From the Midwest to the Middle East: Dispatches from the holy land

Before I left Ohio to spend a year studying and volunteering in Israel, I emailed a family friend who had just returned from a semester here, to express my sadness that the result of Jewish suffering has been to inflict suffering onto other peoples. While I take pride in Israel’s successes as a modern society with a high standard of living and a thriving intellectual, literary, and creative culture, the consequences of Israeli militarism often eclipse these brighter points. My correspondence with this friend began amidst Israel’s bombardments of the Gaza Strip and southern Lebanon, as news of the rising Palestinian, Lebanese and Israeli death tolls cycled in. It was not a sunny moment.

My comment was a relatively simpleminded observation: After nearly two millennia of virtual pacifism, Jews in Israel have developed a powerful military force with a corresponding impulse to dominate any foe. The lingering humanitarian crisis in the Gaza strip is evidence of the stark consequences of this arrangement. After Jewish residents were evacuated from Gaza last summer, the Israeli Defense Forces have continued a fierce military and economic siege that keeps Gaza, the most densely populated patch of land on the planet, in a constant state of crisis regarding food, water, sanitary conditions and electricity. Objectively, it’s a human cage; disagreement is only over the cause.

The response to my email by my friend and our families was interesting. News of my comments spread rapidly and an ideological alarm was sounded: Criticism of Israeli behavior is evidence of a traitorous Jew, a pro-Palestinian backslider. A famous quote by former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir was invoked more than once. “Peace will come to the Middle East when the Arabs learn to love their children more than they hate us.” I had never fully realized the potency of the American Jewish bottom line and the rapidity with which any dissenting opinion should be squelched. As I prepared to depart for Israel, the challenge of developing a conscientious and ethically sound relationship with this country started coming into clear focus.

This personal episode is relevant because it reflects a frequent phenomenon among the American Jewish community at large. While there is a wide political spectrum in Israel with contentious arguments over every policy, especially settlements and major military operations, it is taboo to mimic these arguments in the organized Jewish community. Great organizational energy is instead directed at the narrowly defined concept of “support for Israel,” which entails total approval of everything that goes on here, so as not to fuel the nation’s anti-Semitic enemies.

Defining support for Israel in this manner preserves a binary that paints Israel as the morally pristine peace-seeking party left with no choice when dealing with the hostile, anti-democratic terrorists that surround them. This binary rejects the legitimacy of Arab grievances, making peaceful settlement a categorical impossibility and failing to acknowledge Israel’s role in creating its own enemies.

In a controversial article published in the London Review of Books, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt dissect American support for Israel, emphasizing non-Jewish neoconservative leaders who are equally intolerant of criticism of Israel. Walt and Mearsheimer ridicule the idea that open debate, by threatening the status quo, endangers Israel’s existence, and argue conversely that the status quo is extremely dangerous to both Israel and America. The status quo guarantees decades and decades of additional conflict, and makes the recruitment of radical militant enemies a certainty. It guarantees the intensification of anti-American opinion in the Arab world and underscores America’s arrogance in unilaterally charting the course for this region.

Additionally, the suppression of dissenting opinion is a great loss to Israeli peace organizations’ desperate fight to chart a less bloody future. Without a significant counterpart in American politics, Israeli doves cannot generate the necessary power and momentum to undermine the supremacy of their country’s military establishment and move toward a more sincere and lasting settlement.

American Jews frequently tout their role in the civil rights movement and identify the recent suffering of the Jewish people as a driving force in preventing the suffering of others. Clearly, however, the civilian death toll in Lebanon and the lingering humanitarian crisis in the Gaza strip undermine such claims, as the September InterActivist’s interview with Jehan Mullin demonstrates. (To receive a PDF version of September’s edition, email theinteractivist@gmail.com) There are enormous ethical and humanitarian issues relating the state of Israel, and as a young Jew deeply invested in the longevity of his people, I feel a responsibility to work sincerely toward resolving these issues during my lifetime. •

Ben Mendelsohn graduated from Ohio University in August, 2006 with a degree in English literature and film. He is currently living and volunteering in Tel Aviv, Israel.