STANDING WITH ISRAEL, DISSENTING FROM SHARON

by

Gidon D. Remba and Samuel Fleischacker

As Published in the Chicago Jewish News, May 10, 2002

This year’s Israel Solidarity Day drew more than 25,000 Chicago-area Jews, the largest pro-Israel display seen in the Windy City in decades. But behind the Jewish unity celebrated that day, lurks a deep chasm which divides the Jewish community, one which grows wider with each passing day.

Chicago Peace Now, which we co-founded to support the Israeli peace movement Shalom Achshav, joined other mainstream Jewish organizations in co-sponsoring the rally. We stand together with the Jewish community worldwide and with the State of Israel during this time of trial when its citizens are subject to an unceasing and morally repugnant onslaught of suicide bomb massacres of children, women and men by Palestinian terrorists. While we believe that the Palestinian people have a right to national self-determination in an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza, if prepared to live at peace next to a secure Israel, we deplore the use of terrorism against civilians to achieve Palestinian goals. Such indiscriminate attacks have compelled Israel to exercise its legitimate right to self-defense in an effort to stanch the slaughter of its citizens. But senior Israeli military strategists have acknowledged that Israel's counter-strikes against terrorism offer only a temporary reduction in Palestinian attacks, while at the same time stoking the fires for renewed waves of terror, and the rebuilding of Palestinian bomb-making capabilities. Can Israel live forever by the sword alone? Peace Now joins many of Israel's leading strategists in affirming that there is no military solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which is at its heart a political struggle. We believe that Israel's security in the long run will be best assured by the creation of a Palestinian state and the drawing of a well-defended border between Israel and that state. The road to real Israeli security must therefore pass through the removal of most Jewish settlements built throughout heavily-populated Palestinian areas, clearing a pathway for Palestinian independence. With former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, we remain convinced that Israel’s strength rests ultimately on its moral power, which demands justice and freedom for both Israelis and Palestinians.

With the end of Israel’s military control of much of the 82% of the West Bank and Gaza where its forces and settlements remain today, and the emergence of a Palestinian state, Palestinians would no longer be struggling against an occupying army, having lost the moral and public relations advantage of the claim to be a subject and colonized people. Much of the steam would have been released from the engine of national liberation. Israel would no longer be condemned for continued oppression of Palestinians. Statehood will impose new obligations on the Palestinian leadership in the eyes of the international community, including sovereign responsibilities for preventing aggression across an international border to resolve remaining disputes with Israel. Israel would have gained the upper hand politically, morally and militarily.

This message is fully compatible with a passionate commitment to Zionism and an abiding love for Israel. Indeed, we represent the views of the lion’s share of the population of Israel. Chicago Peace Now marched under banners reading "Two States, Two Peoples, One Future." We affirmed our solidarity with Israel and our fellow Jews, while making clear our dissent from the political policies of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Jews throughout the Chicago area, who care profoundly for the Jewish state, turned to us after learning we were a co-sponsor of the rally, seeking a way to express this dual message. We invited progressive Jews to march with us, and many did. Others marched with their own synagogues, sporting T-shirts proclaiming the supreme Jewish value of seeking peace and pursuing justice. The media captured only the Jewish unity, neglecting the diversity which nourishes the Jewish commitment to Israel.

We originally had planned not to display any political banner at the rally. We found, however, that some people were carrying signs with messages like "End Arab Occupation of Jewish Lands" or "Kahane was right," referring to Rabbi Meir Kahane who, with his Kach Party in Israel, had promoted the criminal idea of "transferring" all Palestinian Arabs out of the West Bank and Gaza. Such odious racism led the Knesset to outlaw Kahane’s party. Its successor, Kahane Chai (Kahane Lives!), appears on the US State Department roster of terrorist groups, along with Hamas, an irony which seems to escape its local devotees. We therefore unfurled our own banner calling for a two-state solution and a return to negotiations.

