Dennis Fox’s Weblog

On an NPR talk show this morning about the usefulness of tomorrow’s Barack Obama-Mahmoud Abbas meeting, Juan Cole was skeptical about progress toward a Palestinian state. One caller went on at length calling Cole an anti-Semite for departing from what seemed to her Israel’s obviously justified position about, well, just about everything.

Then my email brought a report of today’s vote in the Knesset, which “would mandate year jail term for anyone who speaks against Israel’s status as a Jewish state.” The bill was approved by a majority but is not yet final. However, regardless of whether this particular bill passes (and regardless of whether Israel jails any of its citizens who commemorate the Nakba, the Palestinian Catastrophe of dispersal and repression beginning in 1948, as another bill would mandate), the contradictions between Israel’s Jewish and democratic self-image are becoming more apparent. As Chaim Oron, chair of the left-wing Zionist party Meretz, noted, “Have you lost your confidence in the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state? This crazy government – what exactly are you doing? Thought Police? Have you lost it?”

As I’ve explored elsewhere, Zionists on the left are the most pained by exposing their country’s primacy of tribalism over universalism. Unwilling to join those right-wingers who insist “democracy is not a Jewish value,” I wonder what they will do once the illusion of Israel’s democracy becomes impossible to sustain.

I’ve thought often about the process of shedding my own left Zionist identity, which framed my teenage years and early twenties. Elsewhere I’ve written a bit about absorbing the left-humanist-Zionist values that made me aware and proud of my Jewishness while also making me uncomfortable — with Israel’s close ties with South Africa, with its rationale for keeping Arab citizens in second-class status, with its 1967 occupation. Motivated by a matrix of political impulses and personal ties, I held together my own conflicting reactions, thinking with unjustified optimism that things would work out.

As I look back at those seven or eight years, its seems clear that the internal contradictions were too stark to ignore but too painful to acknowledge. Even after leaving Israel in 1973, no longer thinking myself as a Zionist, persistent emotional responses and my continuing family and other personal ties led me to focus on other causes. Some of this eventually helped me think my way through Zionism, especially anarchism’s critique of statist and religious identity and critical psychology’s challenge to ideologically convenient assumptions. My return to Israel and the West Bank during three trips since 2004 helped me explore these implications on the ground.

The difficulty of my own efforts to sort things out makes me empathize today with left Zionists who cling to the notion that Israel’s dual Jewish-democratic identity is not simply a charade. If I had stayed in Israel maybe I’d be one of them still, along with my few remaining American friends who stayed in Israel after I left 36 years ago. But I like to think I’d have moved already to Israel’s non-Zionist left, joining Israeli Jews who have been able to set aside any inner conflict to work for universal democratic principles. They’re the ones who will end up in jail if the latest Knesset bill becomes law.

Technorati Tags: anarchism, democracy, critical psychology, Israel, Jewish State

I just got back from a memorial for Hilda Silverman, a Boston-area activist who died a year ago at 69. I knew Hilda as a mainstay of the local Jewish peace community, relentlessly working to change inaccurate perceptions about causes and consequences, determined to challenge even those she worked with to not lose sight of justice. The last significant conversation we had was more than two years ago when we stopped for pizza on our way from a demonstration at Brandeis University, defending Jimmy Carter’s book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, to a fund-raiser for ICAHD, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions. I might not have made it to the fund-raiser if Hilda hadn’t asked for a ride. It was cold, and I was tired. She seemed tireless, and our conversation, along with the  pizza, warmed me up.

A short video at the memorial showed clips of an interview with Hilda talking about trying to reconcile her lifelong identification with the Jewish people’s millennia of suffering and victimhood with her clear understanding that “the price was too high” for displaced Palestinians. The Boston Globe’s obituary included this:

“I am a Jew with a profound consciousness of Jewish victimization through history,” she wrote in a 2002 opinion article for the Philadelphia Inquirer. “But, for me, victim and victimizer, oppressor and oppressed are not mutually exclusive categories.” She denounced some of Israel’s actions toward Palestinians, then stood firm as many Jews labeled such criticism as a betrayal.

