Jews on Jews

A similar letter was published in Australia in March when Prime Minister Kevin Rudd celebrated Israel’s anniversary but pointedly ignored Palestinian suffering (though former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser has endorsed a motion in parliament to readdress this imbalance and launch immediate negotiations with Hamas.) The support of many groups across the community spectrum, including the peace movement and unions, indicated a deep sympathy for a different narrative.

What then is the role of Jews who believe in a safe and secure homeland for both peoples?

The explosion of alternative lobby groups around the Western world, including the new US-based J-Street, is a realisation that being “pro-Israel” means more than supporting aggression against Iraq and Iran and isolating Gaza. J-Street’s co-founder Jeremy Ben-Ami told Salon that many American Jews are upset that Jewish neo-conservatives are “driving us towards wars and policies that I don’t want to be responsible for”.

Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama, the supposed “liberal” hope, recently told America’s leading Zionist lobby AIPAC that he vowed to protect an “undivided” Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

“Obama should be seen for what he is”, says Mouin Rabbani, contributing editor to the Washington-based Middle East Report, “a thoroughly conventional American politician who has every intention of becoming a thoroughly mainstream American president.” The idea that America’s massive annual aid to Israel be conditional on the Jewish state’s good behaviour - cease settlement building and use of cluster bombs - is an idea that should be seriously considered.

However, successive polls by the American Jewish Committee prove that Jews are far more moderate than their spokespeople suggest. One synagogue in the US holds lectures under the heading, Israel, warts and all, recognising that many younger American Jews are growing increasingly disillusioned with the Jewish state.

A recent documentary about American/Israeli Diaspora relations, Eyes Wide Open, highlights that a growing number of young Jews have “a fear to commit to Israel”. The challenge is wresting control of the community from men who only want to support an Israel portrayed as under threat. Peace doesn’t suit their agenda.

The AIPAC conference in Washington DC in early June revealed why. Writer Philip Weiss explained in the American Conservative what is at stake and how the vast majority of Zionist Jews have “passed on their full powers of judgment to the Israeli government. In that sense, the Zionists in that hall might best be compared to Communists of the ’30s and ’40s, who also abandoned their judgment to a far off authority even as they argued this and that subclause codicil in intense councils.” Indoctrination has found its natural home. Weiss went on:

“If the AIPAC legions were somehow convinced that Jews will only be safe in the Middle East if the Arabs among them were also safe - without checkpoints, without a siege, with the dignity and freedom that Jews have had in the West - all these arrayed powers might then be directed to a larger idea of family and produce a miracle at last.”

Equally, a growing number of Australian Jews began to realise, during previous Prime Minister John Howard’s government, that the community leadership was endorsing policies that merely acted as Israel’s amen choir. More importantly, eight years of the Bush administration has caused incalculable damage to the Middle East. Where are the prominent Jews speaking these obvious facts?

Time.com’s senior editor Tony Karon wrote on Israel’s 60th anniversary that “the Zionist ideology that spurred Israel’s creation and shaped its identity and sense of national purpose has collapsed - not under pressure from without, but having rotted from within”. It is the responsibility of Jews everywhere to craft a Jewish identity that doesn’t define itself through occupation, colonisation and war.