Child Abuse

Listen to Susan Abulhawa:

They start terrorizing us at a young age. At any given time, Israel typically holds hundreds of Palestinian children in administrative detention, where they are interrogated and tortured without charge, without trial, without their parents, without a lawyer, without an advocate. They’re often kidnapped on their way to and from school, playing in the streets and throwing rocks at tanks, as they have a right to do, or pulled from their beds and dragged away in the middle of the night. They’re shot and murdered or maimed wherever they stand.[1]

And to Rabbi Joseph Berman, Government Affairs Liaison for Jewish Voice for Peace who says:

Almost half of the 5 million Palestinian people living under military occupation are children. These young people who should be free to play, learn, develop, and grow, must live with the constant fear of home demolitions, physical violence and even imprisonment at the hands of Israeli forces… Every year, hundreds of Palestinian children are being arrested, held in inhumane conditions, and denied their rights of due process by Israeli military kangaroo courts. Every year, 75% of those children suffer documented abuse or mistreatment at the hands of Israeli forces. And Israel just brought back  “administrative detention” for children, allowing the IDF to lock up children indefinitely, without even bringing a charge.

           440 Palestinian children, some as young as 12, are locked up in Israeli military prisons. Pulled            from their beds and dragged away in the middle of the night

I can only imagine the pain felt by children watching their parents being abused by Israeli kids in uniforms carrying guns. In their young life they have lived not only with the theft of their homes and water but also their history and dignity. Their parents have no way of protecting them and they know it.

However, with all the injustice, suffering and humiliation inflicted upon Palestinian children, what Israel is doing to its own children is child abuse at its worse.

Israel teaches every day by its rhetoric and actions that because they are Jewish, somehow they are superior to other children, that it’s OK to rob and kill other human beings because Jewish kids are “God chosen people.”  Even if the children of Israel do not as yet know what is being done in the name of their Jewishness, they will someday learn. Perhaps then, they will be embarrassed, or worse. They might buy into their role of living above the rules of civilization.

The pain will come when they grow up to live in a world that will not see them as superior, but simply as arrogant. When that happens, Jewish children will have one of three choices; Live in isolation, which in the modern world is getting harder and harder to do. Or accept the fact that they have been terribly abused as children by their own people and government. Or put on blinders and blame their loneliness on anti-Semitism.  Regardless, they will have been assigned to a life of isolation and loneliness.  

I call this the worst form of child abuse. I cannot imagine anything that would infuriate me more  than to have someone come along and tell my children that they do not have to live by the same rules of courtesy and justice as everyone else because they are exceptional.  I cannot imagine anything that would guarantee more unhappiness. Not only would they be miserable, they would spread their misery to anyone who loves them.

Golda Meir said, “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children, but we can never forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.”  Well, I have news for her. It was not the “Arabs” who turned her children into killers. It was their own Jewish superiority culture. Israel’s attitude that Jews are superior human beings and all who are not Jews are less deserving simply because they are not Jews. I find myself asking, what are the parents of these children thinking. Then I remember, they were abused in exactly the same way when they were children. 

Thomas Are

May 16, 2016

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[1] Susan Abulhawa, Why We’re Suing the U.S. Treasury Department.  Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.  May 2016, p.55.

Raining Rockets

Michael Oren, Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. said on CNN,  “We have thousands of rockets raining down on our citizens.” In fact, we hear over and over again, “rockets are raining” down on Israel.  It makes a strong impression.

Advertisers will tell you that the essence of propaganda is repetition.  So, we hear on FOX News, repeated reports of “rockets raining” down on Israel.  It is such an important image that Israel will do anything to keep it alive, even when rockets stop. In the summer of 2008, Palestinian sources reported 8 rockets in June, 12 in July, 11 in August, 4 in September and 2 in October.  An Israeli Intelligence Report issued by the Israeli government to international journalists  states, “Hamas was careful to maintain the ceasefire.” There were no deaths by rockets because there were no rockets.[1] 

Not the image of “rockets raining” that Israel wants.  An average of four drops per month hardly qualifies as a rain.  When I look out on my front drive and see four drops, I hardly expect to read in the paper that we had a rainy day.  If there are not enough drops to wet the street or water my hedges, I don’t expect my neighbor to say, “Wow! What a rainy day.”