Sandy Tolan, the memorial event’s featured speaker, pointed out that Hilda’s empathy for those on both sides and her deep understanding of the conflict’s complexities did not stop her. He related Hilda’s political understanding and efforts to his book, The Lemon Tree, and went on to talk about the dim prospects for a two-state solution, acknowledging that Hilda herself had tired of that particular topic. Tolan ended by advocating a search for something other than a one-state/two-state choice, whether dual state or binational or confederation or something as yet unthought of. He knows, as Hilda knew, that Israeli settlement policy had rendered impossible a viable Palestinian state on what’s left of Palestinian territory. And that Hilda would keep looking for peace with justice.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Jewish State, Palestine, Reconciliation, two-state solution, Sandy Tolan

I neglected to post anything two weeks ago when Shachaf Polakow of Israel’s Anarchists Against the Wall came through Boston on a fund-raising tour. (Since Israel has started arresting rather than simply tear-gassing and shooting Israelis and Palestinians engaged in non-violent anti-Occupation efforts, legal costs have escalated beyond $100,000. If you can, help; the money will first pay for Palestinian legal defense and then for Israeli costs.)

In addition to Shachaf’s largest Boston event – a panel discussion with Noam Chomsky and Leila Farsakh – I went with him to a smaller discussion at Kavod House, a local progressive Jewish organization for twenty- and thirty-somethings. During the discussion after Shachaf’s slide-and-video presentation, I made a point I’ve made before when talking about his group: Unlike many of the more numerous Israeli liberals and left-Zionists I’ve met who know something is rotten in Israeli democracy and Israeli society but are unwilling to reach conclusions that should be obvious, anarchists engaged in direct action against the Wall seem refreshingly unconflicted. It’s been useful to meet Israelis who seem able to put aside Israel’s nationalist and religious mythology and focus on what justice demands.

I’ve just finished reading Uri Gordon’s new book Anarchy Alive! Anti-Authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory. Uri’s an Israeli anarchist who teaches Environmental Ethics, Social Analysis of the Environment, and Environmental Politics at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, which I’ve noted here before. We were scheduled to meet back in November during my most recent West Bank/Israel trip but I had to come home early instead. I had hoped to get his take on several topics, so am glad now to at least have the book. It’s a good clear read.

Anarchy Alive! highlights and dissects issues that divide anarchists, focusing on power and influence, violence, technology, and – most relevant here – the incongruous anarchist relationship to national struggles, as seen most directly right now in the work of Anarchists Against the Wall. Uri doesn’t try to resolve every issue, no doubt an impossible task; it’s useful enough that he addresses them head on and draws out many of the difficulties anarchists face in making their way through a long and varied terrain.

Uri has a related piece on the history of anarchism in Israel, including influences on the early kibbutz movement, a movement that served as my own teenage introduction to the notion that we don’t have to accept things as they are.

Despite the touring and writing, Israel’s anarchists continue their direct action campaign in support of Palestinian resistance. Their website has much information, including video clips. And a way to send them some money.

Technorati Tags: Anarchists Against the Wall, Anarchy Alive, Shachaf Polakow, Uri Gordon

Last night I went to hear a panel discussion featuring Noam Chomsky, Stephen Walt, Irene Gendzier, and Duncan Kennedy at Boston University’s Law School. The central topic was the US role in the Israel-Palestinian conflict. All four panelists are critical of US support for Israel; the moderator told us that academics on the other side who had been invited to attend had all refused.

The auditorium was pretty full, and at the end lots of people lined up to ask questions. Most were supporters of Israel incensed at what they tried to portray as one-sided inaccuracies. Several made points that would have been worth pursuing, but there was too much pro-Israel shouting and ranting to enable much actual discussion. The way this went added to my thinking that these sorts of panels with longish presentations and little time for actual back-and-forth discussion bring little clarity. I’ve been to enough similar talks to know that  the structure makes actual communication secondary regardless of which side the speakers are on.

