Preview

I am writing this in COVID exile in Jaffa, Israel, on the edge of Tel Aviv, while waiting for a negative test in order to be allowed to fly back to the U.S. I am sure that below the surface of the everyday life I see here, the Israelis are dominating and discriminating against the Israeli Palestinian population here. But on a moment-to-moment basis, this wonderfully multicultural city is among the most inviting and enjoyable I’ve ever spent any time in. It is filled with art galleries, museums, ethnic restaurants, funky flea and food markets, antique shops, furniture stores (vintage and designer), gelato on every block, and even a world-famous experimental theater; all of it ensconced inside a city bounded by a beautiful beachfront on the warm Mediterranean, and boasting centuries of history as a key trading port for many countries and civilizations. As with Tel Aviv, ultrareligious Jews who seek to shut down secular life in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the country are here, somewhere, but almost invisible.

There are only two downsides I can discern as a visitor; the first is the price of real estate. As with Tel Aviv, Jaffa is at least as expensive as Manhattan and worse than hipster Brooklyn. The second is the “invisible” one: There is a brutal, dehumanizing occupation going on not far from here, being carried out by a country that—for the most part—either pretends not to notice, or believes it is literally its God-given right to carry out.

Every day, the news from that occupation—as well as of the treatment of the more than 20 percent of Israelis who are not Jews (and are often ignored in the American discourse)—seems, somehow, to get worse. Just in the past few days, I’ve come across stories describing:
The horrifically racist “Jerusalem Day” march through Arab neighborhoods, in which fascist, pro-terrorism Israelis threatened and harassed Israeli Palestinians with the approval and protection of the country’s authorities.
Israel’s refusal to cooperate with any credible investigation into the murder of a beloved Palestinian American journalist who was likely killed by Israeli forces, possibly even intentionally—at least, this is what the Palestinians claim—which led to one of the most upsetting images I have ever seen coming out of Israel in my entire life: the police attack on casket-carrying mourners. (I’ve not seen anyone even try to explain that.) And this lunatic “every country kills journalists; it’s antisemitic to care when Israel does it” defense offered up by the idiotic soap opera actress Israel has hired as its “Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism and the Delegitimization of Israel” would be funny for being so stupid were the topic not so serious and so damn depressing.
There has also been an ongoing epidemic of settler violence against the Palestinians in the occupied territories. As if in preparation for President Biden’s visit, Israelis are uprooting Palestinian villages and expanding their illegal settlements. And all this is being done with the explicit cooperation of the Israeli army, whose commander recently explained that “the army and the settlements are one and the same.”

While in Tel Aviv, I met with members of the American embassy and consular staffs (at their invitation), as well as many people from the Israeli peace movement. And while my admiration for the courage and tenacity of the latter group is boundless, I didn’t hear anything while I was here that would lead me to question my overall pessimism that this situation can only get worse. Israel’s tenuously balanced government has less than no interest in any sort of concessions that could lead to serious peace negotiations, and the hard-line Islamicist Hamas is growing more and more popular among Palestinians, especially its young future leaders. Joe Biden is not about to invest any political capital in forcing Israel to change its ways, and it’s far from clear to me that it would help even if he did. The Israelis have always been able to outlast the Americans whenever a president has disapproved of anything their government has done.

The BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement, which dominates discussion on the American left on this topic, only makes matters worse. It is complete failure in every respect save for its (entirely) rhetorical victories. Yes, it helps perhaps in making the Palestinians feel they have not been entirely forgotten by the rest of the world, but beyond that, it amounts to little more than virtue signaling. As I keep saying, in the 18 years of its campaign, no major labor union, no government body, no major global corporation, not even any significant local government has endorsed BDS. Using a “boycott” against Jews was always a stupid idea, given the association that so many have of the tactic when it was used by the Nazis.