Back in 2008, Israel had a dilemma. How to maintain the victim image of rockets raining down on innocent women and children when there are no rockets? After six month of rocket absence, on November 4^th  Israel invaded Gaza and killed six Palestinians.  Did you get that date? November 4^th was election night in the US when Barack Obama was elected president. Israel planned its invasion precisely at a time when it was almost guaranteed no one in America was watching news from Israel. We were all saturated in the counting of votes so significant to our own lives.  When Gaza responded by firing rockets, Israel screamed of being attacked and was defending itself. 

Israel bombarded Gaza with 600 tons of rockets, killing over 1400 Palestinians. Americans expressed shock. Israeli spokespersons simply asked, what would you do if rockets were raining down on your family?

So, what would you do? Maybe ask what made Palestinians with no power, so desperate that they fired a few weak, unguided missiles into Israel.  Could it be that it’s the only way to remind the world that they are still suffering oppression under a brutal occupation?

Thomas Are

May 10, 2016

[1] These statistics and quotes are lifted from the Media Education Foundation documentary, The Occupation of the American Mind, 2016.  

A Jewish Jew

Well, it has finally happened. Bernie Sanders put Israel’s abuse of the Palestinians on the table.  For years no presidential candidate has dared mention Palestinian human rights. Criticizing Israel was the third rail of politics. Not even when Israel attacked our USS Liberty, an unarmed reconnaissance ship, flying the American flag, bombing the ship, killing 34 US sailors, wounding 171, strafing life rafts with machine gun fire when our troops tried to abandon the ship was there an outcry from Washington.   Our Chair of the Joint Chief of Staff, Thomas H. Moorer, never believed Israel’s claim that it was a mistake, “Israel’s attack was a deliberate attempt to destroy an American ship and kill her entire crew.” Our president at the time, Lyndon Johnson, said that he did not want to embarrass an “ally.”  To this day, there has been no official condemnation of Israel.

More recently, in 2010, Israel invaded a “Freedom Flotilla” in international waters, killing nine humanitarian workers, including an American, seeking to bring food, medicine and toys to the Gaza Strip which Israel had bombed and sealed off from the world. A midnight attack on an unarmed ship of ordinary people cannot be justified by claiming self-defense. Yet, our government voiced no condemnation.  Those abused and terrorized by Israel are still trying to reclaim their private property confiscated by Israel.  All, but one, of our presidential candidates continue to give Israel a pass.

It’s easy to understand why.  Any thinking person knows that we, meaning the United States, have a lot of Palestinian blood on our hands. It is less disturbing to leave it under the table.

Then, suddenly, Bernie Sanders addressed the wrongs of our American practice and policy in supporting Israel. He did not attend the Netanyahu speech to our congress in which the Prime Minister of Israel stood before our congress and undercut our president’s efforts to avoid a violent confrontation with Iran.   

He declined to speak to AIPAC, choosing to support the interest of US citizens over the interest of a foreign nation. Then, of all things, he called for rational dialogue with the Palestinian leadership.  After a half century of demonizing anything Palestinian, he alone of all the presidential candidates, says we must hear their side of the story.

If we are ever going to bring peace to that region that has seen so much hatred and so much war, we are going to have to treat the Palestinian people with respect and dignity … One has got to say that right now in Gaza unemployment is somewhere around 40 percent. You got a lot of that area continues – it hasn’t been rebuilt, decimated. Housing decimated, health care decimated, schools decimated. I believe the United States and the rest of the world has got to work together to help the Palestinian people.[1]

Of course, Hillary Clinton responds by pulling out her playbook, supplied by AIPAC and Netanyahu, declaring Israel’s right to defend itself and how Israel “pulled out of Gaza” giving them the opportunity for freedom and prosperity. She counts on Americans not knowing the real history of what happened when Israel left Gaza and barred the gates.  

I have been asked, “How could Sanders say such things, after all, he is a Jew.”  I say, “Yes, but he is a Jewish Jew, not a Zionist Jew.” He expresses concern for the Palestinians precisely because he is a Jew. He seeks to follow the ethical requirements of his Jewish faith.