Of the speakers, the one I had never met was Duncan Kennedy, a Harvard Law School professor and critical legal studies scholar. When I was teaching legal studies I used a classic piece of his on how law schools are essentially training in hierarchy. I had only learned recently that Kennedy has become outspoken on Israel/Palestine, and is now teaching a course on related legal issues. A quick web search found a lot of his work. Here, he begins a short piece last month about Gaza in the Harvard Crimson by referring to a point he made in somewhat different fashion last night, that too many otherwise progressive academics would rather avoid the subject:

When I told a friend, a former section leader in a large Harvard College course, that I had been offered a chance to do an op-ed for The Harvard Crimson on Gaza, she identified two fairly common, understandable undergraduate attitudes: “The situation is too complicated and I can’t make up my mind about it;” and “This is controversial and there are differences of opinion. No side is ‘right.’’”

I hope that the recent war, occurring at the beginning of the Obama presidency, will lead to enough discussion of Israel and Palestine in the Harvard community so that more of us feel able to take positions. With that in mind, I will use my space to present a factual picture one would think controversial, but which surprisingly is a matter of consensus of “informed observers.”

The bulk of the column presents an account that will probably strike some as less consensual than Kennedy suggests, though I think disputes would mostly be a matter of emphasis and tone. I especially appreciate his penultimate context:

Numerous observers have charged Israel with committing war crimes during the war. Without downplaying that aspect, I think it is important to understand the 1,300 Palestinian casualties, including 400 children as well as many, many women, versus 13 Israeli casualties, as typical of a particular kind of “police action” that Western colonial powers and Western “ethno-cratic settler regimes” like ours in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Serbia and particularly apartheid South Africa, have historically undertaken to convince resisting native populations that unless they stop resisting they will suffer unbearable death and deprivation. Not just in 1947 and 1948, but also in Lebanon in 1982 and 2006, Israel used similar tactics.

Causing horrific civilian deaths is often perfectly defensible under the laws of war, which favor conventional over unconventional forces in asymmetric warfare. The outright “crimes,” like the My Lai massacre, Abu Ghraib, or Russian massacres in Afghanistan and then in Chechnya, are less important for the civilian victims than the daily tactics of air assault, bombardment, and brutal door-to-door sweeps, meant to draw fire from the resisters that will justify leveling houses and the people in them.

Kennedy’s final paragraph makes sense to me, too:

Can this picture be right? If so, what is to be done? If not, what is to be done? If you are not already clear about what you think, it is crucial to try to find out for yourself. If the situation is as bad as I have painted, you might consider some small step, perhaps just a contribution to humanitarian relief for Gaza, or e-mailing the White House, or something more, like advocating for Harvard to divest.

Technorati Tags: Gaza, Israel, Palestine, Duncan Kennedy, war crime

1. An article about today’s election on the Jerusalem Post website:

In Meretz, veteran politicians hoped [to...] re-energize the party. With a predicted four seats in the Knesset according to the exit polls, [Haim] Oron … pledged that Meretz would “return to be a central factor in the establishment of a Zionist, social-democratic left-wing, dovish and humanistic State of Israel. This space was left vacant in these elections.”

2. From the blog South Jerusalem run by Gershom Gorenberg (an American-born Israeli journalist who I heard speak in Boston the other night) and Haim Watzman:

South Jerusalem is…. The only place in the world where you can be a left-wing, skeptical Orthodox Zionist Jew and feel like you are part of a mass movement.

3. From the controversial Israeli historian Benny Morris’s book Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999, which I recently started chipping away at, here writing about the early 1920s:

Zionist spokesmen argued, as after previous rounds of violence, that the May rioting had been the work of a few agitators, not a true reflection of majority Arab opinion. The reason: If the violence was widely supported, there was no hope for Zionism. It had to be explained as the work of a small group of criminals, with the Jews — whose “interests were identical” with those of the Arabs — striving for “peace with the Arab nation.” This of course ran contrary to the truth, and contrary to the findings of the British commission of inquiry…. The violence, it concluded, was rooted in political and economic reasons arising from Jewish immigration and Zionist aims and was not caused by envious effendis, as the Jews claimed….