The response we received to our message from fellow Jews at the rally was deeply troubling. It suggests that extremism is the tip of an iceberg, carrying increasing numbers of the Jewish community in a dangerously rightward drift. While about half of those who saw our banners offered gestures of support and encouragement, the other half volunteered ugly provocation and invective. Some of the marchers cursed and screamed at us, calling us "scum" and offering to wipe their rears on our sign, while one person, wearing a kippah on his head, violently assaulted several of those who were holding the banner, charging at them, pushing them to the ground, and attempting unsuccessfully to rip our vinyl peace banner. We called security and the assailant disappeared, but he and several others re-appeared later, and began roughly pushing people holding the banner and attempting to pry it from their hands.

Others made critical comments with less fervor, which we welcomed, as this offered an opportunity for a reasoned exchange. Some blamed the Oslo Accords for the current violence, claiming that the guns now killing Israelis were given to the Palestinians by a dovish Israeli government which believed naively in a Palestinian will to peace. Such critics forget that without the peace accords, continued Israeli rule over every Palestinian city and camp, with no hope of independence, would have exploded much sooner into even greater paroxysms of violence. And it would have erupted with smuggled weaponry, as most Palestinian guns and all Palestinian bombs and rockets now are. Others insisted that the time for negotiations was past, that there was no alternative to war until "every terrorist is killed," a view which even the top brass of the Israel Defense Forces regards as naive and unattainable. One person explained to us that he was happy with the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, while another reacted to our Peace Now logo by exclaiming "Transfer Now!" Another, when asked whether killing every Palestinian was preferable to making peace, responded "Yes. That's what I would like to see." With such friends, Israel hardly needs enemies.

It is horrifying to find such sentiments widely and proudly paraded at a Jewish rally, and a sad testimonial that so many people were unable to acknowledge the legitimacy of even moderately left-wing ideas at a rally that was supposed to show support for Israel among a broad swath of the Jewish community. This intolerance in fact demonstrates a lack of support for the Israeli public. Most Israelis favor accepting the Saudi peace initiative, which means relinquishing virtually all of the occupied territories, with some border modifications, in exchange for a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace. A majority support the creation of a Palestinian state. 86% of Israelis now advocate convening an international peace conference in the hope of sparking a new political dynamic with the Arab world. The idea that Israel should pursue a military-only strategy and abandon all near-term efforts at rekindling serious negotiations, or ignore other avenues to devise a political solution to enhance its security, goes clearly against the overwhelming grain of Israeli conviction.

Some of our critics pointed out, reasonably, that it is Israeli Jews, and not Americans, who must take the risks of peace. But it is also Israeli Jews, not Americans, who bear the risks of continued war, unending settlement-building, and all other Israeli policies championed by the American Jewish Right. What kind of support do we show for the Israeli people when we write off the legitimacy of their own peace movement, of the legions who quietly support it and oppose the attempt to hold on forever to the West Bank and Gaza? What kind of a Jewish solidarity rally is it where Jews spew vile, scatological language at their fellow Jews, and attack them physically, for holding up a peace sign?

We should not mistake the Israeli people's anger against terrorist atrocities for an abandonment of the search for a just peace with their Palestinian and other Arab neighbors. Israelis today believe as never before in the unyielding truth of Yitzhak Rabin’s last words, spoken before he was gunned down by an extreme right-wing Jewish settler at a Peace Now rally in 1995: "Peace entails difficulties, even pain. For Israel there is no path without pain. But the path of peace is preferable to the path of war...For the sake of our children and our grandchildren, I want this government to extract every particle, to exhaust every possibility, to promote and reach an inclusive peace. This rally must send the message to the Israeli public, to the Jewish public throughout the world, and to many, many in the Arab world and the world at large, that the people of Israel want peace."

Gidon D. Remba is Coordinator and Co-Founder of Chicago Peace Now, which supports the Shalom Achshav (Peace Now) movement in Israel. He served as Senior Foreign Press Translator in the Israel Prime Minister’s Office during the Egyptian-Israeli Camp David peace process from 1977-1978. Samuel Fleischacker, who co-founded the group, is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

For a reply to criticisms of this article, see
Myths and Facts About the Palestinian Conflict