Emails from Israel, and a word about shifting commitments
When I saw him in Jaffa in November, an Israeli friend opposed to his government’s policy toward Palestinians described what it was like to be teaching at Sapir College when Qassam rockets from Gaza landed right near him on campus. Today he emailed to say that “things are very bleak right now,” that “the conflict seems to have greatly diminished Israel’s ability for rational thinking.” These days he’s doing volunteer social services work in Sderot, speaking with fearful residents.
Another friend who wrote a few days ago – an American-born Israeli lawyer – wondered why Israel’s defenders in the American Jewish community seem so much more belligerent than Israelis. This has always been the case, I think. The organized Jewish community here, which tries to portray itself as united in Israel’s defense, exerts enormous pressure on anyone insufficiently supportive of Israel’s right wing. The result is a distorted picture of what American Jews actually think – which, according to polls, is much less in tune than the official organizations with whatever the Likud Party claims is Israel’s bottom line.
I know my friends and colleagues throughout Israel aren’t representative of Israelis as a whole, but still it’s good to hear from Israeli Jews who reject their government’s assault on Gaza in particular and its policies toward Palestinians more generally. A few Israelis who have commented on earlier blog postings, like many of their American Jewish supporters, deflect justice-based criticisms with an attitude that, because anyone with a brain must see that Israel is right, critics must be either stupid, uninformed, or evil. The dissenters, though, demonstrate that even in Israel there is no one obviously correct response even in the face of falling Qassams.
At counter-protests on the street, the smirks of young Zionists and sneers of older ones signify, to me at least, resort to easy stereotypes and refusal to consider whether long-standing assumptions might be flawed. Having once been a young Zionist myself, I sometimes wonder if I was as blindly self-righteous, as determined as they to identify with Israel’s toughness and roughness.
And having transformed my approach to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians more than to any other political issue throughout my life, I sometimes wonder whether I’ve come to understand the complexities more fully or if I’ve simply exchanged one set of assumptions for another, as those who dismiss what I write might like to think. I think there’s a difference between unexamined commitments and those that develop after sorting through competing perspectives and principles, but in any case this process of transformation, of shifting certainty amidst complexity and confusion, has seemed to me central to identity since my own days in Young Judaea in the 1960s, providing focus to my graduate student research projects, my subsequent academic concerns, and my more recent life transformations. More about this, as always, another time.