Zionist officials, though they maintained the fiction in public, were well aware of the truth. As Thon put it…. “This may be fine as a tactic, but, between ourselves, we should realize that we have to reckon with an Arab national movement….”

Comment: After Gorenberg’s talk the other night, I asked him the question I hadn’t been able to give after his talk. He had hinted that Israeli democracy needed improvement, even calling on Diaspora Jews to remind Israel that democracy requires equal rights for minorities rather than simply imposing majority rule. I wanted to know if he thought the second-class status of Israel’s Palestinian citizens was really a fixable problem, akin to that of racial minorities in the US where the law in theory even when not in fact holds all citizens to be equal, or whether in Israel the refusal to become “a state of all its citizens” demonstrated a structural distinction that meant second-class status for non-Jews must be eternal. He said it was a good question, but unfortunately the crowd at the literature table left room only for small talk.

Benny Morris, despite his meandering from army refusenik to right-wing apologist, and despite his reliance on Israeli sources and perspectives, at least provides useful evidence that from its very inception in the late 1890s Zionist organizers made public comments far removed from their actual goals and expectations. It’s sobering reading for those who still cling to popular pro-Israel defenses, and especially useful I think because it comes from a now-right-wing Israeli academic. For me, it’s one more reminder that Meretz’s Haim Oron and South Jerusalem’s Gershom Gorenberg remain mired in a past that never had a chance of moving forward.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Benny Morris, Gershom Gorenberg

It never occurred to me when I became a teenage Zionist in the mid-1960s that the Jewish state would someday defend its interests – and by extension mine, or so I was taught at the time – by becoming the biggest bully on the block. By the late 1960s, when I envisioned living in Israel for the rest of my life, I still thought a binational state of equals would have been preferable to a Jewish-defined state. The left-humanist Israelis who were most influential in my political and moral development hoped that American Jews like me who immigrated to Israel would help set things back on the right track.

Within just a few years it was clear to me that the right track had been dismantled. There was no going back. In hindsight, Israel’s internal contradictions were already fatal even before my Zionist immersion — the pulls between democracy and Jewish identity, the inability to sort out what  “Jewish state” might actually mean, the blindness to the common danger that victimization might lead to victimizing others. All of these tensions escalated beyond repair once Israel became an occupying power, a transition that inevitably destroyed any pretense that Israel would someday become a light unto the nations or even, in Zionism’s alternative, more realistic vision, a nation just like every other.

What nags at me as I read today’s reports, as I read the horrendous stories of children killed, bodies destroyed, hopes betrayed, as endless emails arrive with one or another petition, one or another appeal, is Israel’s rationale for its actions and its methods. Aside from the ever-present electoral calculations, it’s mind-boggling that Israel optimized its destructiveness to teach Hamas a lesson, to regain its deterrent capability, to make it clear to all Palestinians – to all Arabs, all Muslims, everyone – that Israel is a crazed beast willing to destroy everything and everyone. Acknowledging this goal — boasting of it smugly — clarifies that Israel will forever refuse to imagine life as an equal.

Maximizing destruction, justifying phosphorous bombs and other horrendous weapons on legal technicalities, counting every adult male a terrorist, rejecting any responsibility for hundreds of dead children who were in the wrong place at the wrong time — all this and more may damper Palestinian resistance for a time, but Israeli planners know that resistance will someday escalate once again, and the Israeli bully will have another tantrum.

Israeli professor Neve Gordon notes in How to sell ‘ethical warfare’ that

Ultimately, the moral claims the Israeli government uses to support its actions during this war are empty. They actually reveal Israel’s unwillingness to confront the original source of the current violence, which is not Hamas, but rather the occupation of the Gaza Strip, West Bank and East Jerusalem. My student, R, and the other Israeli protesters seem to have understood this truism; in order to stop them from voicing it, Israel has stomped on their civil liberties by arresting them.

I’ve noted before that most of my Israeli friends and colleagues are much more opposed to Israeli policy than Israelis as a whole. This includes native-born Israelis such as Gordon, but also immigrants, including friends from my 1960s Zionism years. Had I remained in Israel, I imagine I too would be as demoralized as some of them, after putting down roots in a country that bears so little resemblance to what we imagined together four decades ago. The attack on Gaza can only add to their dismay about what went wrong, as it does to mine.

