Peter Beinart: “It is immoral to have ethnically-based citizenship...”

Last winter I attended a Peter Beinart talk at Harvard.  He was there to debate the merits of his most recent book, The Crisis of Zionism, with Barry Shrage, a Harvard professor and president of Boston's Combined Jewish Philanthropies.  It was an interesting experience.

Despite facing a largely pro-Israel audience at Harvard at a time when his book had already elicited substantial scorn from many in the American Jewish community, Beinart presented his arguments about the immoralities and dangers of Israeli policy with dignified composure.  That same composure attended his rejoinders to rightwing counterarguments from Dr. Shrage.  Moreover, he struck me as a very decent and unusually honest man.  (My impression of Shrage was less flattering).

In my last post I noted an upcoming talk where Norman Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky will discuss waning Jewish-American support for Israel.  One of Finkelstein’s key pieces of anecdotal evidence for his claim that liberal American Jews are distancing themselves from Israel’s more draconian policies toward the Palestinians is the case of Beinart: a figure of some standing in New York's orthodox Jewish community whose CV includes a stint as editor at The New Republic—a staunchly pro-Israel publication. 

I was initially skeptical about Beinart's significance for those of us hoping to see American political discourse grow more sympathetic to the Palestinian plight.  Before the Harvard lecture, I had caught snippets from reviews and interviews that made it sound like Beinart's opposition to settlement expansion in the West Bank was solely a concern about Israel's demographic integrity qua Jewish state and adorned with reservations about the purported desire of Palestinians that Israel simply cease to exist.  

 But it’s clear that something significant is going on when you see people like him making this basic point about racism so bluntly, and at venues likes Shalom TV:

[Note: It looks like the timestamp embed code isn't working, so to cut to the part I'm referring to here, skip to 35:15 mark or open this link in a new tab]

I disagree with many of his individual points as well as much of the narrative that frames them—e.g., he says Israel’s settlement projects in the West Bank constitute a “tragic mistake” rather than a predictable extension of a colonial project that goes back to the first Zionist aliyah—but ask yourself if you can remember anyone in the mainstream of the American Jewish intellectual establishment speaking so openly before, say, 2008, about the immorality of ethnic citizenship in Israel.

Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, and Anna Baltzer at the New School

Earlier this month Norman Finkelstein posted on his website a flyer for an upcoming talk with Noam Chomsky and Anna Belzer which will be held at the New School in Manhattan on October 6th.   The subject of the talk is also the subject of Finkelstein's most recent book, namely the state of American Jewish support for Israel.

It occurs to me that this talk will coincide with the first day of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine's NYC sessions, also to be held in Manhattan.  Yet I can't seem to find any indication that the New School talk is being held in affiliation with the Russell Tribunal.  Since it's doubtful this scheduling is purely a coincidence--after all, both events were put together by and feature people who follow the solidarity movement pretty closely--it's hard to avoid idle speculation as to whether this talk might have been intentionally set up in counter-position to the tribunal, which will almost exclusively feature spokespeople on Palestine who have taken strident positions against the two-state advocacy for which Chomsky and Finkelstein are known.  This also unlikely; such petty discursive fractiousness is beneath people like Chomsky and the good people who put together the Russell Tribunal.  So if you know something I don't about all this, please leave a comment.  If not, I'll just have to wait and see if the organizers get back to me with an explanation.

The Narcissism of Small Differences

It isn’t exactly a secret that leftist activism suffers from a chronic tendency toward infighting and sectarian division.  As the recently deceased Irish journalist Alexander Cockburn put it, “one of the problems with the left is [that] it tends to form a small tight circle with the guns pointing in and then they fire.” 

Within the Palestine solidarity movement this autoimmune disorder has manifested in recent years in the form of a debate over whether the movement should be advocating for a one-state or two-state approach to addressing the grievances of the long stateless Palestinian people. 

The rough contours of the debate are as follows. 

