Let me open by saying to all of my Muslim readers: “Blessed Eid al-Adha. May God return it to you and your family with goodness, health, and peace.”
This morning I spoke with a group of young Jewish Americans spending the next months in Israel on an educational experience (Kivunim) trying to understand Israel and their own Jewish identity. I remember doing the same on the Young Judaea Year Course program in 1974-1975. Even in real time as an 18-year-old, I understand that it would be one of the most consequential years of my life.
I joined the Zionist youth movement Young Judaea in 1970 after my family moved from a very Jewish neighborhood on Long Island to a very non-Jewish neighborhood further east on the island. In my new school where Jews were only 3% of the student population, a classmate who spent the summer in Israel with his family invited me to start with him a new chapter of Young Judaea in our town.
Honestly, I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I did think it would be a good place to meet Jewish girls. I joined and became a leading activist very quickly because it seemed to be intellectually challenging and not just a social club as some of the other Jewish groups in town were. The next year, I was elected to the regional leadership council, and by 12th grade I was president of the Long Island region of the movement – one of the largest regions in the country.
Shaping a political agenda
My own political agenda had begun to be shaped at the time of the US general election in 1968. As a youngster, I marched against the war in Vietnam and in civil rights marches. I had the privilege of meeting my congressman, Allard Lowenstein. He became best known as a moral and political organizer of the American liberal Left in the 1950s-1970s. His causes included civil rights, opposition to apartheid, opposition to the Vietnam War, and human rights.
One of his most important political roles was in the anti-Vietnam War movement. He was a key figure in the “Dump Johnson” movement, which encouraged anti-war Democrats to challenge president Lyndon Johnson in 1968. That effort helped create the political climate in which senator Eugene McCarthy ran against Johnson, and Johnson eventually decided not to seek reelection. I also had the honor to meet McCarthy – I was 12 years old at the time.
In the summer of 1972, while attending the leadership training program of Young Judaea in Camp Tel Yehuda, we engaged in a role-playing exercise to try to understand Israeli politics. I was given the role of what was called “The New Left.” This was a loose grouping of activists, intellectuals, students, and journalists that challenged both the Israeli establishment and the older Zionist-socialist Left, especially after the 1967 war. Their positions included opposition to the occupation after 1967.
The New Left argued that ruling over Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza would corrupt Israeli democracy and deepen the conflict. The New Left called for withdrawal from the occupied territories and recognition of Palestinian national rights at a time when that was still considered radical. This was one of its defining differences from the mainstream Zionist Left.
Many in Labor spoke of “territories,” “security borders,” or Jordanian options. The New Left increasingly spoke of Palestinian self-determination. The New Left paid more attention to Palestinian citizens of Israel, land confiscations, military rule’s legacy, discrimination, and the gap between formal citizenship and real equality.
The 1970s also saw the rise of the Israeli Black Panthers, mainly Mizrahi Jews protesting poverty and discrimination. They were not identical with the Ashkenazi intellectual New Left, but they became part of the broader anti-establishment challenge to Labor Zionism.
I found myself agreeing with all of the positions of this small part of Israeli political culture. Later I had the honor to meet Lova Eliav. His book – Land of the Hart – became my political bible, replacing The Zionist Idea as my source of inspiration. By the age of 16, I already knew that Israel would be my home, even though I found myself increasingly getting into political arguments with almost every Israeli I met.
I was confronted by these Israelis (living in the United States) claiming that I was a naive, unaware American who could not understand the reality of Israel because I didn’t serve in the Israeli army and, as so many of them said to me: “You don’t know THEM” – meaning the Arabs. If I had been more knowledgeable then and surer of my own opinions, I would have asked them how they knew THEM. I would have discovered that they did not know THEM at all.
When I did immigrate to Israel after completing my BA in Politics and History of the Middle East, I knew I had to do something very significant in order to dispel the claim that I did not know THEM. I considered doing an MA at the American University of Beirut, but the civil war in Lebanon was too dangerous for me to be there.
I then heard about an American Reform rabbi (the late Bruce Cohen) who was looking for American Jewish university graduates to come to Israel to live for two years in Arab villages and engage in projects to improve Jewish-Arab relations between communities living in close proximity. That is how I joined Interns for Peace and ended up living in Kafr Kara from 1979-1981.
My emergence into Israeli society and culture came from a deep understanding that Israel could not be the democratic nation-state of the Jewish people if it ruled over another people and denied them freedom and if all Israeli citizens were not genuinely equal in the eyes of the state.
Furthermore, it is also clear that Israel will never have security if the Palestinians don’t have freedom and vice versa. We have lied to ourselves for too long about being the only democracy in the Middle East. Israel will never truly be democratic if our society is not based on the equality of all its citizens, and the Arab citizens of Israel will never be treated as equals as long as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is unresolved.
Not only are these two aspects of life in Israel essential to define ourselves as a democracy, they are also the only way for Israel to be a state that is based on morality and believes that maximum justice within the country and between us and our neighbors must be the core to our survival. A country that is inherently immoral because of the inequality of its citizens based on national-religious identity and rejects the aspiration of seeking maximal justice cannot survive forever.
This is a challenge that faces the State of Israel now more than at any other point in our history. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict must be resolved; it cannot be managed – that is what October 7 teaches us. All citizens of Israel must be equal because without that Israel cannot truly be a democracy.
The writer is the Middle East director of the International Communities Organization and the co-head of the Alliance for Two States.
Source:
www.jpost.com