Technorati Tags: Gaza, Israel, Palestine, Zionism

Last week I posed five questions related to how different ways for framing Israel’s assault on Gaza affect our perceptions  of what is going on. A useful piece by the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions offers its own take on reframing the issues. Here’s the introduction, but see the details on the ICAHD site:

Israel’s core messages, listed below, argue for the justice of its cause in Gaza, cast Israel as the victim and ensure that its war is seen not in terms of occupation but of the broader Western struggle against terror. The critical reframing we offer, that of Israelis committed to human rights, international law and a just peace as the only way out of this interminable and bloody conflict, argues that security cannot be achieved unilaterally while one side oppresses the other and that Israel’s attack on Gaza is merely another attempt to render its Occupation permanent by destroying any source of effective resistance. It argues that Israel could have avoided all attacks upon it over the last twenty years, and the rise of Hamas, if it had genuinely negotiated a two-state solution with the Palestinian leadership. Israel, the strong party and the Occupying Power, is not the victim. Indeed, its attack on Gaza is a form of State Terrorism.

Israeli dissidents, such as ICAHD’s Jeff Halper, are a key resource in opposing the official story that all Israelis are united in wanting Gaza demolished. I’ve posted previously to pieces by Julia Chaitin and of course to continuing anti-Occupation work by Anarchists Against the Wall and other Israeli groups now working to end the siege and assault on Gaza. Israeli protests against the current assault don’t get much press, but they happen nonetheless.

There’s also a steady stream of columns in Israeli newspapers, and in other forums by Israeli journalists and others, sharply critical of Israeli policy. Amira Hass, for example, begins her column in Ha’aretz today with this:

History did not begin with the Qassam rockets. But for us, the Israelis, history always begins when the Palestinians hurt us, and then the pain is completely decontextualized. We think that if we cause the Palestinians much greater pain, they will finally learn their lesson. Some term this “achievement.”

Nevertheless, the “lesson” remains abstract for most Israelis. The Israeli media prescribes a strict low-information, low-truth diet for its consumers, one rich in generals and their ilk.

She ends with this:

In 1993, Israel had a one-time golden opportunity to prove to the world that what people say about us is untrue – that it is not by nature a colonialist state. That the expulsion of a nation from its land, the expulsion of people from their houses and the robbery of Palestinian land for the sake of settling Jews are not the basis and essence of its existence.

In the 1990s, Israel had a chance to prove that 1948 is not its paradigm. But it missed this opportunity. Instead, it merely perfected its techniques for robbing land and expelling people from their houses, and forced the Palestinians into isolated enclaves. And now, during these dark days, Israel is proving that 1948 never ended.

Also in Ha’aretz a few days ago, Gideon Levy, writing “with sorrow and deep shame,” bluntly addressed the prospect of Israel being charged with war crimes:

The questions that will beg to be asked, as cautiously as possible, are who is guilty and who is responsible. The world’s exaggerated willingness to forgive Israel is liable to crack this time. The pilots and gunners, the tank crewmen and infantry soldiers, the generals and thousands who embarked on this war with their fair share of zeal will learn the extent of the evil and indiscriminate nature of their military strikes. They perhaps will not pay any price. They went to battle, but others sent them.

The public, moral and judicial test will be applied to the three Israeli statesmen who sent the Israel Defense Forces to war against a helpless population, one that did not even have a place to take refuge, in maybe the only war in history against a strip of land enclosed by a fence. Ehud Olmert, Ehud Barak and Tzipi Livni will stand at the forefront of the guilty. Two of them are candidates for prime minister, the third is a candidate for criminal indictment. It is inconceivable that they not be held to account for the bloodshed….

…
The first echoes can already be heard. This past weekend, the UN and the Human Rights Commission in Geneva have demanded an investigation into war crimes allegedly perpetrated by Israel. In a world in which Bosnian leaders and their counterparts from Rwanda have already been put on trial, a similar demand is likely to arise for the fomenters of this war.

