On Sunday, September 23rd, Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby gave a talk at the Greater New Bedford Jewish Federation. As a member of the community, I was there to see if he would blast Jews for voting Democratic and pitch the Republican Party (he writes that God is a Republican); or if he was going to take potshots at multiculturalism and secularism and talk about the primacy of “Judeo-Christian” values – or if he was going to hop on the recent Muslim-bashing bandwagon – all points of view he regularly flogs in his Globe columns (website http://www.jeffjacoby.com). But this particular evening he chose another subject: selling the One State Solution.
Before I go on, I should point out that I agree with Jacoby on a One State Solution – though only because Israel has now taken so much Palestinian land that the Two State Solution is dead. Coming from an American, it should come as no surprise to say that a single, secular, democratic state is not only best, but is now the only practical solution to packing 12 million people into a space the size of New Jersey. Jacoby would consider this view antisemitic. Yet he sees nothing wrong with forcing Jewish law and ethnic privilege upon a substantial (and some say, only temporary) minority. Besides, there are many ways that Jewishness and democracy can coexist without requiring a quasi-religious settler state. Jewishness seems to be alive and well in the United States. We’ve also had 64 years to see what Zionism has become.
Jacoby started his talk, “Whatever Happened to Israel’s Good Name?” by asking if anyone remembered when the media actually loved Israel. Hammering away at the theme of how the media and forces of delegitimization have now conspired to “demonize” Israel, Jacoby asked the friendly audience if they remembered when LIFE Magazine had described Israel as a little nation “struggling to survive.” Well, not any more, he lamented.
He pulled out a copy of a special issue of LIFE Magazine from 1973, the “Spirit of Israel,”commemorating the nation’s 25th birthday with 92 pages of photos and articles, and held up his prop. Jacoby asked the Federation audience: Can you imagine the media publishing something like this today? Can you imagine them being concerned with Israel’s survival today? Jacoby was clearly preaching to the choir, and most of the audience was rapt and nodding in agreement. What Jacoby downplayed was that the Israel of 1973 was under a Mapai government, the Prime Minister was a bit of a novelty as both a woman and an American, most of the kibbutzim had not yet been converted to corporations, Palestinian territory had not yet been completely expropriated, and messianic nationalism had not yet taken root in Israel. This was a very different Israel in 1973.
Next Jacoby mentioned Michael Oren’s Wall Street Journal article, “Whatever Happened to Israel’s Reputation? – How in 40 years the Jewish state went from inspiring underdog to supposed oppressor.” Oren’s piece invokes the same LIFE Magazine issue and extols democracy and vitality in Israel, but stops short of admitting to readers of the international business magazine that Israel has finally come clean and formally abandoned the Two State Solution – although this was the message that Jacoby and the Jewish Federation were selling that Sunday night.
Jacoby repeated points he had made in his May 23rd Boston Globe column, “Peace process harmed Israel’s reputation,” in which he wrote: “The concessions Israel has made in pursuit of peace are unprecedented in diplomatic history. (I found myself wondering what actual concessions he was talking about). In his piece, Oren claims the concessions consisted of: Recognizing the PLO as a diplomatic partner, creating an armed Palestinian Authority, twice offering the Palestinians a sovereign state, agreeing to share control of Jerusalem, removing every Jewish community in Gaza.” But this conflates the PA with the PLO, paints Palestinian policemen as an army, casts offers of an emasculated state as true self-determination, defines continued land theft in East Jerusalem as “sharing,” and offers a revisionist version of the Gaza pullout. Jacoby didn’t even bother putting a spin on Israel’s human rights abuses or its Occupation. For him and most of the audience, Israel has no warts – and it was still 1973.
He described Ariel Sharon’s unilateral pullout from Gaza as the work of “appeasers.” The “appeasers” in this case – Ariel Sharon and Shaul Mofaz, who implemented Tokhnit HaHafrada (the Apartheid-sounding “separation plan”) – were members at various times of both the Likud and its spin-off, Kadima. Why would crafty old Ariel Sharon suddenly go soft? Well, he didn’t, said Sharon’s closest advisor, Dov Weissblas, explaining: “The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process. […] When you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Disengagement supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.”
Indeed, the Two State solution is dead and still pickling in the same formaldehyde – although the U.S. State Department continues to maintain that Palestinians must sit down in direct talks with Israel, even as Israel denies it needs to. The “Roadmap” is all but forgotten and Israel’s hasbarists have a ready-made answer for why there is no “political process with the Palestinians” – We never had a partner for peace.
