In his letter of March 24th (“A disconnect in the dialog“) David Cohen makes a strange interpretation of my criticism of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, claiming that such criticisms “demonize and objectify” that country, thus introducing his own disconnect in whatever dialog he hopes for. Yet Israel can blame only itself, not its critics, for the world’s disapprobation.

I had pointed out how deftly Mr. Cohen, the ADL, and the Jewish Federation had managed to change the subject from Gaza to anti-Semitism. Mr. Cohen saw this as “writing off [my Jewish friends and neighbors] as genocidal partners of an apartheid state.” I’m not in the habit of using such incendiary rhetoric, but friends can disagree.

Cohen goes on that the Jewish Holocaust is singular in history. I wish he were right, but of course there is the Armenian genocide – which his own employer, the ADL, actually denied. And there have been many more, starting with King David’s slaughter of the Amelekites and including genocides in our own lifetimes in Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda.

There is nothing singular about the human capacity of violence, injustice and brutality. And it is indeed shocking, after all Jews have endured through the centuries, that a Jewish state could be guilty of human rights abuses. But it’s a fact, and one that Mr. Cohen wants to filter through “lenses,” explain by past persecutions, and diminish by assigning equal blame to oppressor and oppressed.

I’ll happily accept Mr. Cohen’s challenge to acknowledge that not every violent act is Israel’s fault. Israelis in Sderot are justifiably frightened from countless home-made rocket attacks that have killed several civilians.

But does this mean any sensible person must assign equal blame to both parties? Do Palestinians have racist policies that take Israeli homes and land? Did Palestinians kill 1500 Israelis in the Gaza offensive? Do Palestinians control Israel’s borders and internal checkpoints in their own land? Did Palestinians build a “Berlin Wall” on Israeli farms? There are fundamental injustices underlying this conflict that have yet to be acknowledged by Israel’s defenders and professional lobbyists, of which Mr. Cohen is one.

I would in turn challenge Mr. Cohen to acknowledge the reality and Israel’s responsibility for the Palestinian “catastrophe,” the Nakba, which “cleansed” 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland in 1948. But Cohen seems to believe that dialog is only possible if no one criticizes Israel or asks it to confront some ugly realities.

In fact, the Nakba is a fitting event to consider next month at Passover, which re-tells the story of persecution and the flight from oppression. Recalling both the Exodus and the Nakba, we are reminded us that oppression is universal and that when our religious texts call on us to pursue justice: “justice, justice shalt thou pursue” – it means justice for everybody. On Passover some Jews add an olive to the seder plate to remind us that Jewish history is forever linked with that of Palestinians, and neither people will be truly free until justice exists for both.

Mr. Cohen may talk that line, but let’s see him walk it. There will never be peace without justice, and justice requires some painful admissions that, as of yet, Israel’s defenders are not prepared to make.

I am responding to Bob Unger’s essay of March 8th, in which the Standard-Times apparently took some flak for a Danziger cartoon and a few letters opposing Israel’s siege in Gaza. With very little effort, a delegation from the Jewish Federation and David Cohen, who works for a number of pro-Israel lobbying organizations including the ADL, succeeded in convincing the paper that the problem was anti-Semitism.

How easily the subject can be changed.

The subject, in this case, being the illegal and (a number of us would say) immoral treatment of Palestinians in Israel’s Occupied Territories.

The descriptions of Unger’s friend’s father sleeping with a packed suitcase under the bed indeed strikes a chord with many Jews who regard Israel as their rainy-day policy. Of course, sleeping with a suitcase under the bed also is a current reality for Palestinians who never know when their homes will be bulldozed. But the world has changed much in 60 years. A couple weeks ago “Waltz with Bashir,” a film based on an Israeli soldier’s nightmares resulting from his involvement in the Sabra-Shatila massacres in Lebanon in the 80’s, almost took an academy award for best animation. Military “refuseniks” regularly decline to serve in the Occupied Territories. In 2007, Avraham Burg, former speaker of the Israeli Knesset, wrote a book which appeared last year in English, “The Holocaust is Over: We Must Rise from its Ashes.” This is the counterpoint to Mr. Unger’s editorial and, more importantly, suggests the tremendous ethical turmoil Israelis are grappling with in confronting their society and their history.

But for American pro-Israel groups like the Federation or the ADL, it doesn’t matter that Israel is now the most powerful military nation in the Middle East, the only nation in the region to have nuclear weapons, and has both the ear and the purse of the United States. David has become Goliath and yet these organizations still think of Israel as a nation of helpless refugees of three generations ago.

The cartoon which partly prompted the delegation’s complaints was indeed in poor taste and does not adequately depict the politics of Netanyahu or Livni, although Lieberman publicly urged that Gaza should be destroyed completely like Grozny was by the Russians, and that Arab members of the Knesset should be killed – so Danziger had him pegged correctly. As for Netanyahu, his party flatly rejects a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River and so Palestinians must either remain in a quasi-Apartheid state, or be forcibly deported. Not quite as bad as Lieberman, but bad enough. And none of the three candidates seemed particularly appalled by the massive loss of life in Gaza. So maybe Danziger didn’t have it so very wrong after all.