This morning an email came from a friend in Israel, a member of Psychoactive, a group of Israeli psychologist/activists focused now on Israeli-Palestinian interactions. He asked if I’d help distribute accounts of conversations with Palestinian “friends and colleagues who live in Gaza and try to save their own lives while listening to the troubles of others.” Once he sends these I’ll post them on the RadPsyNet website and link to them here.

I know that polls show the large majority of Israeli Jews supported at least the initial assault on Hamas and maybe even what Amira Hass calls the “rampage” on Gaza as a whole. It’s important not to lose sight of those Israelis who steadily work to reframe the issues.

Technorati Tags: Anarchists Against the Wall, Gaza, Israel, Palestine, war crime, Psychoactive

One of the most common refrains of those who see through an Israel-centered lens is that Israel is “the only democracy in the Middle East.” Americans in particular assume that democracy, Israeli-style, is pretty much the same as democracy, US-style – that Israeli citizens regardless of religion or ethnicity have the same individual rights as those we think the Bill of Rights and other Constitutional provisions guarantee us. Setting aside for the moment the distortions of democracy right here in the US, it’s pretty easy to demonstrate how much Israeli democracy departs – in both theory and practice – from what Americans like to assume is basic to democracy.

I’ve written about various aspects of this disjunction throughout this blog as well as in other articles. The theoretical and practical incompatibility between being a Jewish state and a democratic state was a prime focus of the course I taught at Israel’s Ben Gurion University in 2006. If modern democracy means something beyond pure majority rule – if, as we like to think in the US, there are individual rights that even majorities cannot stamp out – then detailed comparisons between Israeli democracy and the theory and practice of other democratic states exposes Israel’s version as deeply flawed.

Today, Israel’s Central Elections Committee voted overwhelmingly to disqualify both of Israel’s small Arab political parties from running candidates in February’s election. As the Jerusalem Post explains it, quoting Section 7A of Israel’s Basic Law,

‘a candidates’ list shall not participate in elections to the Knesset if its objectives or actions, expressly or by implication, include one of the following: (1) negation of the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state; (2) incitement to racism; (3) support of an armed struggle against Israel by supporting an enemy state or a terrorist organization.

With many of Israel’s Palestinian citizens protesting the assault on Gaza, rifts in Israeli society are more exposed than usual. Israeli Arab leaders are indeed working as best they can to alter Israeli policy, which I gather is being termed a violation of the third clause of the quoted paragraph.

But over the past couple of years it’s been the first clause that’s seemed to me most relevant. That clause bars any political party calling for full equality between Israeli Jews and Israeli Palestinians in a state that prefers neither. Insisting that Israel become “a state of all its citizens” rather than “a state of the Jewish people” violates the demand that all parties accept Israel as a state in which Jewish concerns count most.

There is no fundamental barrier in the United States to a political party seeking to change the constitution or other political fundamentals. We’ve had Nazi parties, Communist parties, all kinds of parties seeking to use the ballot to transform the country. No government body decides whether a party platform itself is a disqualification.

In Israel, obviously and openly, that’s not the case.

Israel’s Supreme Court will get a chance to rule on the Elections Committee’s decision. Regardless of what it decides, the fact that the country’s Basic Law bans parties that seek to alter the Basic Law should be enough to stop Israel’s supporters from crowing about Israeli democracy. Not likely, though.

Technorati Tags: democracy, Israel, Jewish State, Zionism

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.

Technorati Tags: Gaza, Israel, Palestine, Zionism

Yesterday’s march from Copley Square through downtown Boston drew a few hundred participants. The mood was more somber than at last week’s chant-filled protest. This time it was a funeral procession, marching with coffins.

With deaths mounting – more than half of them civilian, according to most credible accounts – adjustments were necessary in last week’s signs.

At Downtown Crossing, the mix of marchers and shoppers is always somewhat jarring.

At Boston Common, tourists and others passing by took notice.

A lot of Americans retain some hope that Barack Obama will change US policy on Israel and Palestine.

I retain my skepticism.

Technorati Tags: Boston, Gaza, Palestine, photos