But there are costs as well. BDS has provided a ready-made excuse for the many conservative “pro-Israel” politicians and organizations who would like to shut down free speech about Israel to pass laws that do so. It has also made it even more difficult to discuss the issue on college campuses (to say nothing of social media). This is, of course, in addition to the problems it raises for those of us who believe in the importance of the free exchange of ideas, regardless of their origin. Yes, I’ve said all that before, but this week, an important piece of new evidence arose: a brand-new Pew Research study that finds 5 percent of Americans say they support the BDS movement against Israel, and just 2 percent say they support it strongly, while 84 percent have no opinion or have never heard of it. The support figure is actually kind of high compared to its support in Congress by the way, where, according to my count, it has three supporters among 535 senators and representatives. People who support the right of Palestinians to live in peace and dignity, with the same rights as you or me (or Israeli Jews), need to face up to the undeniable failure of this strategy and think anew. The support of The Harvard Crimson, the Middle East Studies Association, and this or that student government does not a successful movement make.

One of the great strengths of the Zionist movement of the 1940s that led to the creation of the state of Israel was its ability to withstand—even encourage—intense internal debate. There are good reasons why Palestinians feel they do not have this luxury. But notwithstanding those reasons, when Palestinians and their supporters demand fealty to a failed strategy, it does nothing for the people living under oppression.

One can sympathize with the fact that for the past hundred years, the Palestinians have only been offered unfair deals and asked to help solve a problem—that of approximately 250,000 Jewish refugees of Hitler’s Holocaust—that they did nothing to cause. The 1947 U.N. “Partition Plan” that the Zionists (reluctantly) accepted, and the Palestinians refused even to discuss, choosing war instead, was markedly unfair to them, as has every offer been since that one. (The earlier ones were not so hot, either.) In 1947, the U.N. Special Committee on Palestine calculated its Jewish population to be 608,000, or slightly less than a third of its population. Under the U.N.’s plan, however, the Jews were to be accorded 55 percent of the land, including the crucial seaport of Jaffa (where your loyal correspondent is writing this), with its Arab population of 70,000 as against just 10,000 Jews. Forty percent of Palestine was given to its Arabs, with the remaining 5 percent, which included Jerusalem and parts of the Negev desert, to remain under U.N. sovereignty until such time as everyone could agree on how it might be divided. (All this remained academic, however, once Israel declared itself a state on May 14, 1948, and five Arab armies immediately invaded.) Things have only gotten worse for the Palestinians over time, both in terms of the lives they’ve been forced to live and the offers they’ve received, leading up to the ridiculous “Jared Kushner peace plan,” which no one took seriously even as a propaganda exercise. In classic Trumpian style, the entire thrust of Kushner’s Middle East policy appears to have been to further line his own pockets with corrupt deals with his Saudi and Israeli co-conspirators.

To the question of “What is to be done?” I have no answer save a rethinking of the problem from the bottom up. My good optimistic friend Jill Jacobs, who heads up my favorite organization, T’ruah, thinks that the two-state solution lives on because the only problem is politics. Another optimistic friend, the scholar/activist Hillel Schenker, co-editor of the excellent Palestine-Israel Journal, reminds me of how close Israeli and Palestinian negotiators got to outlining a final peace agreement under the prime ministership of Ehud Olmert in 2008, before Olmert decided he preferred to go to war in Lebanon. (Olmert later ended up in jail, convicted for corruption.) But “political problems” are real problems and can be more difficult to solve than scientific or even existential ones. And with great regret to the people who consistently put themselves on the line trying to do so, as the “liberal realist” I have no idea how to solve this one. That said, I found this JPost editorial full of good sense and maybe even (the slightest) cause for optimism.

Sorry, both for this pessimistic report and for the lack of music this week. You can, if you’ve not had enough, however, listen to my Tel Aviv University talk, with comments from the estimable scholar and activist Yael Sternhell. It can be found here. (We begin at 6:30.) And the (really long) book that I am basing all of this on may be pre-ordered from Amazon here and lots of places, here.