But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. (Amos 5:24)

Wash yourselves; made yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doing from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; defend the fatherless, plead for the widow. (Isaiah 1:16-18)

You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him. (Exodus 22:21) 

You shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor, in the land. (Deuteronomy 15:11)

And most of all that which has become known as the golden rule:

            You shall love your neighbor as yourself. (Leviticus 19:18)

Many Jews have ignored these text and chosen the State of Israel as the measure of their faith, equating any criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic.

Even when his criticism of the policies and practice of Israel brought condemnation from fellow politicians, the media and from other Jews, Sanders listened to his Jewish heart and spoke up.

The sad commentary of our day is that he is losing the race for the democratic nomination to Hillary Clinton. She says exactly the opposite. To Hillary, Israel is sacred and Netanyahu is never wrong. No matter how many children are killed by Israeli rockets, how much water is stolen from the West Back or how many illegal settlements are built on Palestinian land, to her, Israel is simply “defending itself.”  She is indifferent to Palestinian pain because she is convinced that the Jews in America, especially those with money, view Israel as their substitute god and will vote for her as Israel’s defense attorney. But Bernie Sanders is shifting the ground.  More and more Jews are growing concern over the abuse of Palestinians and they are doing so precisely because of their Jewish faith and commitment to their Jewish scriptures.

Thomas Are

April 26, 2015

[1] Sanders Slams Clinton for Ignoring Palestinians’ Needs and Thinking Netanyahu is “Right all the Time.”  Mondoweiss, April 4, 2016.

I FEEL SICK

I need a shot, or something. Monday, March 21^st, I heard Hillary Clinton’s diatribe to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC.  And I am sick. Does she not watch the news? I know the reporting by the US media is framed and slanted, but the few images out of   Gaza that do come through are enough to make anyone sick to the stomach.

Over and over again she referred to Israel as Jewish and democratic. But, even she knows that it can be one or the other but it can’t be both. Half of the people over whom Israel rules is not Jewish. Israel is not democratic, never has been and Hillary Clinton knows it.

She boldly states that Israel and the US share the same values. Well, I hope not: Jeff Halper, head of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions and Nobel Peace Prize nominee, writes:

Terrorism is a form of violent struggle in which violence is used against civilians in order to achieve political goals.

This definition would seem to apply to Israel’s own policies toward the Palestinians, beginning with the expulsion of half the Palestinian people from their country, the systematic destruction of 536 villages, towns and urban neighborhoods and the expropriation of their lands, and up to today where military occupation of five decades has resulted in the deaths and injury of tens of thousands of civilians, massive arrest and torture, the demolition of some 60,00 homes, impoverishment, further displacement and expulsion – and open “punishment” for the crime of turning to the ICC for protection.[1]

I share moral values with this Jewish writer who has witnessed Israel’s “democracy” first hand. Israel is a brutal occupier and thinks nothing of killing innocent people, including women and children. Clinton it wrong. There are millions of Americans including many Jews who do NOT share Israel’s values.  If Hillary Clinton shares Israel’s values and becomes president of the US, America could become a police state run by the military of whom she will be the Commander in Chief.

She says, as president, she would immediately attack BDS.   This is a non-violent grassroots movement designed to expose Israel’s atrocities. In other words, to her, violence is justified, objection to violence is not.

Then, she lifted up Golda Meir as her example of leadership. In doing so, Clinton commits herself to be as blind to reality as was Meir who is famous for saying:

There is no such thing as a Palestinian people, Meir told the Sunday Times of London. It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They did not exist.

So, the occupation drags on. But to Hillary Clinton, Golda Meir was a woman and since Hillary is a woman, when it comes to choosing a leader, that is what matters most, for honestly, that is about all that she has to offer.  I agree. It is time for the US to have a woman president, but just not this woman. Which of course is exactly what she wants, not that it is time to have a woman, but it is time to have “me” as president

One could hope that she would just look at a map showing the 88 percent of what used to be Palestine and compare it to the little landlocked areas in which Israel confines the Palestinians today.  Twelve percent of their homeland, cut up by walls and Jewish only roads.   She calls that a democracy and wants to be the democratic leader of America.

She justifies Israel’s disproportionate wars on Palestine by referring to suicide bombers. The fact that there have been no suicide bombers in almost a decade is not relevant to her.    

Clinton labels any resistance as acts of terrorism.  During her entire speech, she talked endlessly about terrorism. All Palestinians, including the more than 500 children massacred in Gaza last summer are automatically terrorist. 