Advocates of the two-state solution generally frame their position in terms of international law as it bears on the grievances of the Palestinians against Israel.  They point out that there has been an international consensus on how to effect a “Peaceful settlement of the question of Palestine” since the mid-1970s and that this consensus is grounded in the Geneva Conventions and the UN Charter.  The quintessential articulation of this position’s juridical bedrock is an International Court of Justice advisory opinion from 2004 that addressed the four “final status issues” upon which past attempts to broker a settlement between the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships have foundered.  The ruling stated unequivocally that the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem are occupied Palestinian territory, the Palestinian refugees have a right to return to the homes they fled during the Six Day War, and both the Israeli settlement project in the occupied territories and the separation wall that Israel built in the wake of the Second Intifada are in direct violation of international law.  The political upshot of this is that the Israelis must cede sovereignty over the Occupied Territories to the Palestinian leadership, dismantle the separation wall, and honor the refugees’ right of return by either facilitating their repatriation inside Israel or through substantial monetary compensation.

Supporters of a one-state framework typically reject this position for one or both of the following reasons. 

Facts on the ground have rendered a two-state settlement impossible.  While it may have seemed plausible in the 1970s that the territories Israel occupied in June 1967 could be forged into a sovereign Palestinian state in exchange for peace and recognition, the intervening decades of aggressive Israeli settlement and infrastructure projects in the West Bank have created an insurmountable obstacle to a full withdrawal.  These Israeli development projects have brought with them an extensive Israeli security apparatus that operates in close cooperation with the Palestinian Authority, which is, in effect, little more than a subcontractor for Israeli state power.  The punch line of these observations is that the whole of Israel-Palestine is already encompassed by a de facto one state situation.  Given the way this line of thought brings into relief the apartheid-like situation of Palestinians in the territories, who lack Israeli citizenship while living under what appears to be permanent Israeli control, solidarity activists should eschew fantasies of two-state solutions and advocate instead for equal Palestinian rights and inclusion in a revised version of the polity they're already sharing with the Israelis.

Two-state solutions are built on outdated nationalist ideology and fail to address the problems faced by Palestinian citizens of Israel.  The gist of this objection can be easily gleaned from the following remark made by John Spritzler in a forthcoming interview:

For me the overriding issue is that the two-state solution says there should be an exclusively Jewish state in which people who are not Jewish—namely, the Palestinians-- are either not allowed to return from refugee camps to their homes in the state or are made second class citizens, and that next to it there should be a “Palestinian state”. That’s Klu Klux Klan thinking. “Let’s have a white state.” “Let’s have a Jewish state.” It’s racist thinking.

And indeed, personal experience has mercilessly taught me that to defend the two-state position can be an invitation to accusations of racism from radically-inclined activists.  Needless to say, this sort of hair trigger inclination to label fellow activists as bigots is, if nothing else, not conducive to constructive debate.  

To my mind, there is no better illustration of the toxic effect this debate is having on the movement than the backlash to Norman Finkelstein’s recent criticisms of the BDS movement’s implicit one-state orientation.   

Despite decades of relentless advocacy and sacrifice for the Palestinian cause, it only took one youtube clip of Finkelstein voicing some characteristically polemical criticisms of recent trends in the solidarity movement for him to be labeled a “Zionist” and a “traitor” and summarily dismissed as an ally, virtually overnight.  However one feels about Finkelstein’s arguments, it should be clear that a movement which would turn its back on someone who has given so much for the crime of expressing some cranky dissenting views has lost perspective.  

Are we fighting for justice or are we playing a game to see who can most sanctimoniously outflank their allies to the left?  US citizens who decidedly support the Palestinian cause represent a tiny fraction of the population.  To think that one can sow division and enmity between them with self-righteous posturing and inflammatory rhetoric without betraying that cause is to help ensure that we will continue repeating the self-destructive mistakes of our leftist forbears. 

Russell Tribunal NYC

The 4^th session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine will convene October 6^th in New York. 

The tribunal is modeled on the International War Crimes Tribunal, organized in 1966 by the eminent British philosopher Bertrand Russell.  The IWCT met in two sessions—the first in Sweden, the second in Denmark—in 1967 to investigate alleged war crimes committed by the US military in Vietnam.  Aside from Russell, participants included the famed French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, military historian Gabriel Kolko, and a young Tariq Ali.   

The basic premise behind the original Russell Tribunal was that the same standards of international law and morality applied to Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg Tribunals should hold for all states.  If the US was violating these standards, it should be held equally accountable.

The Russell Tribunal on Palestine was established to assess and pass judgment on crimes committed by Israel and its collaborators against the Palestinians.  In the words of its organizers:

The RToP is an International People’s Tribunal created in response to the international community’s inaction regarding Israel’s recognized violations of international law. The Tribunal aims to bring attention to the complicity and responsibility of various national, international and corporate actors in the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and the perpetuation of Israel’s impunity under international law.