For the ADL to whine to the Standard Times about anti-Semitism is the very definition of the term “chutzpah.” The ADL itself has been criticized by Jewish peace groups for actually defending Avigdor Lieberman’s racist attacks on Israeli Arabs.

Cultural understanding is already alive and well in this community. Any visitor to Buttonwood Park will see Abe Landau’s arm with its concentration camp number on the Holocaust memorial there. Avahath Achim is among the oldest synagogues in New England. A charter school is operating in the Tifereth Israel building. Jews have been well integrated into our region’s and American life for centuries. Jonathan Sarna’s excellent history, “American Judaism” from the Yale Press, paints a fairly positive portrait of Jewish acceptance in America since the earliest Sephardic Jews arrived with the Dutch. In the Truro Synagogue, you can read a wonderful letter from George Washington stating that this is a country of all faiths – a letter that Washington wrote to all 24 of the nation’s Jewish congregations at the time. The suitcase under the bed has been unnecessary in this country for hundreds of years.

The dispute over Palestine is a political and territorial issue which has less to do with Jew versus Muslim than occupied versus occupier. It is an issue which demands more attention to justice, human rights, and international law than to exploring our feelings or singing Kumbaya (or Hatikvah). If anything, we’ve been a bit remiss in the cultural or historical understanding of Palestinians.

What is interesting now is that the Obama administration has sent a number of signals indicating a new, more balanced, approach in dealing with the Arab world – and pro-Israel supporters don’t like it a bit. This, I suspect, not simply the cartoon, is what truly upsets pro-Israel flag-wavers, fixated on persecutions of the past, in which every affront means an existential threat or anti-Semitism.

So let’s not change the subject.

Friends of Israel have been a little touchy about the upcoming UN Review Conference on racism” nicknamed “Durban II”), dubbed Durban II, and its resolutions. Israel plans to boycott the conference and several of its friends, including the U.S. and Canada, have stepped back considerably from endorsing the conference. Although it will attend as an observer, the U.S. has abandoned efforts to continue to shape the draft resolutions. In doing so, the United States made the right decision, and for the right reasons.

The Durban II document blasts xenophobia toward foreigners in general terms. It mentions discrimination against immigrants without identifying particular nations. It deplores propaganda used against foreigners vaguely. It expresses shock at tribal and ethnic violence, once again without so much as a mention of a continent. The document says that militias should not be used to terrorize minorities – where? It suggests that victims of slavery might have some justification for seeking recourse to reparations (a view which President Obama has opposed). It complains that the global War against Terror has given rise to racial profiling and human rights abuses, including spying on people in their places of worship. If this had been a much shorter document of universal principles, it would have meant the same thing to all countries.

But on about the 8th page the document dutifully deplores the Holocaust, then launches into a full page of criticisms of Israel. The word “Zionism” does not appear in any draft resolution (despite distortions by Israel and its policy defenders in the U.S.) and only the facts of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, as well as its discrimination toward its own Arab citizens, are condemned. The document criticizes Israel’s “Law of Return” as a racial law, which is indisputable since the law pertains only to Jews or in-laws of Jews. And who can rationally dispute the facts of Israel’s occupation – facts documented for decades? Everything on that page was true.

But Israel is the only country that is specifically singled out for criticism, and for all the committee-generated verbiage, the Durban II document lacks the courage to target any specific human rights abuses other than those in Palestine and Israel. There are also quite a few missed opportunities. On about page 16 it calls for an end to discrimination based on sexual orientation, but fails to identify the countries with the worst records of persecution of gays (Iran and Saudi Arabia come to mind). The document goes on to encourage the recognition of international bodies and discusses UN procedures and bodies, but in none of the remaining 30 pages are any countries other than Israel ever mentioned by name.

It is regrettable that the United States decided to walk away from the draft process after several dozen revisions, but it did try. Other points might have been added to the document – expressions of concern for the treatment of native people in the U.S., Brazil and Tibet, or concern for the persecution of Uighurs in China might have been added. The treatment of religious and ethnic minorities in Islamic countries, Venezuela, the treatment of Baha’i or Kurds in various countries, or the treatment of foreign workers or religious minorities in Saudi Arabia, could all have been mentioned as well. Of course, by naming names and naming crimes for each of the 195 nations of the earth, the draft document would have been tens of thousands of pages long.

While Israel and several pro-Israel organizations in the United States rejoiced in the State Department’s seeming rejection of anti-Semitism, there is a more obvious truth: The Durban II document was simply a mess. In fact, the word “anti-Semitism” was absent from State Department spokesman Robert Wood’s explanation for the rejection of the document.

It may be true that the United States is not eager to pay reparations, doesn’t welcome criticism, and doesn’t want to criticize its friends – which includes not only Israel, but Saudi Arabia and China. But another truth is that the Durban II outcomes document, by failing to hold none of the nations of the world accountable for racism and human rights abuses (with the notable exception of one), is also a document that means nothing.

The U.S. actually did the right thing.