How the Anti-Israel Left Helps Perpetuate the Occupation

We at Tikkun have recently been discussing how to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Occupation of the West Bank. Like most other liberals and progressives, we see the Occupation as a terrible blight on the history of the Jewish people and an important source for growing anger at those Jews who give blind support to Israeli policies. While the distortions in consciousness that have permitted the Occupation were already present in the right-wing of the Zionist movement, the willingness of the American Jewish community and sections of the Labor Party in Israel to justify and implement the Occupation has transformed Jewish life, often turning major segments of the Jewish world and Judaism into a cheering squad for the policies (including torture and assassination of “suspected militants”) of a particular nation state rather than as a witness to the God of the universe and the possibility of a world based on justice, love, generosity and peace.

Unfortunately, the Left that criticizes Israel has often itself manifested dramatic distortions. For one thing, it seems as if every group of Jews who come to an understanding that Israeli policy is immoral and self-destructive simultaneously develop their own rationale for why they can’t work with other Jewish and non-Jewish groups that have these same ideas. The result is a cacophony of voices that could, if united, work in a powerful way.

But united around what? It can’t be around the dissolution of the State of Israel envisioned by many who are currently planning a set of demonstrations against Israel June 10-12 coordinated by the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation and the United for Peace and Justice, two organizations to which Tikkun belongs and which often do valuable work. The reason we can’t join them is the same reason the Tikkun Community couldn’t join the Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP): the willingness of all these organizations to keep alive as an option the notion that the solution to Israel/Palestine peace lies in the dissolution of a Jewish state, using the language of “one state solution” as the way to signal to many who never thought the Jewish people never deserved a state at all.

Now, don’t get us wrong. We are not pro-states at all, and at Tikkun we are working for a 21st century in which nation states are supplanted by regional and global arrangements and nationalism and nationalist wars disappear. But as long as the world does have states, we think the Jewish people have one of the better cases in the history of the modern world for having the protections that a state entails. That’s one reason why we are strongly critical of Israeli policy, but not in favor of destroying or politely eliminating a Jewish state. But our other reasons for opposing a one-state solution have to do with the well-being of the Palestinian people.

http://files.tikkun.org/current/article.php?story=20070421224404113

:P

"Get'cher score-cards here! Can't tell the players without a score-card! Score-cards here!"

They are both strong advocates for peace, and opponents of the Israeli Right, and of the Right in general.

The facts will speak for themselves......

Would you really care?

but do you promise to stick around? and at least reply when i list a couple?

Makes many very important points.

I hope they have learned that "the enemy of my enemy is not always my friend!"