She repeated the old charge that if Palestinians did not teach their children to hate, we would have peace.  I agree that Palestinians children hate Israel.  Blow up my home, uproot my family’s farm, steal my water, bomb my school and murder my little sister, and you would not have to “teach” me to hate. I would learn that all by myself.  And what is so ironical is that it’s the Jewish kids in Israel who are taught that non-Jews are lesser human beings who threaten their security and want Israel to be wiped out.

Israeli Intelligence Minister Yisreal Katz declared the situation as a state of war:

He vowed to push a parliamentary bill through allowing the government to expel all relatives of the attackers, whether they were involved in the attack or not. Suggesting a further crackdown on people not involved in the attack, the Israeli military announced a full-scale closure on the West Bank villages of Zawia and Auga on the grounds that two of the attackers were originally from those villages.[2]         

Someone should ask when has Israel NOT been in state of war. Halper writes:

Israel tops the list of countries in intense international conflicts of the last two hundred years. Besides being embroiled in an intense civil conflict during the half-century before the establishment of the state in 1948, it has fought four conventional wars (1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, plus the 1967-70 War of Attrition), at least seven hybrid or asymmetric ones (First Lebanon War 1982 with an occupation lasting until 2000; First Intifada 1987-93, Second Intifada 2000-05, Second Lebanon War 2006, and three assaults on Gaza 2008/9, 2012, 2014), plus mounting or participating in innumerable operations and engagements inside Israel, in  the Occupied Territories, throughout the Middle East and well beyond. It continues to be engaged in one of the longest securocratic wars of modern times: its occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza and the Golan Heights over the past nearly five decades.[3]

Halper summed it up, (And I am working from memory here) by drawing a triangle: At the top, he put “Jewish.” On the lower corner he put “Democratic” and on the last point, “All the land.”  Then Halper announced that Israel could have any two of these it wanted, but could not have all three.

One: Israel could be Jewish and Democratic, but then could not have all the land. (the traditional two-state solution.)

Two: Israel could be Democratic and have all the land, but could not then be Jewish. (One democratic nation for all its citizens.) Or,

Three: Israel could have all the land and be Jewish, but could not then be democratic. (An apartheid state controlling the Palestinians by force.)

           

In spite of its military might and its trigger-happy option to use it, like most empires of history, Israel may crumble from within. Whether it survives remains to be seem. If, or when, that happens, it will leave millions of innocent victims, Jewish and Palestinian.  So sad.

Reflecting on all this, I have changed my mind.  I don’t need the shot. Hillary Clinton is running an Israeli fever. But, I am not hopeful. As someone pointed out, you just can’t give a flu shot to a tombstone.

Thomas Are

March 26, 2016

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[1] Jeff Halper, War Against the People, (Pluto Press, 2015) p.150

[2] Intel Minister: Israel in State of War after Multiple Stabbings, Anitwar.com, March 8, 2016

[3] Jeff Halper, War Against the People, (Pluto Press, 2015) p. 69.

Innocent Victim

We know a lot about him. Taylor Force grew up in Texas, loved horses, was an avid skier, played the guitar, graduated from West Point, served as an officer in Iraq and Afghanistan, lived in Lexington, Kentucky before moving to Nashville to continue his studies at Vanderbilt.  “He lived really large.” His father said of him. A friend remembered his as a peaceful, kind and just an all-American guy. Then he went on a school trip to Israel where he was stabbed to death by an outraged Palestinian. By any measure, 29 year old Taylor Force was an innocent victim and his death was an unnecessary tragedy.  I can only imagine how I would feel if it had been my son.

My local newspaper headlines, “American Student Latest Victim in Palestinian Violence.”  Vice President Joe Biden said “the U.S. not only deplored a recent wave of Palestinian attacks in Israel but also condemns the failure to condemn these acts.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu points to the challenges Israel faces. “The first one is the persistent incitement in Palestine society that glorifies murderers of innocent people and calls for a Palestinian state not to live in peace with Israel, but to replace Israel.”[i]

My newspaper seems to forget Israeli daily violence committed against Palestinians on their own land, both by the IDF and by settlers. Joe Biden, as usual, blames the conflict on the resistance and not on the occupation. And poor Netanyahu believes his own propaganda that it is the Palestinian and not his Israeli government that glorifies violence.

