile envoy to
kick-start the peace process. It’s understandable, therefore, that J Street
fashioned itself as Obama’s “blocking back,” clearing a path so Congress didn’t
sabotage the White House’s efforts
at peace.
J Street has made important gains.
It has forged alliances with a growing number of Democratic members of Congress
and with some of the Democratic Party’s biggest Jewish donors. And it has
helped destroy the myth that most American Jews support the Israeli government
no matter what it does.
But by itself, J Street’s strategy
of pressuring Washington to pressure Israel won’t work if the White House won’t
aggressively run the ball. And there’s little reason to believe that this White
House, a Hillary Clinton White House or a Republican White House, will. Without
outside pressure, however, it’s unlikely Israel will elect another government
eager for a two state solution anytime soon. The lesson of the last few years,
in fact, is that absent outside pressure, the Palestinian issue recedes from
Israeli politics entirely.
The problem, for people who believe
in the two state solution, is that most of the pressure that exists today comes
either from Hamas terrorism or a BDS movement that is largely hostile to
Israel’s existence.
It’s time for American Jews who
support Israel but oppose the occupation to commit to large-scale, direct
action of our own. And the most important place to do so is in the West Bank.
Palestinians in villages like Bil’in and
Nabi Saleh have been protesting, unarmed, for years against the theft of their
land. But their efforts receive little attention in American Jewish circles or
in the American press. Few American Jews have any idea that under the military
law that governs Palestinians in the West Bank, Israel routinely criminalizes freedom of speech and assembly.
Or that peaceful protesters can be held in detention for years without trial.
But if thousands of American Jews
joined those protests, American Jews would know. Protesters would return home
with videos to show their synagogues; hawkish parents would be appalled by the
treatment meted out to their children. And the American media, which covers
Jews far more intensively than it covers Palestinians, would follow. The model
would be Freedom Summer, Robert Moses’ campaign to bring white college students
to help register voters in Mississippi in 1964, and thus draw the nation’s eyes
to oppression that garnered little media attention when practiced only against
blacks.
Such an effort would not be simple.
The call for Jewish volunteers would have to come from Palestinian activists
themselves. There’s a risk that some protesters would throw stones. Even if
American Jews came to support a two state solution, some of the people marching
with them would not.
But even if protesters differed on
their ultimate goal, the core message—that it is fundamentally unjust to deny
people the basic rights that their neighbors enjoy because of their religion or
ethnicity—might reach American Jews, and Americans overall, in a way it never
has. By facilitating a human connection between Palestinians and Jews—the kind
of connection Palestinians rarely make with settlers or soldiers--such a
movement would also combat anti-Semitism. It would create the right kind of
pressure on Israel: not military pressure but moral pressure, the kind of moral
pressure that Washington still refuses to deploy.
As the Gaza War has shown yet
again, Palestinians often remain invisible to American Jews except as killers
and haters. And it is because their humanity remains invisible that we so
easily justify their oppression. Perhaps if we placed ourselves among them, we
might be able to see them as we see ourselves. And in the wake of a war that
has brought only misery and destruction, those of us who still believe in a
democratic Israel living alongside a democratic Palestine might create a
beachhead of hope.