In much of his talk, Jacoby seemed to be implying that, during all the years that Israel claimed to be negotiating a Two State Solution alongside American intermediaries, this was actually the work of an evil “Mr. Hyde” appeaser – because the more sensible “Dr. Jeckyl” knew all along what his “red lines” were – and that if it were not for Likud-Kadima’s temporary insanity no one would have promised to actually honor such appeasement crazy talk. But now the world unreasonably expects Israel to live up to the yet-to-be-explained “magnanimous concessions” it made while temporarily insane, and the damned Palestinians continue to insist on a state. No, we must have it all. Reconciling Zionism and Palestinian statehood is a zero-sum game in which there can only be one winner. This was the gist of his talk.
No one should be surprised at any of these sudden revelations because the Likud’s platform for years has spelled out its “red lines”:
- The Jordan river will be the permanent eastern border of the State of Israel.
- Jerusalem is the eternal, united capital of the State of Israel and only of Israel. The government will flatly reject Palestinian proposals to divide Jerusalem.
- The Government of Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river.
- The Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza are the realization of Zionist values. Settlement of the land is a clear expression of the unassailable right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel and constitutes an important asset in the defense of the vital interests of the State of Israel. The Likud will continue to strengthen and develop these communities and will prevent their uprooting.
That night Jacoby (and the Jewish Federation) were also selling the line that American Jews no longer want Two States. He cited figures he claimed came from the American Jewish Committee, which purported to show that 55% of American Jews are opposed to a Two State Solution. He called this a “healthy development” and added that a Palestinian state would be a big “mistake.” I was unable to verify his statistics on the AJC website or elsewhere. In fact I discovered not only the opposite, but figures strongly to the contrary. A 2011 Gallup poll reported that 78% of American Jews and 81% of American Muslims support a Two State solution.
Lies and damned lies notwithstanding, he was on a roll, at least with a large portion of the audience. Jacoby complained that, somewhere along the line, people had actually started seeing things from the Palestinian perspective. He claimed that the act of simply sitting down and negotiating with Palestinians “has undermined Israel’s claim to the land.” He dismissed Palestinian national aspirations as being based on antisemitism, citing an admission by Edward Said. From my reading, what Said actually wrote is that antisemitism has been an obstacle to Arab nationalism, not its basis.
Jacoby then argued that Israel is now in a 19-year retreat from the Likud’s “red lines” and that Israel should unapologetically reject Palestinian statehood and sharing of Jerusalem once and for all. He tried to paint these views as “shared U.S. values.” Perhaps they are shared with people like Mike Huckabee, but One State and a completely Judaized Jerusalem are not accepted United States foreign policy and (outside the Jewish Federation) not acceptable to most American Jews. Yet many in the audience nodded in agreement. Jacoby added that Israel’s backing away from these “red lines” has created “irresolution,” “weakness,” and “panic” which only encourages Israel’s enemies and diminishes Israel’s respect.
Jacoby again echoed the obligatory throwaway line (“Israel has never had a partner for peace”), and asked provocatively, What is peace, anyway? Peace means one partner in conflict must give up his aims. He continued, Besides, peace is over-rated. Israel can exist without peace. He cited statistics showing that Israelis are quite happy with their quality of life – presumably including the economic and moral consequences of being an occupier. The hardliners firmly expect Two Staters to give up this aim.
His time was up and he took questions. I held up a copy of the 2011 B’Tselem Human Rights report and countered, As long as we’re displaying magazines tonight, this one displays another dimension of Israel that it doesn’t like to address: human rights abuses, illegal detentions, assassinations, home demolitions, confiscation of land, and press censorship.
The audience booed, and Jacoby asked me if there was a question in there somewhere. I wrapped up, Yes, my question is this – why shouldn’t Americans, especially American Jews, be concerned about these issues? He brushed off B’Tselem as an antisemitic group generating “libel” and “propaganda” against Israel, and totally ignored the question of whether Americans and American Jews had a right to be concerned with Israel’s actions. Instead he talked about a flowering democracy, flowering press freedoms, and a flowering economy in Israel.
The combination of wilful ignorance and denial in the room that night spells a real danger for this community and others like it. The extreme form of Zionism represented by people like Jeff Jacoby and peddled by the Jewish Federation repeatedly (this was Jacoby’s second talk to the group) – one which is so at odds with both U.S. foreign policy and Jewish ethics – will forever wreck the chance of Israel actually living up to the bright and shiny 1973 LIFE Magazine image that many still cling to in their minds and hearts today.
This was published in MondoWeiss on October 3, 2012
http://mondoweiss.net/2012/10/boston-globe-columnist-sells-one-jewish-state-and-wonders-why-israels-image-is-tanking/