However, when seen in context, Taylor Force was just one of the many innocent victims of Israel’s oppression. And unless we are willing to remember, face and address that context, Taylor Force will have died in vain. He stepped into a hornet’s nest of hostility.

Less than two years ago, over 500 children were killed during Israel’s bombardment of Gaza which deliberately targeted schools, hospitals and water supplies. Today, Gaza is an open air prison lacking housing, water, food, medicine and electricity. Its people, most of them refugees from Israel’s previous aggressions, have been used as a testing ground for Israel’s arms and surveillance market.  In the West Bank, Jewish only roads and a twenty-five foot wall separate families from their loved ones, farmers from their fields, children from their schools and the sick from their hospitals… all justified, defended and financed by the U.S. in the name of “security.” No one dares ask about “Palestinian security?”

Does anyone question what is going on that would cause young kids to sacrifice their lives to express their frustration. It is too simple to just label them “terrorist.” That label has lost its sting. Anyone who resists being occupied and abused has been called a terrorist.

I don’t know if Taylor Force was targeted because he was an American, but he was certainly put in harm’s way and set up by US indifference to Israel’s violence. 

Thomas Are

March 12, 2016

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[i] Isabel Kershner, Biden Condemns Attacks in Israel. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, March 10, 2016, p. A-3

WHAT'S YOURS IS MINE

When I was a kid in grade school, my greatest fear surfaced when I encountered the Miller brothers. They called themselves the “Kings,” but everyone else called them the bullies. Their childhood philosophy was; “What’s mine is mine and I will keep it, and what’s yours is mine, and I will take it.”  Whatever generated such an attitude is beyond my understanding. Hopefully, in time, the Miller brothers have grown up.  On the other hand, Israel is now 68 years old and shows few signs of growing up, especially when it comes to water.

Three things make water unique. First of all, there is no substitute for it. Chemists and engineers produce amazing products which make our lives longer, safer and better. But with all our ingenuity, brain power and money, no one has ever produced one drop of water or a satisfactory substitute for it.

Second, water is absolutely essential for life. Nothing lives without water.  Yet fresh water represents less than 2.5 percent of all available water on earth.[1]

Third, a large portion of water is “consumptive,” meaning that when it is used, it is gone forever.  

For these reasons, every nation on the globe is establishing water policies designed to preserve and extend its water supply. Even so, every nation is experiencing “water problems.” Consider the recent water crisis in Flint Michigan and the unprecedented drought in California. A Presbyterian Women’s study for 2016 reported that, “twenty-four states in the United States reported prolonged drought conditions.”  Every nation on the globe is suffering water shortages. That is, every nation, but Israel.

Israel’s history of addressing its water needs is, as long as we have a weaker neighbor with a water source, we will never run out; “What’s mine is mine and I will keep it, and what’s yours is mine, and I will take it.”  Mr. Katz-Oz, Israel’s negotiator on water issues, said, “There is no reason for Palestinians to claim that just because they sit on lands, they have the rights to that water”[2]

Of the water available from West Bank aquifers, Israel uses 83%, leaving only 17% for Palestinian use.[3]

Facts and figures don’t address the question of equity. Arguably 50% or more of the water that Israel uses is unilaterally appropriated from water that should fairly go to its Arab neighbors. Even the New York Times uses the word “theft.”[4]

 Most people remember the 1982 invasion of Lebanon because of the horrendous massacre of some 2000 unarmed men, women and children in the refugee camps of Sebra and Shatila. Israel invaded Lebanon supposedly to destroy the PLO. But for almost 20 years after the PLO had vacated Lebanon, until the year 2000, Israel remained in Lebanon and controlled the Litani River, pumping millions of gallons of water into Israel. “What’s yours is mine, and I will take it.”   

The US media applauds Israel’s wall as being necessary to keep out suicide bombers. It is significant that the wall around Qalqiliya, which traps that city of about 60,000 Palestinians on the Israeli side of the green line, just happens to sit upon the largest fresh water aquifer in the Middle East. Surely, no one would suspect the cutting off of farmers from their fields, doctors from their hospitals and kids from their schools had anything to do with the water under Qalqiliya.  It’s simply an outcome of, “What’s yours is mine.”