Russell Tribunals have also been held to evaluate the crimes of Pinochet’s regime in Chile and the American occupation of Iraq.

If all goes according to plan, I’ll be attending the New York sessions and reporting back here on this blog.

A modest proposal...

I recently had the opportunity to conduct an extended interview with John Spritzler, a retired researcher from the Harvard School of Public Health who has written and organized for a number of local BDS campaigns, including the relatively high profile (read: controversial) Somerville Divestment Project.  The interview covered a range of topics related to philosophy, activism, and the politics of Israel-Palestine.  I hope to have the full transcript edited and available here sometime over the weekend, but for now here’s an excerpt in which John lays out one of the more original and compelling proposals I’ve come across for resolving the conflict over Palestine:

Based on published accounts of the magnitude of wealth of the 18 richest families in Israel, you can demonstrate that if most—not all, but  most--of their wealth was put into a fund, after five years it would accumulate enough additional wealth that you could say to every Israeli Jew who is living in a house or on property that was stolen from Palestinians that they will be given one million dollars to buy the land and house from the original Palestinian owner—for the full million dollars.  And if they refuse to sell it to you, then you will give the land back to them but keep the million dollars to buy a new house for yourself.  That proposal, I argue, would be enormously popular among most of the Israeli working class because it would create a situation where they were no longer living amidst enemies who hate them for having stolen all this land.  Furthermore, it would create a housing boom.  The economy would take off, creating jobs and reducing unemployment.  I mean, it’s a win-win situation for almost everybody except the 18 wealthiest families.  Okay, so you can say well, that’s never going to happen.  Well, it’s never going to happen only if there’s never a movement that takes this perspective and organizes around it.  But if there is such a movement, it could gain support.

What I'm Doing Here

It is a commonplace on the American political Left that the plight of the Palestinians is typically mitigated, misreported, or effaced altogether in mainstream press coverage of the decades-old Israel-Palestine conflict.  But it is also the case that the three intervening decades separating Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon from the present have witnessed the emergence of a solidarity movement advocating on behalf of Palestinian rights which has grown steadily from an exiguous assemblage of fringe elements to a standard cause célèbre on college campuses from Brown to Berkeley.  And there are probably few places where American engagement with the Palestinian struggle for rights, statehood, and peace is more prominent and organized than the Northeastern coastal cities of Boston and New York.

For the past several years I have been personally involved with many Northeastern nodes in the diffuse network of what are, for better or worse, commonly referred to as “pro-Palestine” organizations. (My friends and I prefer to think of ourselves as "pro-justice" and "pro-peace" rather than partisan fans rooting for our chosen team).  My involvement has led me to participate in actions as diverse as ballot initiatives, protest demonstrations, academic conferences, and film screenings.  This work has been gratifying and hopefully, in some small way, has advanced the cause of bringing justice and peace to Israel-Palestine.

But my experiences as an activist have also kindled a kind of fascination with the movement itself—the people, rhetoric, goals, and tactics, along with their reception among various swaths of the public have been exciting to follow and analyze purely insofar as they form a peculiar and dynamic social phenomenon, independent of any personal stake I might have in their particularities or consequences.

Moreover, I can’t count how many times since I first became engaged with Palestine as a political cause that I have taken part in a wildly effervescent rally or sat, utterly engrossed, through an informative and provocative lecture, only to come up empty in the days that followed when I searched online media for reports documenting the event.  There’s a lot of noteworthy engagement with this thorny issue going on here in the Northeast, and much of it is unfortunately going under- or altogether unreported.  

Hence this blog.

Here you’ll find coverage of local actions, campaigns, and lectures pertaining to the Palestinian cause in and around the two cities I simultaneously call home, as well as interviews and character sketches of locals who’ve heeded the call to free Palestine (and perhaps, for good measure, some locals who decidedly have not).  And while it would be impossible to completely set aside my own solidarity with the people these activists seek to help, I will strive–in the spirit of Palestine’s most eloquent and incisive voice: the late Edward Said–to maintain a critical distance from my subject.  Rather than use this blog simply as a channel for spreading the word about local activism in its original terms and framing, I want to do proper justice to this important work by documenting it, where possible, with the unblinkered eyes of an outsider and by subjecting it, where appropriate, to earnest critique.

Hence the title.