| Ira Chernus PROFESSOR OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO AT BOULDER |
Bush’s Israel Problem -- And Ours
No one knows what’s is in
George W. Bush's mind as he heads off for , as
the pundits say, to burnish his legacy by moving both sides closer
to peace, as the
pundits say, he faces enormous problems on both sides.
Among Palestinians, the Fatah leaders Bush is
willing to talk to with speak for only a segment of their
people. A recent poll showed 39% percent
of Palestinians trusting Mahmoud Abbas’
Fatah party. Only 16% percent
trust the opposition Hamas Party. But 41
percent%
say they do not trust either faction. Even if Abbas
concludes some kind of deal with Bush and the Israelis, he may be a leader who
looks over his shoulder and sees only a small band of followers.
If such a deal really creates a Palestinian state,
more Palestinians may jump to the pro-Fatah side. But
the deal is bound to create a rather truncated state (chunks of land,
especially around Jerusalem, officially ceded to Israel, for example) with
limited independence,
as chunks of land around (Palestinians denied a full-scale army and full
control of their own water rights, for example,). Bush supports -elected
Hamas leaders must be excluded from the government. So, many
Palestinians will see any deal as a sell-out and resist. How many, and how they
will resist, no one can predict. But it’s predictable enough that Palestinian
society will end up more fractured and its government less able to govern.
Which This chaos is probably just what the Israeli
government wants. According to many reports, Israeli undercover
agents helped found Hamas years ago to undermine the
then-nearly-universal Palestinian support for Yasser
Arafat. [need a citation for this] There
is little doubt that tThen the Israelis pumped money (and perhaps arms)
to Fatah during its internecine war with Hamas to intensify the inner Palestinian split. It’s
the same reason that, according to many
reports, Israeli undercover agents helped found Hamas years ago, to
undermine the then-nearly-universal Palestinian support for Yasser Arafat. (For what it’s worth,
an Israeli student of mine tells me that a family friend, a former high
official in an Israeli security agency, confirms this allegation.) It’s
the same reason thatTo further sow dissension, the Israelis used
massive violence to break up the prospect of Fatah-Hamas
unity in 2006.
Israeli governments have pursued such divide- and- conquer
strategies ever since the state was born. What the Israelis have always feared
more than anything else is a unified opponent. And on the Israeli side, fear more than anything
else is the obstacle to peace. That is George W. Bush's
Let’s look at the fear and its consequences, and then
why it is our problem.
The Politics of Fear
Last month a well-respected rabbi in my community, Tirzah Firestone, wrote a moving public confession. Like most Jews,
she “had been raised with the unquestioned narrative about , where, she says,
“I encountered the shocking effects of my people's fear,” she writes in. [citation]. “.… Fear
has been inculcated into us Jews. It lives in our cells.,”
By now, fear has become “the sovereign power in our lives,
and [it] justifies any action.”
As a trained psychologist, the
rabbi knows that people who build walls around themselves for safety end up
reinforcing their fear.: “What an incredible metaphor this ‘security
barrier’ [which … The
danger of our barriers is a kind of sclerosis of the soul, a deadening of our
humanity.”
Where does tTheis
fear comes
from? Nearly all
analyses agree with the rabbi that it comes from a history “full
of real trauma and suffering, centuries of expulsions and pogroms, ghettos and methodical extermination.”
But even sympathetic critics of
Israeli policy usually fail to point out what every Palestinian knows all too
well: Jewish fear comes from, and
perpetuates, a confusion between past and present.
Jews have been far too quick to identify Palestinians with Nazis, every,
to equate isolated bombings in an Israeli bus or café with the
methodical killings of the Nazi holocaust. Jews have become victimizers because
they have never ceased seeing themselves as victims.
Indeed, the influential Jewish
theologian Emil Fackenheim once quoted an Israeli
psychologist who said that so many Jews equated all Arabs with Nazis because they have
“entered a holocaust psychosis.” Fackenheim The
very influential theologian usedoffered this
quote to “prove”support his claim that the Israeli occupation
of [not sure I follow
this: is Fackenheim being ironic here and thus the scare quotes around prove?
Or is he turning the psychologist’s insight on its head, transforming psychosis
into the basis of a sacred act?]
Israel has spent nearly 60 years showing conclusively
that Jews can not only can fight back but make themselves
invincible in the Middle East. Yet the fact that Israel is militarily secure
has not taken away the fear. It just does not sink in to the minds of most
Jews, in Israel and elsewhere.
Why not? One
intriguing speculation came recently from the always insightful Israeli
commentator Uri Avnery. When the U.S. intelligence
community announced that Iran was not pursuing a nuclear weapon, Avnery wrote that the news that Israel was not in danger of an annihilating attack fell “like
an atom bomb” on that country. The Iranian threat was,
he said “our most precious possession.” [citation]
Beneath the irony he revealed a grim truth: “Jews have become used to anxiety. We have little red warning lights in our heads, which come on at the slightest sign of danger. In such a situation, we feel at home. We know what to do. But when the lights stay off and no danger appears on the horizon, we get the feeling that something suspicious is going on. Something is wrong.”
In other words, fear has become a foundation
stone of Jewish identity. Indeed, too many Jews define what it means to be
Jewish largely in terms of persecution, oppression, and the need to resist
anti-Ssemitic
enemies. Without an enemy to fight they would be plunged into an identity
crisis.