Thousands of Christians pilgrims visit the Holy Land every year and nearly swoon at the sight where Jesus was baptized by John in the Jordan River. It is beautiful; Rich blue waters surrounded by lush green trees, all placid and clean. One can just picture Jesus and John appreciating the beauty of nature.  This site, called Yardenit is easily accessible to tourists. However, this is not the whole story. According to Christiana Z. Peppard in her powerful little book, Just Water:

Several hundred meters south of Yardenit, the calm waters of the Jordan disappear. The river has been dammed, siphoned, redirected into underground pipes heading for Tel Aviv, and replaced by a spout of barely treated sewage that foams into a dry, rocky canal. Here the Jordan is a limp toxic strip of river… Still, a few hundred meters north, eager Christians continue their ritual purification and prayers at Yardenit, oblivious to the defiling sludge just downstream.[5]

Not only does Israel soak up water like a sponge, Israel uses water as a weapon of genocide.

Israel deliberately targeted wells, cistern, roof water tanks, storage tanks, miles of pipelines, water treatment facilities and sanitation plants during its bombardment of Gaza last summer. Today, Israel continues to destroy Palestinian water supplies.  “Wells are increasingly infiltrated by salty sea water because Israel is over-pumping the groundwater. UN scientists estimate that Gaza will have no drinking water within fifteen years.”[6]

In the West Bank:

Besides attacking Palestinian homes, torching their crops and animal barns, settlers confiscate water springs, poison Palestinian water wells with  chemicals, spoil them with dirty diapers, with their own feces or with dead chickens, and topple and shoot roof top water tanks.[7]

Settlers have few restrictions on water use:

When supplies of water are low in the summer months, the Israeli water company Mekorot closes the valves which supply Palestinian towns and villages so as not to affect Israeli supplies. This means that illegal Israeli settlers can have their swimming pools topped up and lawns watered while Palestinians living next to them, on whose land the settlements are situated, do not have enough water for drinking and cooking.[8] 

The question remains; Is water a right or a commodity.  Be careful how you answer. If you say it is a commodity, you join everything Israel, and the Miller brothers, stand for: “What’s mine is mine and I will keep it, and what’s yours is mine, and I will take it.” On the other hand, declare water a right, you immediately become a responsible citizen of the human community.

Thomas Are

February 12, 2016

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[1] Christiana Z, Peppard, Just Water, (Orbis Books, 2014) p. 21.

[2] Ronald Bleier, Israel’s Appropriation of Arab Water: An Obstacle to Peace. Middle East Labor Bulletin, Spring, 1994

[3] Ifamericansknew.org. Water in Palestine, Palestine Monitor.

[4] Ronald Bleier, Israel’s Appropriation of Arab Water: An Obstacle to Peace. Middle East Labor Bulletin, Spring, 1994

[5] Christiana Z, Peppard, Just Water, (Orbis Books, 2014) p.102.

[6] Ifamericansknew.org. Water in Palestine, Palestine Monitor

[7] Elias Akleh, Israel’s Water Genocide, Countercurrents.org. May 19, 2014

[8] Ifamericansknew.org. Water in Palestine, Palestine Monitor

Nothing is 100 Percent

Nothing is 100 percent. No person is totally good or totally bad, nor is any action. We all wind up contributing to things that we would not choose to support.  By the time I had breakfast this morning, I had supported sweatshops where the sheets on which I slept were sewn and left a significant carbon footprint by its transportation to the store where I shop. Global warming is a product of living.

Politicians love this aspect of being able to find an alternative argument to any action or policy that does not benefit their cause. This intertwining of good and bad in everything we do means that opponents can always find enough flaws in our good efforts to bring us to inaction.  When we call Israel to cease its abusive treatment of non-Jews both within its walls and beyond, its defenders accuse us of ignoring all the good there is about Israel, and they are right.

Israel does protect the freedom of its press, holds open elections, has developed high-tech medical procedures and engineering systems. Israel has established a land of opportunity… at least for Jews.   

For these reasons, the United States has been the patron saint of Israel for decades. However, Lawrence Davidson points out that the popular reasons for supporting Israel are not the whole story:

The common given reasons are suspect. It is not because the two countries have overlapping interest. The US seeks stability in the Middle East and Israel is constantly making things unstable (mostly by practicing ethnic cleansing against Palestinians, illegally colonizing conquered lands and launching massive assaults against its neighbors). Nor as is often claimed, is the alliance based on “shared Western values”.  The US long ago outlawed racial, ethnic and religious discrimination in the public sphere. In Israel, religious-based discrimination is the law. The Zionist state’s values in this regard are the opposite of those of the United States.[i]

For these reasons, I support the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) non-violent movement, which has gained much more traction outside the US than here. Our presidential candidates love cast dispersions on BDS. By doing so, they not only gain praise, it makes them sound as though they are on top of the Israel/Palestine situation and would probably cost them very few votes, if any. 

Jeb Bush, “On day one I will work with the next attorney-general to stop the BDS movement.”

Ted Cruz, “BDS is premised on a lie and it is anti-Semitism, plain and simple.”

Marco Rubio, “This BDS coalition of the radical left thinks it has discovered a clever, politically correct way to advocate Israel’s destruction.”

Hillary Clinton, “We need to make countering BDS a priority.”

Marc Ellis, Jewish scholar and activist, finds such caricature amusing:

The Knesset anti-BDS solutions are becoming more and more bizarre. First they try to stamp BDS out by waving the magic wand of anti-Semitism around the world.  Then they propose to mobilize Jews and everyone else that counts politically to rise up because BDS wants to destroy Israel. Even supporters of Israel should ask: Can these strategies succeed when the world is aware that an entire people are being ghettoized by Israel.[ii]

I have been an anti-Zionist for almost thirty years. I move in those circles, read anti-Zionist books, attend conferences, study documentaries, subscribe to anti-Zionist magazines, have hundreds of anti-Zionist friends and I have never, ever heard anyone talk about wanting to destroy Israel or “push all the Jews into the sea. No one wants that to happen.  What they do want is for Israel to become a democratic nation committed to living in peace with all its citizens and its neighbors. That cannot happen as long as Israel insists upon being a Jewish state.  

I support BDS, not because it is perfect, but because it is the best hope I know of to pressure Israel into living by the rules that respect liberty and justice for all like any other nation claiming to be a democracy.

BDS is not perfect. As it exposes Israel’s underside, it inevitably feeds to latent anti-Semitism. It hurts some innocent people along the way and disrupts the social unity in Israel and its critics.  

But, having said that, I support BDS because it works.

During the Gaza war in the summer of 2014, dock workers in the Port of Oakland refused to unload cargo from an Israeli ship. That same summer the Presbyterian Church passed a divestment resolution that pulled millions of dollars from companies profiting from the occupation. [This summer, the Methodists joined the Presbyterians and voted to withdraw their investments from five major Israeli banks for divestment]. Last April, the British bank Barclays dumped its holdings of Elbit Systems and the Danish bank Merkur terminated its contract with G4S.  The European Union is about to start “slapping labels on products produced in Israeli settlements.”[iii]

And what do the supporters of BDS want?  At least three things: To end the occupation. To give Palestinian citizens within Israel equal rights and protection, and to respect the right of refugees to return to their homes. Is that enough?  No. But it would bring hope to the Palestinians and peace to Israel.  

Now: NEWSWEEK REPORTS THAT FOREIGN INVESTMENT IN ISRAEL HAS DROPPED BY FIFTY PERCENT.[iv]  

It’s not perfect. I wish it were 100%.  But it is enough to get Israel’s attention and cause anxiety in the Knesset for its failure to stem the effects of BDS. Hopefully Israel will get the message: Join the nations of civilized people or become even more isolated.

Thomas Are

January 21, 2016

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[i] Lawrence Davidson, BDS in the crosshairs of US Presidential Candidates.

[ii] Marc Ellis, The (Jewish)) Civil War Heats Up. Sort of., Mondoweiss,  January 1, 2016.

[iii] Mondoweiss, An Open Letter to Dan Rabinowitz: Let’s Get our Facts Straight about BDS, November, 2015.

My note: G4S and Elbit Systems provide security equipment to Israeli prisons at which political prisoners are held without trial and subjected to human rights abuse, including torture.

[iv] Jack Moore, Foreign Investment in Israel Drops by 50%. Newsweek, June 25, 2015.