Fear as Foreign Policy
So The
Israeli government feeds
this fear obliges by insuring that there will always
be an enemy. Once it was all Arabs, then
all Palestinians, then the PLO. Now it is Hamas. The
Israelis have a long history of ignoring Hamas offers
for peace, insuring that Hamas will be retained as an
angry foe.
Now they’ve done
it again. In the last few weeks Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and others have
proposed a long-term truce. Apparently there areAlthough certain
forces in the Israeli government are urging that truce talks begin. But
after some days of uncertainty, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has publicly vetoed the idea in no uncertain
terms. And
Fear has prevailed
again in the dominant Israeli view, as Avnery sums it
up: “If
the Palestinians are strong, it is dangerous to make peace with them. If they
are weak, there is no need to make peace with them. Either way, they must be
broken.” And
if (as is likely) they will not be broken,
This fFear
goes
farhelps
to explain not only the many Israeli policies that are violent and outrageous (“Those
Arabs understand only one thing: FForce”)
but the few that are now in the direction of peace.
In a recent interview, Olmert
shocked his nation by saying publicly that Israelis must take seriously the
prospect of dividing On the contrary, Olmert views “his
primary responsibility as prime minister, Olmert said, lay in as “ ensuring
a separation from the Palestinians.” [citation]
Israelis have
become obsessed with the fear that, if the occupied territories are not somehow
jettisoned, Palestinians will some day outnumber Jews. The idea of letting them have the
right to vote, and thus rule over Jews, is too
terrifying to accept. But
how can Jews “live eternally in a confused reality where 50%
percent of the population or more are residents but not equal
citizens who have the right to vote like us?” Olmert askhas asked.
“My job as prime minister, more
than anything else, is to ensure that doesn't happen."
Olmert’s talk of flexibility on , saying “We shall never be moved.”. What Rabbi Firestone, or any good
psychologist, could tell him is that people who feel compelled to prove their
inflexibility (like people who wall themselves in) only root themselves deeper
in their anxiety.
Olmert also knows that Israeli leaders who do not create an appearance
of intransigence, that catering
caters
to the fears of their public, will
soon be voted out of office. So at the same time that he shocked Israelis by
hinting about dividing she surely knew that was quite an
understatement.
Olmert also knows
one more
thing: that Right-wing
politicians recently forced through a law that says fully 2/3two-thirds of the
Knesset
(Israeli’s
parliament) must approve any changes in the
boundaries of
Negotiating a Two-State
Solution
As Bush listens to Olmert and Israeli leaders, he
is likely to hear the same kind of ambiguity -- and perhaps outright duplicity
-- on all the other key issues, too.
There’s a tragic irony here. The limited independence the
Israelis will probably offer now might have been widely welcomed in , -- if
the Israelis had offered it back in 2000, when
Bill Clinton tried to broker a final peace. But just as the talks came near
to the point of agreement (at Taaba, in January 2001),
then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak backed out. He was,
overtaken by fear -- not of the Palestinians, but of his political opponents on
the right, who were busy scaring Israelis into seeing an independent ian as
Nazi Germany reborn.
Seven years of war and occupation have passed since
then, terribly lean years for the Palestinian people. Fewer of them are now
willing to accept a two-state solution at all. The movement for a single,
secular, binational state -- the ultimate terror for
most Israeli Jews -- has now taken deep roots and gained widespread support
among Palestinians and their supporters. [link to statement]
A two-state solution might still win over the
Palestinian public, if it requires Israel to remove all but a few of the
settlements, gives Palestine full control over all of the West Bank and Gaza including all of Arab
Jerusalem, and offers real independence, including things like a
genuine army and full control over water. A new Palestinian state
would have to include Gaza as well as the West Bank, of course. And
it would have to be ruled by the government the people elected, including the
full complement of elected Hamas officials.
But the fears of Israeli Jews are powerful enough to
insure that no Israeli government agreeing that agrees to
such a deal can survive. That
is Bush’s
Why is it also our problems? Listen to Karen Hughes, Bush’s close friend
and former uUndersecretary
of sState for pPublic dDiplomacy.
After two years trying to understand how to improve ” [citation] She told Hughes said she
advised Bush and Rice two years ago that U.S. help in
ending the
Israel-Palestin stalemate six-decade old fight over Israel would probably
likely do
more than anything else to improve the U.S. global standing worldwide.”.
Restoring
If indeed anger in the Muslim world poses a threat to
our national security, nothing will make us more secure than helping to bring peace
between
The good news is that there have always been Jews, in U.S.,
their numbers are growing rapidly, and the many are joining
the proliferating Jewish peace groups. Though these groups are still small, their numbers are growing
rapidly, andbut their
impact can be great. As they grow, their voice will reach the several million
Jews who do not really believe the fear-driven alarms sounded by right-wing
Jewish institutional leaders. The fear that grips those several million is the
fear of speaking their conscience, despite the harsh criticism they may endure.
The more Jews speak out now for a just peace, the more
they will make their view a legitimate option in the mainstream Jewish community.
That
is the key to breaking through the widespread fear-induced silence. And that,
in turn, is the key to taking genuine steps toward peace for of America.
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